Transcript of Stalingrad

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Start your free trial at shopify.com.au. The History Channel original podcast. July 1942. It's been over a year since Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. After initial success, the German campaign bogs down across all fronts, so Hitler prepares to launch another offensive. One of his objectives is capturing Stalingrad, a city of great strategic and symbolic value, particularly to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. One of the titanic battles of World War II is about to erupt.

This is World War II with Tom Hanks, episode 10, Stalingrad.

June 1942. Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler travels to Finland to meet with Finnish military leader Carl Gustaf Mannerheim. The Germans are about to launch another major offensive against the Soviet Union. But to do so, the Wehrmacht needs access to more oil.

The amount of fuel the air force alone is consuming, the amount our tank divisions are consuming, is something quite monstrous.

Hitler's main supply of oil is from his ally Romania, but he confesses to Mannerheim how dependent Germany is on that one source of fuel.

And without the afflux of 4 to 5 million tons of Romanian petroleum, we would not be able to wage the war.

Hitler's also concerned the Romanian oil fields are vulnerable to Allied air attacks. Oil is always a problem for Hitler.

Unlike the United States or Russia, Germany doesn't have an internal source of oil or petroleum that it can tap into. It must go get it from somewhere else.

The Caucasus, the mountainous region of the Soviet Union's southwest, contains some of the richest oil fields in the world. If the Germans can seize them, the Wehrmacht will have all the oil it needs, as well as depriving the Soviets access.

The Caucasus is a vast mountain range that spans Europe and Asia 750 miles. This is going to be a serious obstacle for any army that tries to traverse it.

Hitler and his generals prepare a plan to conquer the Caucasus: Operation Blue. The Southern Army Group first head towards the Volga River to secure this vital supply route and prevent the Soviets from moving in reinforcements. Next, capture the fields.

Can they get there? If they could, could they go ahead and pull all that oil out of there? Do they have the logistical means necessary to get it back to Germany? This is Hitler's idea. It has to be successful.

Until now, Hitler's campaign against the Soviet Union has proven to be far more difficult than he and the German High Command anticipated.

In June of 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Union, the biggest military operation of all time. Hitler's banking on a quick win. The Germans take tens of thousands of square miles and capture millions of Soviet soldiers, but they don't take Moscow. They don't get the quick win. The war goes on into 1942.

Barbarossa did not meet its objective set by Adolf Hitler, which was to capture vast amounts of land, to get raw materials, uh, also to wreck Bolshevism. Which needed the collapse of the Soviet Union to happen rapidly, none of which happened.

Hitler is concerned he's gotten himself in trouble in the Soviet Union, but he's convinced that the situation can be righted. He can continue this war forever as long as he has a sufficient supply of oil. And that's what the 1942 strike is going to take care of, a strike for the oil fields of the Soviet Union. This is the world's first war for oil.

June 1942. German forces begin their push south towards the Volga as planned.

Hitler is impatient and desperate to get the, uh, oil fields as soon as he can.

But then he splits the Southern Army Group in two.

For Hitler, Operation Blue is an exercise in frustration. The armies aren't moving fast enough, they're not meeting the objectives, And for that reason, he decides to split them into two big groups.

It's a measure of his arrogance that he thought he was just simply going to be able to divide this force and, and in some of the most difficult fighting terrain of Europe.

Hitler orders most of the Southern Army Group to push directly for the oil fields. The job of seizing the Volga will now be left to a single combat force. One of the biggest and most experienced, the 6th Army.

The German 6th Army is the largest army in the German order of battle. At the beginning of the campaign, the 6th Army had over 300,000 men in it.

By the middle of August, they're closing in on the Volga and the city that guards it, Stalingrad.

Stalingrad is named after Adolf Hitler's personal rival and the personification of Bolshevism, Joseph Stalin.

It's Stalin's city. It was named to commemorate a great victory he won over the Whites in the Russian Civil War. He doesn't want to surrender a city named after himself.

Stalingrad itself is also a major industrial center, which produces something like 20% of Soviet tanks, including the famous T-34, along with a lot of other products critical to the war economy. Stalingrad is a prize in its own right.

Once again, the Red Army is facing forced to retreat by the Wehrmacht.

The, um, German forces with their shirts off— it's summer, uh, and they're just racing across the steppes, and the Red Army is just collapsing.

Stalin understands that if Hitler controls the Volga River, that he will control the supply lines, and therefore there's a chance he can defeat the Soviet Red Army.

Stalin goes into a freefall panic.

Stalin is determined that this is where Hitler must finally be stopped. In late July 1942, as the German 6th Army advances on Stalingrad, he issues a directive from Moscow: Order 227.

