The great sieges have a powerful hold on our imagination: magnificent stories of an entire population trapped behind defensive walls, of a home place surrounded by danger and violence, threatened with ruin and death. The reduction of a city to piles of rubble as its inhabitants are massacred or dragged into captivity is a universal nightmare, as old as urban settlement.
How many times have we re-invented the tale of the siege of a town on the western coast of Asia Minor, the angry sulk of one of the besiegers, the burial of another warrior 41 days later, the single combat of heroes and the trickery and violence that brought it all to an end? In the modern era, almost every nation state has a primal narrative of defeat or endurance involving a siege, recalling the degradation of civilisation within the walls and the more-than-human bravery of the suffering citizens.
Decades and centuries of remembrance and mythologising overlay the actual events. The Dutch resisted the Spanish fury at Leiden for a year in 1574 and allowed rebel South Holland to survive; the Catholic and Jacobite Irish held out for just as long against a Dutch king's army at Limerick, an honourable defeat dishonoured in its aftermath; the Protestant Irish remember the Siege of Derry, their fierce refusal to surrender. The French exalt Verdun and mourn Dien Bien Phu, which for the Vietnamese is a glorious victory. We may already have half-forgotten Vukovar, Dubrovnik and Sarajevo from a few years ago; Croats or Bosnians have not.
Stalingrad is the greatest epic of the modern age of nationalism, mass armies and large-scale war. It is also the least contested. In narratives of what happened, there is only one side to be on, no matter how often it is replayed and revised in the heads of historians and novelists and filmmakers. Our sympathies are never awkwardly reversible, as they can be when we read about other besieged cities.
Yet, if Stalingrad was the most important battle of the second World War, it did not have an entirely or immediately positive outcome. It consolidated the rule of a paranoid, inventive revenger in the Kremlin; its commemoration often confused sacrifice with politics. It did not win the war; Hitler's armies remained deadly. The most important effect of the battle was a negative one: it frustrated the imminent victory of a violent, racist dictatorship that was worse than Stalinism.
The course of the battle is by now well known and has recently been retold in a couple of very fine, best-selling books: Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad and Richard Overy's Russia's War. In April, 1942, Adolf Hitler, against the advice of his senior generals, determined on a push to the far south of Russia. He took forces that could otherwise have strengthened his attack on Moscow and sent them on a long slashing race to take the city of Stalingrad, situated on the Volga about 60 miles from the bend of the other central Russian river, the Don. Beyond lay the oilfields on which the Russian army depended and which Hitler sorely needed.
The Sixth Army, led by Friedrich von Paulus, a fastidious upper middle class general with a taste for classical music, struck hard across the steppe from the Don and by late August had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. A few weeks later, they were infesting its centre, having blasted the city to rubble and driven the defenders into a wilderness of holes and cellars with their backs to the river. It seemed a matter of a few days before the Panzers ground their way to the jetties over the bodies of their opponents, who were less than human in the eyes of the racialist fanatic 1,500 miles away in Berlin. But though unmitigated violence had always worked for him so far, he was now thwarted in one of the most terrible acts of coercive heroism in history, as the Red Army threw tens of thousands of soldiers over the river from the villages of the Urals and Siberia to die under the guns of the Germans and hold them on the west bank at any cost.
By November, General Chuikov, the commander of the remnants of the Soviet 62nd Army, ruled a nightmare enclave a few hundred yards wide and a few miles long. The vast new city of Stalingrad, which had in the previous decade grown into an industrial and suburban sprawl hugging the river for 30 miles, was reduced to a narrow bone-filled ruin where the only activity was killing. John Erickson, the best historian of the Russian military, describes it as "a great vortex of fire and bombardment" and memorably imagines the soldiers' ordeal:
"In this wholly ruined and fire-blackened shell on the Volga, the defenders, with nowhere to retreat, faced the choice of fighting or being blotted out with the city, now a nightmare of rubble, sagging, shattered buildings, gaping, burned-out shells with their corpses, where the noise never ceased day or night. By day, German planes hung in clusters in the sky, sweeping in to rake the streets, unload more bombs or to fly across the city with their screamer sirens wailing: at night, lit by fires, flares and the flashes of endless explosions, beside broken walls or in the grotesquely misshapen interiors of what once had been shops, offices, house and factories, hundreds of miniature but horrifyingly savage battles were fought for cellars, rooms, staircases and corners of walls."
In late November, the besiegers became the besieged, in a huge secretive operation that sent hundreds of tanks and half a million men round the back and flanks of the Nazi army, pressing it into a gigantic trap, cutting it off from reinforcements and fuel supplies, and depriving it of all air support. Inexorably, the ring of Soviet fire grew tighter, the starving Germans more hopeless. Von Paulus surrendered on January 31st, 1943, delivering a quarter of a million men into captivity. Very few survived the Soviet prison and labour camps. It was the first serious defeat of Nazism, a terrible demonstration that the Wehrmacht was vulnerable.
