Our prior book reviw focused on the remembrances of German combatants at Stalingrad. This month's review tackles a book focused on the Soviet side. Perhaps even more so than my last book reviewed (and given the ubiquity of German memoirs, interviews, and first-person accounts of the battle), this rare look at what actual Soviet participants in the battle experience and felt is something you should not pass over.
Stalingrad is a battle that fascinates on so many levels. Survivors of Stalingrad offers yet another. This book's searing first-person descriptions as to what it was like to survive the hell that was the final months of the German Sixth Army's existence during the winter of 1942-1943 is truly a must-read.
Traditional accounts of Germany's 1942 summer offensive on the Eastern Front (codenamed Operation Blue) describe the tyranny of time, space, and distance all working together to undermine German efforts. Couple that with the Red Army's wise decision to pull back, draw the Germans in, and only then stand and fight, using its superior size and strength to beat the Axis forces, and you have a conventional wisdom that proved surprisingly enduring.
As it turns out a huge chunk of this conventional wisdom has already been proven to be more myth than reality.
Late in August of 1942 the German Sixth Army bore down on Stalingrad. The German commander, General Freidrich Paulus, had much to contemplate regarding how he would approach the task of seizing the city that would become the bane of his existence and end his military career in catastrophic fashion. Stalingrad sprawled down the broad Volga River's western bank in a long (at over 25 miles) strip of land. Problematically for it's defenders, the Volga's western bank rose significantly higher than it's east bank.
In October of 1942 the German Sixth Army, under General Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus, came as close as perhaps it ever did to defeating the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad - led most prominently by General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov's 62nd Army. At best, by October 1942 the 62nd Army numbered 50,000 men and 80 tanks. According to those present it was nowhere near these numbers and the Germans held overwhelming advantages in men and machines.
In an assault beginning on October 14th, five German divisions - over 90,000 men, 2,000 guns and mortars, 300 tanks, and waves of Stuka's forged a path