As the Germans are advancing and getting ever closer to Stalingrad in July 1942, Stalin issues Order 227. This is the so-called "Not a Step Back" or "Ni shagu nazad" order. No more retreat will be tolerated.

He's reading a lot of Roman history about how the Roman army punished units for surrendering. Stalin says, "We've lost too many provinces. We've lost all of European Russia." The retreat must stop now. Not one more step back. Anyone who retreats in any shape or form will be instantly executed.

There are going to be blocking units made up of the secret police, NKVD, commissars, people like that, whose job it is to kill soldiers that are coming back towards them.

The reason Stalin gives this order, however, is revealing. The Soviets were presumed at the beginning of the war to have had these vast and almost endless stores of manpower, of grain, of wheat. A big country after all, a much bigger country than Nazi Germany. But as many as 70 million former Soviet subjects are now behind German lines. And we shouldn't forget, of course, that Nazi Germany is now drawing on the resources of occupied Europe as well. And in Stalin's calculations, Stalin no longer thinks the Soviets have a manpower advantage. So the essence of this order, "Not a step back," is that if they withdraw any further, they will forfeit any possible material or manpower advantage over the German armies.

Both Hitler and Stalin understand the symbolic power of Stalingrad.

Hitler gets fixated on Stalingrad. You know, this bears Stalin's name. Why don't I take Stalingrad? And this will be just an unspeakable humiliation to Stalin, and it'll be, you know, a sign of, you know, of German supremacy.

Stalin, he's under no illusions that if Stalingrad is reached by the German forces, this is going to be an existential battle of annihilation.

The German 6th Army surrounds Stalingrad. Stalingrad, a city of 800,000, is spread along 30 miles of the Volga River. It has modern apartment blocks, parks, and heavy industrial factories. On August 23rd, the Luftwaffe bombardment begins. In the first 24 hours, thousands are killed. Still, Stalin orders all survivors to remain in the ravaged city.

Stalin deliberately makes no organized attempt to evacuate the civilian inhabitants. Have the Germans attack, shell, bomb. He wants to showcase German barbarism. But he also figures that this will stiffen the resistance of Stalingrad.

His thinking at this point is that if I leave a Russian population in a city center, that Soviet soldiers will fight all that more heroically in their defense.

Stalingrad has been destroyed. There is devastation everywhere. But the German 6th Army 6th Army, a quarter of a million men, 500 tanks, is ready to push in the city and conquer it.

Germany's 6th Army is led by General Friedrich Paulus.

Paulus as a character is quite weak. He doesn't have the self-confidence of a Manstein or a Rommel or anybody like that.

Friedrich Paulus is one of Hitler's less able generals. He doesn't have a lot of experience. In battle. He's a technocrat who's going to get the job done, and Hitler doesn't think the job's going to be particularly difficult.

After 2 weeks of constant bombardment, General Paulus orders the 6th Army to enter Stalingrad. There, the German troops are confronted with a unique, battered landscape that provides cover for thousands of Soviet soldiers.

Imagine an urban warfare campaign in New York or London. It's a partially destroyed, nightmarish ruin. There's actually civilians still running around and living, like, in little caves that they've dug out of the rubble. The environment is surreal.

The Germans describe this savage close-quarter combat as Rattenkrieg, War of the Rats.

The German notion of Rattenkrieg, rats scurrying between rubble, soldiers maneuvering in and out of sewers. It's an open a door, there's an enemy. Now all of a sudden you're Fighting with fists, not with artillery and not with tanks. It is a very face-to-face, personal, and infantry energy-intensive battle.

The Germans push through the mangled industrial debris of factories and oil depots. Hiding within the ruins, Soviet snipers pick off individual soldiers, sowing a sense of random terror. The most skilled marksmen become legends, men like Vasily Zaitsev, who becomes a hero throughout the Soviet Union. Everyone, young and old, is expected to fight, including women.

Women are very much part of the Red Army effort anyway. But in Stalingrad, they're trapped in the city, and so they would just get in there and start to fight equally with the men. They dig tank traps, they learn how to shoot, they become snipers.

But despite the Red Army's gallant defense of Stalingrad, street by street, yard by yard, the Germans are gaining ground. By the second After 1 week of fighting, the Soviets are in danger of losing the city. At the same time, German forces are closing in on the oil fields in the Caucasus.

The Battle of Stalingrad is going badly. The entire Soviet Union seems to be staring down the barrel. Stalin decides he has to do something dramatic to save the city.

Stalin summons his first Deputy Commander-in-Chief, Georgy Zhukov, who successfully defended Leningrad and Moscow. At a meeting in the Kremlin, Stalin confers with Zhukov on military strategy.

