Stalingrad by Antony Beevor Viking 494pp, £25 in UK
Operation Barbarossa was (praise the Lord) Hitler's fatal mistake. The recklessly extravagant invasion of the Soviet Union led inevitably to the defeat of the Third Reich. The operation failed most spectacularly in the bloodiest, most decisive battle of the second World War, the battle of Stalingrad.
The Nazi dictator had made a non-aggression pact with Stalin in order to concentrate first on conquering Western Europe. If Hitler had then deployed all his forces against Britain, the odds in his favour might have proved overwhelming. However, fortunately, he believed he was an infallible strategic genius and that taking the Ukraine's vast agricultural resources and the Caucasian oilfields would ensure German invincibility in all his future campaigns.
This monumental book is a masterly account of hubris and nemesis on a classic scale. After the easy victorious Blitzkriegs in Poland and France, Hitler thought his air force and army were irresistible. He committed them to distances and extremes of weather that made logistics a nightmare, against an equally ruthless megalomaniac who was willing to expend any number of his country's virtually unlimited supply of men and women.
Hitler's "European war against Bolshevism" was Russia's "Great Patriotic War". The Wehrmacht quickly gained immense tracts of territory, until, on the 23rd of August, 1942, it reached the Volga. There, at Stalingrad, an industrial city with a population of about 600,000, the supposedly irresistible force met an immovable object. The confrontation, Antony Beevor writes, was "a matter of prestige between Hitler and Stalin". The clash of gigantic egos was the second World War's Armageddon.
The author is well qualified to write the complex and dramatic history of Germany's ill-starred adventure in the Soviet Union. He studied military theory at Sandhurst and gained experience in practice as a regular officer in the British army's 7th Armoured Brigade in Germany, until resigning his commission to become a full-time writer.
Drawing upon formerly inaccessible primary sources in both Germany and Russia, he has written an authoritative and profoundly human study of Stalingrad at every level, from commanding generals to ordinary soldiers on both sides - and the civilians in between. As well as his own clearly expounded account and analysis of events, quotations from newly available diaries and letters give a vivid idea of what it was like to be involved personally in the destruction and carnage.
Colonel-General Baron Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of the "Red Baron", commanded the Luftwaffe's Fourth Air Fleet, which opened the assault on Stalingrad, to prepare the way for the mighty 6th Army. Richthofen was an expert on air raids against soft targets. It was he who presided over the bombing of Guernica by Stuka dive-bombers during Germany's experimental intervention in the Spanish Civil War.
There were few anti-aircraft guns at Stalingrad when the battle began, and the gun-crews were inexperienced young women. Every battery was soon destroyed. It has been estimated that air raids killed about 40,000 civilians during the first week. In that time, in 1,600 sorties, the Luftwaffe lost only three planes.
Ironically, the effectiveness of the raids, shattering many buildings and reducing parts of the city to rubble, actually helped to establish an impregnable defence. Accustomed to triumphal, fast advances over open terrain, German soldiers were allergic to short-range infantry encounters in the city's ruins.
Under unyielding orders from their demented supreme commanders, the German and Soviet armies alike were compelled to stay in place, no matter how terrible their casualties. Both sides behaved abominably to maintain discipline. NKVD commissars in every Soviet unit summarily executed any soldier who wavered. According to Beevor's meticulous report, the Soviet forces deliberately shot 13,500 of their own men during the five-month battle.
While Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus's army was closely engaged on the western fringe of Stalingrad, Marshal Georgy Zhukov's Soviet forces launched Operation Uranus, attacking from north and south to meet one hundred miles west of the city and encircling more than a quarter of a million of the enemy. Stalingrad, the Germans now realised, Beevor writes, was "the bait in an enormous trap". "News spread rapidly on the German side, with the phrase, `We're surrounded!"
That day, the 22nd of November, 1942, according to a German priest serving as a doctor with the 16th Panzer Division, was a time of "worry, fear and horror". The besiegers were besieged on a steppe without shelter in winter conditions of Arctic severity. Hitler refused Paulus's pleas to be allowed to withdraw from Stalingrad and for the 6th Army to fight its way out of encirclement. Between then and the 7th of January, 1943, just under 52,000 soldiers of the 6th Army died. Not even Hitler was able any longer to prevent surrender.
Beevor colours his sombre narrative with innumerable details of human suffering and ingenuity in appalling circumstances. On the Soviet side, there was "a new cult of `sniperism", "a new wave of socialistic competition for the largest number of Fritzes killed". "A sniper on reaching forty kills would receive the `For Bravery' medal, and the title of `noble sniper'."
By Pavlovian techniques, Soviet troops trained "mine-dogs". Having been taught to seek their food beneath heavy military vehicles, dogs with triggered mines strapped to their backs were sent to forage beneath vehicles behind the German lines.
This excellent history is illustrated with sixteen pages of photographs and six maps of admirable clarity, greatly enhancing appreciation of the text.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic