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birthplace of National Socialism. ‘I wanted to reach the Volga, to be precise at a particular spot, at a particular city,’ he said. ‘By chance it bore the name of Stalin himself.’ The battle had thus taken on a symbolic significance far removed from its strategic one. In his speech Hitler claimed that ‘Time was of no importance,’ but in fact winter was fast closing in, just as it had been when he had failed to take Moscow the previous year. The Sixth Army’s next great offensive began at 18.30 hours on Wednesday, 11 November – coincidentally the anniversary of the Great War Armistice – with five infantry divisions as well as the 14th and 24th Panzer Divisions attacking on a 3-mile-wide front between Volkhovstroyevskaya Street and Banna Gully, just south of the Barrikady Factory warehouse. ‘Exceptionally heavy fighting went on all day for every yard of ground,’ wrote Chuikov, ‘for every brick and stone. Fighting with hand grenades and bayonets went on for several hours.’

Simultaneously, attacks were made on the Mamayev Kurgan, whose height made it such a commanding position that neither side could allow the other to position artillery there, and which thus saw so much bombardment that its actual underlying physical shape was transformed during the battle. It was also said that shellfire was so unremittingly hot there that winter that snow never had a chance to settle on its slopes.45 Certainly the fighting around the huge water-tanks on the hillside was continuous for 112 days from the second half of September to 12 January 1943. Historians simply cannot say, or even estimate, how often the summit changed hands, for, as Chuikov notes, there were no witnesses who survived all through the whole battle for it, and in any case no one was keeping count. At one point the life expectancy of soldiers there was between one and two days, and to see a third day made one a veteran. Rodimtsev’s, Gorishny’s and Batyuk’s divisions all fought there with distinction (and to near-annihilation). At one point, when telephone communication was lost between Chuikov’s headquarters and Batyuk’s divisional command post at the Mamayev Kurgan, a signaller called Titayev was sent to re-establish it. His corpse was found with the two ends of the wire clamped tightly together between his teeth, after he had used his own skull as a semi-conductor.46

The German attack of 11 November succeeded in reaching the Volga along a front of 600 yards, splitting the Russian forces for the third time during the battle. But as Chuikov crowed, ‘Paulus had been unable to capitalize on his superior strength, and had not achieved what he intended. He had not thrown the 62nd Army into the icy Volga.’ With Paulus’ Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army in possession of three-quarters of the city, but Chuikov’s Sixty-second Army still holding out on the right bank and receiving heavy reinforcements, the Germans decided to pour yet more forces from the Don and the south into the city, their places being taken by the Romanian Third Army and Italian Eighth Army along the Don to the north-west and the Romanian Fourth Army to the south of Stalingrad. This was to give the Russians their great chance.

At a two-and-a-half-hour meeting of generals at the Führer’s office in Berlin during the planning of Barbarossa back in March 1941, at which Hitler spoke about German goals in Russia and the means of attaining them – ‘Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their personal scruples’ – he had said that he was under ‘No illusions about our allies! Finns will fight bravely… Romanians are no good at all. Perhaps they could be used as a security force in quiet sectors behind very strong natural obstacles [rivers]… The fortunes of large German units must not be tied to the uncertain staying power of the Romanian forces.’47 Yet he did not take his own advice, for that is precisely what now happened at Stalingrad. It was Zhukov who masterminded the double envelopment of Stalingrad from north and south which, once successfully completed on 23 November 1942, was no less successfully