STALINGRAD NAZI GRAVEYARD

“STALINGRAD HAD BECOME THE FOCAL POINT OF THE EASTERN FRONT AS ITS DEFENDERS SIMPLY REFUSED TO GIVE UP”

It had not been one of the major objectives of the Axis’s summer offensive of 1942, but by September that year Stalingrad had become the focal point of the Eastern Front, as its defenders simply refused to give up. This led to an increasing number of German troops being committed to its reduction. However, by 16 November 1942 what was to be Sixth German Army’s final, desperate attempt to push the battered remains of the city’s defenders from their blood-soaked toeholds on the western bank of the Volga River, ended.

Stalingrad was a model garden and industrial city that ran for 40 kilometres (25 miles) along the western bank of the unbridged Volga River, which at some points reaches a width of 1,500 metres (4,900 feet). At roughly eight kilometres (five miles) wide the city was long and narrow, and was home to some 400,000 people. Much of the population worked in the large factory district located in the northern part of the city. Here the Dzerzhinsky tractor factory, Red October steel works, Silikat factory and the Barrikady artillery factory dominated the city’s landscape.

South of the city centre the area was overlooked by the 102-metre (335-feet) high ancient burial mound Mamayev Kurgan, control of which would allow one side or the other the perfect artillery position from which to dominate the city. Just to the south of the Mamayev Kurgan, near to the main ferry landing point, the Tsaritsa River ran along a narrow gorge into the Volga at 90 degrees. Beyond the city’s suburbs the steppe stretched, undulating gently in all directions and rising gently to the west, where it met the Don River over 100 kilometres (62 miles) away.

Defending the rubble of central and northern Stalingrad were the men of the 62nd Army commanded by Lieutenant General V.I. Chuikov: to the south, a less industrialised area, was the 64th Army led by Major General M.S. Shumilov. By mid-November the Soviet troops in the city were reduced to holding pockets of varying sizes, like islands adrift in a sea of rubble, often connected only by the Volga, across which all their meagre supplies and reinforcements arrived. Yet, by some supreme act of desperation, bravery and tenacity they held on, grinding down their attackers in conditions that resembled those of Verdun.

Facing them, the German Sixth Army, under Lieutenant General Friedrich Paulus, and part of Army Group B (a