Lyn's Reviews > Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad

A study of World War II is an exercise in tragedy. To compare it to a Greek or even Shakespearean play is to engage in understatement and reverse hyperbole: World War II is comparable to nothing else in history.

A student will delve into the political and economic backstory, come to vaguely understand the causes and the historical indices of what was to come. Next he will learn of the epic battles and the strife that engaged millions. But lurking in the shadows, like an especially miserable and haunting ghost is the name:

Stalingrad.

There the scholar will fail to grasp the scope of the calamity, be logically unable to find a way to comprehend the depths to which humans can descend. Stalingrad, in a collection of names that evoke horror, names like Auschwitz, Dresden and Hiroshima; stands apart. Like World War II itself, it is like nothing else.

William Craig, in his brilliant 1973 chronicle of the battle has recounted the meeting of an unstoppable force (the German blitzkrieg) and an immovable object (the stubborn and obstinate Communists) passionately defending their ground – in an action eerily similar to the American Civil War Battle of Gettysburg – where the initial goals were unrelated to the eventual conflict. Stalingrad was a city the Germans had not intended to take and shielded by Russians who had not anticipated to defend.

The numbers and statistics are incomprehensible. What does more than 800,000 dead look like? Stalingrad, now Volgograd (approximately a little north of the latitude of Seattle but in a hot and dusty steppe similar to the North American plains), is a long north to south river city (skirting the Volga River) with miles of streets adjacent to and parallel to the docks and the shoreline. The invading Germans, used to gobbling up miles and rolling up hapless defenders in days, met an obdurate Soviet city situated against a natural barrier. The mechanized war machine ground to an ugly halt in what would become blocks and blocks of urban warfare.

The fast and lethal panzer divisions of the Nazi blitzkrieg were accustomed to lightning fast successes and up until then, they had proven unbeatable. In Stalingrad, there progress was measured in street to street gains and with determined, dug in Soviets who gave ground unwillingly and then would retake a city block with a seemingly limitless supply of reserves coming in from the east.

This was a street fight: brutal, malicious and ugly. Fighting in the streets, fighting in the same building, hand to hand combat. Sniper duels, close range artillery, tanks set afire by Molotov cocktails thrown from upper story windows and then set upon by civilian factory workers. The Soviets hid in cellars and attacked at night, they traveled through the sewers to fall in behind the attackers.

Crossing the river to urban entrenched defenses, the inflexible, overconfident German tactics are reminiscent of the Union advance at Fredericksburg, with tenacious and merciless defenders employing heavy armaments at homicidal proximity and with hideous affect. The November Soviet counter-offensive that surrounded the over extended Nazis is likely still studied today.

Told with an eye towards objectivity and with the good, the bad, and the ugly of both sides; this is still more sympathetic to the Russians: the stolid defenders of the city. Craig fills his military history with colorful stories and frontline remembrances. One anecdote told of three Russian soldiers cut off from their unit and were lost for days in the burning city. The starving communists found a line for food and got in, were served a cup of soup and sat down at a table and only then realized all the others at the same table were speaking German. They quietly finished their hot meal and left.

Craig tells the stories of not just the leaders of both sides, the generals and political heads; but also, and most notably, the privates, sergeants and junior officers who form the bulk of each army, and who bore the brunt of the deadly chess match played from far off Moscow and Berlin.

And if you need a new reason to hate either Stalin or Hitler, especially the German leader, then this book provides plenty of cause of loathing for both.

Of course, much of this battle was fought on the Russian steppe in winter, so the twin specters of starvation and deathly cold played out in Napoleonic fashion. Craig’s descriptions made these difficulties seem real and painful, transforming this narrative into an organic experience for the reader.

An inspired, well researched, but brutally violent and frequently difficult to read military history.