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By Root 1171 0

Mountains. Here the Russians finally slowed them down and held on firmly to the passes in the hills. Eastward, the Germans flowed over the steppes, gradually halted not so much by the Russians as by distance and their inability to supply themselves. Their tanks gobbled gasoline faster than they could bring it up to the front. Hitler became more and more angry with his commanders, and there was another spate of dismissals: Halder lost his job as Chief of Staff, and Army Group A’s Field Marshal List was fired for lack of aggressiveness. Hitler took over the army group himself, which made him the world’s most distant field commander. It had little effect; by late November the German advance had ground to a stop, defeated by time and distance, two things that neither the Wehrmacht nor Hitler could control. The great Caucasus drive was over, and it had netted only thin air.

Meanwhile, Army Group B, the other half of the former Army Group South, had been sucked deeper and deeper into the morass whose center was Stalingrad. Under Field Marshal von Weichs it had seen its spearpoint, 6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, close up on the city in early September. Here the advance stopped; the Russians had retreated as far as they were going. Stalingrad stretches for miles along the great bend of the Volga, where that river and the Don approach each other. It is on the western, higher side of the river, with banks and bluffs falling off to the waterfront. It was then a major industrial center and, during the fighting, Russian workmen in their factories were building tanks which drove out the doors with guns firing at the enemy. By November 1 there were five Russian armies defending the city and the area immediately around it, and two German armies—6th and 4th Panzer—fighting their way into it.

The battle raged unceasingly. Every night the Russians ferried supplies over the river, and the troops worked their way into the rubble and hunkered down behind piles of bricks and mortar; every house, every cellar, every room, became a strongpoint. City fighting is a nightmare for troops and commanders alike; for the troops all the skills developed in open country are negated. The need for constant alertness saps vitality, and even perpetual caution is not proof against sudden surprise, the sniper, the mine, the booby-trap, the man who leaps around the corner and shoots first, the grenade that comes sailing in out of nowhere. Commanders lose control of their battles and watch their forces disappear into a choked mess that defies description. The Germans did not like it, and neither did the Russians; but this was where the Russian high command decided to make its stand. Stalingrad became the Verdun of World War II, its monuments today evoking the same kind of pilgrimages that Verdun’s did after World War I.

As the focus of interest narrowed down on the city and the gigantic battle raging in its heart, the Germans were forced to neglect their long fronts lying either side of Stalingrad. Due south was the Kalmyk Steppe, wide-open territory with few defensive features to it, held only by the relatively thin screen of the Rumanian 4th Army. To the north lay the long line up the Don as far as Voronezh. This too was weakly held, by the 3rd Rumanian, 8th Italian, and 2nd Hungarian armies. All of these were low-priority units; all had German forces attached for stiffening. The Germans openly regarded their allies as second-class troops, which did a great deal to make them so, but even without that, their formations were numerically and materially weaker than the German, as well as poorer in morale.

By November 1 the Germans had split the defenders of Stalingrad into four groups. They had not completely isolated them but they had reached the point where communication between them had to be carried out on the other side of the river. On the 12th the Germans actually got to the Volga itself at one point in the southern outskirts of the city. Casualties were extremely heavy on both sides; the Russians who crossed the river were told not to come back,