Excerpts of Stalingrad [ 1 ]

Stalingrad - The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. Years ago I had to read, for school and college, most of the time is was fairly dull reading. After college I lived alone for a while, with no dish TV and no Internet. I played some computer games and read two books by Antony Beever. The Fall of Berlin was the other.

A few weeks ago we lost power for about 20 hours so I started reading Stalingrad again at a pace of about 5-10 pages a night. I could make better progress if I just sat for a full evening or two, it is not easy to sit and read like a novel, there is much information to absorb. I have been taking time noting certain information that I am going to share on here. Some of it I find fascinating and some of it disturbing, in the end I think it is all important.

*"During that night of 21 June [1941], the diplomats in Berlin and Moscow could only guess what was happening along the frontier that separated them. Never had foreign ministries been so redundant. Some 3,050,000 German troops, with other pro-Axis armies bringing the total to four million men, awaited the invasion of the Soviet Union from Finland to the Black Sea. "The world will hold its breath!" Hitler had declared at a planning session several months before...

In the 24th Panzer Division, for example, Captain von Rosenback-Lepinski is said to have told his motorcycle recon battalion: "The war with Russia will last only four weeks." Such confidence was, in many ways, understandable. Even foreign Intel services expected the Red Army to collapse. The Wehrmacht had assembled the largest invasion force ever seen, with 3,350 tanks, around 7,000 field guns and over 2,000 aircraft...the Wehrmacht famed for its Blitzkrieg, also depended on over 600,000 horses to tow guns and ration wagons...

Hitler's plans of subjugation and exploitation could only strengthen the "rotten structure" [Hitler believed Russian was a rotten structure, which if you crash in the front door the whole thing will crumble down] by forcing even those who loathed the Stalinist regime to support it. Stalin and the apparatus of the Communist Party quickly recognized the need to shift their rhetoric away from Marxist-Leninist cliches. The phrase "The Great Patriotic War" appeared in a headline in the first issue of Pravda to appear after the invasion, and Stalin himself soon took up this deliberate evocation of the Patriotic War against Napoleon...

The infantry divisions, which composed the bulk of the army, were marching up to forty miles a day, their jackboots roasting in the summer heat. The Landser, or infantryman, carried about fifty-five pounds of equipment, including steel helmet, rifle, ammunition and entrenching tool. His canvas and leather pack contained a mess tin, canteen, an Esbit field stove, a combined spoon and fork in aluminium, rifle cleaning kit, spare clothes, tent pegs and poles, field dressing, sewing kit, razor, soap and Vulkan Sanex condoms, even though carnal relations with civilians were officially forbidden..."

*Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. Penguin Books: New York, New York, 1998.