Stalingrad

"Yes, it certainly was the turning point of the war. Whatever we British may claim for the titanic fight on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, the Battle of Stalingrad was the real decider and Beevor’s account of it is simply brilliant. He combines a sense of strategic grasp with the incredibly detailed story of ordinary men’s experiences based on their own accounts. He did a huge amount of research into both the Russian side and the German side and he has come out with a masterly book. “Whatever we British may claim for the titanic fight on the Normandy beaches on D-Day, the Battle of Stalingrad was the real decider.” One particularly striking episode is what was called the ‘Rattenkrieg’, the dreadful struggle in the ruins of Stalingrad with the rats crawling everywhere and the filth, misery, danger and lack of shelter in that wrecked city as they fought from house to house. He builds up a matchlessly vivid picture. Oh yes, it was touch and go. Stalingrad was on the Volga river and the great question was: could the Russians hold on to the west side of the river or would they be driven back across it? That would have opened up a huge opportunity for the Germans to strike deep into central Russia. But the Russians managed to hold on by their fingertips to the west side of the river. As they held on, other Russian troops moved round to encircle the Germans. It was a brilliant stroke. From then on the Germans were starved into defeat."

"Other books I’m curious about that have been recommended (by military historian Sir Hew Strachan) on Five Books include a novel by a British soldier who was at Anzio—another Allied operation which did not go as planned—called Vessel of Sadness by William Woodruff . Italy is where I grew up (partly), near a town called Frascati just south of Rome where, during the war, the German general Kesselring was based for a while. Near our house there were a number of bomb craters made by the Allies trying to get him. Finding them in the woods beyond our garden added to the feeling, growing up, that World War II was still very much with us. The other book I’d like to read, but haven’t yet, is Antony Beevor’s account of World War II overall , as I’ve never read a book encompassing the entire conflict."

"He’s written a lot of good books and he’s rightly considered to be a preeminent historian of World War Two. For me, Stalingrad is by far his best book, and I’ve read nearly all of them. It’s magnificent and gripping. He took a story that hadn’t been told for quite a while and did a lot of important new research. There was that window when you could actually get into the archives, and he was able to get in. He just told a damn good story. It’s a wonderful story anyway, but he told it in a way that—it’s a cliché—was hard to put down. It’s very easy to put down history books, especially big, long tomes. They’re not usually written for the benefit of the casual reader or to be page-turners. This was just really good storytelling. He followed the rhythms of a great narrative, the way the battle developed, the climax, the way that everything became very brutal and very tense. He did a superb job of tracking that narrative and making it really come to life. It’s a really fantastic read. Antony Beevor did an awesome job. In terms of taking a big battle and making it really gripping and accessible, I’d say it’s the best World War Two book that I’ve read. It’s a classic."

"Stalingrad was the psychological turning point of the war. It took place between 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 and it was the largest battle on the Eastern Front. Nazi Germany and their allies were fighting for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwest Russia. The geopolitical turning point of the war came slightly earlier, even though people didn’t really recognise it at the time. It was in December 1941, when the German armies were repulsed in front of Moscow and Hitler decided to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. But Stalingrad was vital in its own particular way because the Red Army for the first time held its ground in the city, fighting in desperate circumstances. Also, its new commanders had the foresight to do what they felt was necessary rather than being terrified of being arrested for their actions, which was the case in the earlier part of the war. Two Soviet generals, Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky, came up with this plan to encircle the whole of the Sixth Army, which was incredibly ambitious. The Germans saw that it was a possibility but they simply did not believe that the Red Army was capable of carrying it out. And the very fact of achieving that meant that the whole psychology of the war, not just in the Soviet Union but elsewhere as well, led to this belief that finally the Germans were beaten and the Allies could win. As far away as Chile the poet Pablo Neruda wrote his homenaje a Stalingrado – so Stalingrad had this tremendous effect on the resistance throughout the world. Stalingrad itself was a byword for courage and it was also a byword for suffering. This is really what I was trying to do when I researched the Russian military archives. I wanted to find out the detail of what life was like for the soldiers and it was simply terrifying. They executed 13,000 of their own men during the course of the battle, which is something that we simply could not imagine. Because they were so afraid of them breaking. Anyone who retreated without orders was executed."