Stalingrad

About This Book

In the summer of 1942 the German army was still winning. One year after invading the Soviet Union, Hitler launched a second great offensive south — toward the oil of the Caucasus, the fuel his war machine could not do without. On the northern flank of that drive lay a long industrial city on the Volga that happened to carry Stalin's name. It was meant to be a flank guard. It became the grave of an army.

E.B Cohen tells the whole story of the deadliest battle in human history — not only the maps and the movements, but what it was to be there. Here is the descent into a city fought over street by street and cellar by cellar, the “rat war” the Germans came to dread; the height called Mamayev Kurgan that changed hands a dozen times a day; the single apartment block a Soviet sergeant held for two months; the perilous Volga crossings that fed fresh divisions into the fire; and the vast pincer of Operation Uranus that snapped shut around a quarter of a million men.

It follows the arithmetic of an airlift that could never have worked, the relief drive that stalled thirty kilometers short, and the slow death of the Sixth Army in the frozen cauldron — to the field marshal's baton that was really an order to die, the surrender of ninety-one thousand starving men, and the long road east from which only about six thousand ever returned.

Rigorous, vivid, and honest about myth and coercion as well as courage, this is the definitive one-volume account of the battle that broke Hitler's army and turned the Second World War.