What made victory possible was not simple resistance and heroism and antifascist ardour, though all these qualities were there in abundance among the defenders and are remembered to this day in Russia. They were also subject to brutal discipline and terror. The German army, by now a semi-criminal mass-killing machine, executed some 15,000 of its own soldiers during the entire war. We know now 13,500 Soviet soldiers were shot for "cowardice" or "sabotage" during the battle of Stalingrad alone. But the antifascist myth of Stalingrad, which echoed around the world and inspired a generation of communists, should not simply be replaced with a black legend of terror, because there is eloquent evidence in oral testimony and eyewitness accounts to the genuine, self-sacrificing bravery of the common soldier - and no struggle on that scale can be sustained through fear alone.
In addition to the great primary feelings of love of homeland and dread of the powerful, there was the typically modern passion to produce, to overwhelm the enemy with technology. It is one of the many paradoxes of his regime that Stalin's monstrous industrialisation programme, which cost millions of lives during the 1930s, was also responsible for the ability of the Red Army to outgun the Germans by December, 1942. By the end of that year, the USSR was making 25,000 planes and 24,000 tanks, twice the volume turned out by German factories. The road to Berlin was opened by machines as well as bodies.
What of the losers? We can look at the ordinary German soldier, who died uselessly and in such large numbers during and after the battle, with a certain elementary human sympathy, but only up to a point: we have learned too much about the complicity of ordinary German combatants in dreadful atrocities in Russia, against unarmed men, women and children, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews. It is difficult to see much moral candour in the ranks of the Ostheer. The Sixth Army, which perished at Stalingrad, had assisted at some of the worst war crimes during its first year in Russia. When its HQ in Kiev was bombed by partisans, men from its command helped round up over 30,000 of the city's Jews. They were taken to a ravine on the city's edge and shot into a giant pit.
Of the many individuals in German uniform that year, one of the least remembered is Colonel-General Baron Wolfram von Richthofen. He was the originator of the technique of carpet-bombing, the indiscriminate showering of entire populations of non-combatants with high explosives, introducing the practice at Guernica in 1937, refining it at Belgrade in 1941 (the town was destroyed and 17,000 civilians were killed in the hours between dawn and breakfast). His bombing raids on Stalingrad, beginning on the morning of August 23rd, 1942, left at least 40,000 dead and would have constituted an infamous war crime in any other conflict, at any other time and place. There and then, at the height of a war of hordes to the death, it was a prelude to further, greater slaughters.
This insane epic had, in a sense, two authors, each determined to drive it to a tragic and unforgettable climax. Hitler wanted oil; he wanted to cut off river traffic on the Volga, constricting the arteries of Russian resistance to the north. These were his rational reasons. But there was also the massively charged symbolism of the city's name. Hitler went so far as to deny stridently and publicly this had any significance for him, and he protested too much.
The collapse of the Soviet dictator's namesake city would have had a crushing effect on his regime's ability to mobilise resistance. Historian John Erickson thinks it drew Hitler like a magnet. And for Stalin, there was also an irrational, surplus pride in his refusal to consider a step back from the doomed city. For 20 years before the Nazi invasion, his closest military collaborators, notably Kliment Voroshilov and the cavalry commander, Semon Budenny, had defeated the White armies on the steppes around the Volga port of Tsaritsyn. After his rise to power, the city was named after Stalin, and the myth created that he had saved the Revolution there. So he would not give an inch, and issued his notorious Order No. 227 that punished retreat or hesitancy with death. He proved willing to sacrifice nearly half a million men and women to save "his" city.
Yet without Stalingrad, it is likely Hitler would have seized the Caspian and Caucasian oilfields, defeated the Soviet regime, broken through to the Middle East, left the Jews of Europe and the Near East without a single refuge and exterminated them. He would have turned the Slav populations of Eastern Europe into helots, and reinstated, with his Axis allies, the crudest form of colonialism over much of the rest of the world, of the sort that would have made Leopold II's rape of the Congo seem normal.
The US would probably have sued for peace under an isolationist regime after Roosevelt had been driven from office. With more breathing space, perhaps the Nazis would have gone ahead with certain military schemes that were denied resources in the crisis of 1943 - such as the atomic bomb project, headed by that equivocal genius, Werner Heisenberg. A triumphant Hitler with a nuclear weapon: this was worth preventing.
The new film, Enemy at the Gates, reduces this epic to a personal conflict, to a duel of warriors - in this case of two snipers, one a young Russian shepherd and the other an amoral German officer. We might be back in Troy: but this is a kind of mock-Homeric reduction of the vast impersonal slaughter of modern combat. A medium more capable than any yet invented of capturing the enormous scale and destructiveness of the worst war in history seems afraid of its own power, shrinking back to ancient dramatic conventions.
Enemy at the Gates does have some extraordinary panoramic scenes that convey, more vividly than anything I have seen, the enormity of the destruction and the grinding down of life in the Stalingrad cauldron. And it reminds the cinema-going public that the war was not won by Americans and Englishmen. Unfortunately, it still owes too much to the conventions of the Western and the romance to be taken seriously. See the movie, by all means, but read the books.
Neil Belton's The Good Listener: A Life Against Cruelty won the Irish Times Prize for Non-Fiction in 1999.
Enemy at the Gates is on general release.
