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oilfields, 745 miles beyond its existing positions—a longer advance than the German drive from the Siegfried Line to the Channel coast in May 1940. Its formations soon found themselves attempting to sustain a front 500 miles wide with hopelessly inadequate forces, against stubborn Russian resistance. Meanwhile Army Group B commenced operations designed to close up to a line along the Volga and secure Stalingrad. Manstein was transferred northwards with five infantry divisions and the siege artillery he had used at Sevastopol, to end the tiresome resistance at Leningrad: following a change of policy, Berlin was now impatient to occupy the city. The next news from the Sixth Army showed that its progress towards Stalingrad had become sluggish. Hitler, irked, ordered that the Fourth Panzer Army should be diverted from the Caucasus to support Paulus. He thus divided his strength in a fashion which rendered each element of his forces too weak to attain its objectives.

But August 1942 was another season of Russian catastrophes. One of Stalin’s favourites, the old Bolshevik warhorse Marshal Semyon Budenny, presided over a series of shambolic defeats in the northern Caucasus. The Sixth Army wrecked Russian forces on the Don east of Kalach, taking 50,000 prisoners; an entire Soviet tank army collapsed, with crews abandoning their vehicles in panic. On 21 August, Paulus launched a dash from the Don to the Volga, blasting a path through the defenders with waves of dive-bombers. In two days, his forces reached the river nine miles north of Stalingrad. The city’s capture seemed imminent, and he dispatched to Hitler a draft of his plans for Sixth Army’s move into winter quarters. Farther south, on 9 August mountain troops took Maikop, the most accessible of the Caucasian oilfields, where Russian demolitions proved so thorough that it was deemed necessary to bring equipment from Germany to drill new wells. Army Group A’s spearheads began pushing east for the Caspian; the Seventeenth Army was directed southwards through the mountains towards the Black Sea.

The entire Caucasian advance was hamstrung by Hitler’s orders to divert available fuel and ammunition supplies to Paulus. Among the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin, however, there was another surge of optimism: Rommel was at the gates of Cairo, armaments production was rising, Germany’s Japanese allies had achieved extraordinary triumphs and the implications of American naval successes at the Coral Sea and Midway were barely comprehended. Dönitz’s U-boats were devastating Atlantic convoys; an Italian submarine commander reported that he had sunk an American battleship, and was decorated by Mussolini for his flight of fantasy. German civilian morale revived.

Only the technocrats who knew the economic and industrial secrets of the Reich were undeluded. The manpower situation remained desperate, and Germany was increasing aircraft output by sustaining production of obsolescent types. General Halder wrote in his diary on 23 July: “The chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions.” In September, German difficulties mounted swiftly. Troops in the southern mountains encountered snowstorms, and repeated changes of objective wreaked havoc with operations. Again and again, German advances were delayed or halted by lack of fuel—the First Panzer Army found itself immobilised for three weeks, conceding a precious breathing space to Stalin’s commanders. Almost all available Luftwaffe support was diverted to Stalingrad, heedless of the cost to operations elsewhere. On 12 September, the first German troops entered the city.

Along the length of the front, Russian soldiers and civilians alike understood little of the Germans’ huge difficulties, seeing only the miseries imposed upon their own people by battlefield failure, slaughter and starvation. On 23 October Commissar Pavel Kalitov wrote in dismay from Logovo, on receiving the order for yet another retreat: “The civilians are howling. Everything is to be evacuated. Everywhere there is weeping, tears, grief.