The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [182]
Efforts were made, both at the time and since, to present the Dieppe Raid as having taught the Allies valuable lessons about the way the French coast could be assaulted, which were subsequently put to invaluable use in Normandy in June 1944. In fact sheer common sense ought to have told the Combined Chiefs of Staff that Mountbatten’s plan was misconceived from the outset, that tanks could not attack up shingle beaches with high esplanade walls, that proper sea and air support was required and that surprise was essential.
Meanwhile in the east General Friedrich Paulus’ Sixth Army was designated to take Stalingrad (he had a force of around 280,000 men at the start of the battle), and by Sunday, 23 August the 16th Panzer Division had crossed the steppe to reach the Volga just north of the city. Once there, however, the Germans could do little to interdict the river traffic because they had no naval weaponry or river-mines. They had brought along their exterminatory ideology, however, so when the Wehrmacht there were no SS involved in the battle of Stalingrad – reached the hospital for mentally handicapped children in the city, they promptly shot all the ten- to fourteen-year-old patients.7
In the short term, Army Group A did well in the Caucasus. Rostov fell on 23 July, Kleist’s First Panzer Army captured Stavropol on 5 August, and the Germans seemed about to grasp the region. At their furthest point, elements of the First Panzer Army almost reached Ordzhonikidze and were less than 50 miles from Grozny and only 70 miles from the Caspian Sea. The loss of the Caucasus, from where the Russians took 90 per cent of the oil that fuelled their tanks, planes, ships and industry, would have been catastrophic for the Allied cause. The Russians could not retake it except by crossing the 1,300-yard-wide River Volga, and by the late summer Stalingrad, on the west bank on the bend of that river, seemed about to fall. ‘What’s the matter with them?’ Stalin asked of the local military commanders there. ‘Don’t they realize that this is not only a catastrophe for Stalingrad? We would lose our main waterway and soon our oil too.’8 The stakes could therefore hardly have been higher.
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The battle of Stalingrad is deservedly considered to be the most desperate in human history. The German Sixth Army was sucked into a house-by-house, street-by-street, factory-by-factory struggle often even more attritional than the trench warfare of the Great War. The city is 25 miles long and hugs the western bank of the River Volga, confusingly called the right bank because the river flows southwards towards the Caspian. Visiting Volgograd today, and viewing the city-length battlefield, one is immediately struck by the problems faced by the Germans in their assault. To the north lie three huge factories – from north to south, the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory, the Barrikady (Barricades) Arms Factory and the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) Factory. In the centre is the 300-foot-high Mamayev Kurgan, the highest hill in the city (originally the burial mound of the Tatar Duke Mamayev) and all the southern approaches to the city are dominated by an enormous reinforced-concrete Grain Elevator, which stayed in Russian hands throughout the siege, supplied by trenches and gullies connecting it to the Volga. The Wehrmacht had to capture these formidable obstacles in order to take the city.
The Red October Factory specialized in recycling metal, the Barrikady Factory in military hardware, and the Tractor Factory, named after the monstrously cruel ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, makes tractors to this day, which roll past his larger-than-life-sized statue there. In 1942 it had been turned over to making tank chassis. These three brick and concrete buildings – each half a mile long and between 500 and 1,000 yards wide – were originally erected for industrial production rather than defence, of course, but their sturdy structures might just as easily