Stalin had always wanted to be a military commander. Long before World War II, he dressed as a military commander. But he's not a commander. He's not a brilliantly talented strategist. And he's still constantly overruling his generals, ordering offensives that are unnecessary, that are unprepared. But now Stalin begins to learn to listen to people he trusts.

He's starting to find talented people. Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who helped defend Moscow. He's now going, "Hey, that guy, I think he knows how to win." Zoukhoff is broad-shouldered, he's short, he's muscular.

He's an incredibly tough person. He literally clears minefields by sending troops running across them. The quintessential Stalinist general.

Zoukhoff presents Stalin with a new plan: lure the 6th Army deeper into Stalingrad. Then surround them and counterattack from the rear of the city.

At the end of the meeting, Stalin shakes hands for the first time with Zhukov, something he's never done before, because he realizes that if this works, the tide of the war will change.

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In September 1942, Soviet General Zhukov designed a new strategy to defend Stalingrad. Relying largely on deception, he opens up misleading radio channels, orders fake defenses, and starts construction on 17 false bridges.

The Soviets are starting to learn the art of war. This is not the Soviet Army of 1941.

Zhukov, a chess player, is known for meticulous planning.

Zhukov's plans for the operation are elaborate, and they take weeks to prepare.

The army inside Stalingrad is completely unaware of what its real role is. Its role is to be the bait in the trap. Their commander knows that the only way he can do it is by sacrificing more and more men.

By October, both armies combined lose nearly 6,000 troops a day. And both sides are equally ruthless in their tactics.

German soldiers would bribe these poor orphans, uh, to go and fill their water bottles in the Volga. With a crust of bread, Soviet snipers were ordered to shoot down the Russian children who were starving. This was the pitilessness of the battle.

At his headquarters, Adolf Hitler is informed that his army won't be able to take the oil fields in the Caucasus. His earlier decision to split his forces has doomed the operation.

Hitler is told that actually we haven't got enough troops to seize the oil fields. He explodes in rage. He says he's been lied to. He blames his generals. So it completely changes the atmosphere at Führer Headquarters.

Hitler shifts his focus to one goal: capturing Stalingrad. By mid-November, it appears the 6th Army might just do it. They make their final push to encircle Soviet troops on the Volga.

The Germans are feeling confident about the Battle of Stalingrad. They already hold 90% of the city. Hitler is getting reports from his commanders on the site that the city is about to fall.

They're starting to fly swastika flags. Hitler is boasting to his buddies that Stalingrad's about to be mine.

I wanted to capture Stalingrad, and you should know we are humble. There are only a few places left. We have as good as got it.

Hitler seems confident that the Wehrmacht is on the verge of victory. As fighting continues around Stalingrad, the Red Army unleashes a deafening fusillade from over 3,000 Soviet heavy artillery and Katyusha rockets.

Katyusha rockets are one of the great weapons invented by the Red Army. They could fire these terrifying salvos. The scream is completely unearthly.

The 6th Army's flanks are defended by badly equipped Romanian troops. This is where Zhukov focuses his attack.

They were whipped by their own officers. They received virtually no pay at all. Their morale was rock bottom. Why should they die for Germany?

The Romanians are quickly overrun. Hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers encircle the 6th Army in a pincer movement. On November 22nd, Soviet forces link up in the town of Kalach on the Don River. The 6th Army is now surrounded and cut off from its supply lines. General Paulus is in a desperate position.

One of the most shocking documents in the German command of the Second World War is the memo that General Paulus writes back to Führer headquarters. It opens with two words: "Armee eingeschlossen"— the army is surrounded. Stalingrad is surrounded. Words that no German commander ever believed they would ever have to write.

Hitler, when he hears about this, is absolutely speechless with rage. As far as Hitler was concerned, the capture of Stalingrad had been proclaimed a victory. It was only a few days before the great Soviet encirclement. He could not admit that he had been deceived. That they had lost it.

This crucial battle has altered Stalin's approach to leadership.

Stalin had been the headstrong, clumsy, and obstinate commander who constantly makes colossal mistakes with catastrophic effects. Stalin by now has learned to listen to generals, to recognize the limits of his expertise and to let them plan the detail while he sets the larger strategy.

You start to see this transition of Joseph Stalin into political leader and letting his military professionals fight the battles. Joseph Stalin is indeed maturing as a war leader.

Stalin's forces have Paulus's 6th Army surrounded. The Russian winter is closing in. November 1942. Winter descends over the Eastern Front. What remains of the German 6th Army is trapped in the city of Stalingrad. 250,000 men are completely surrounded by Soviet troops. General Paulus asks permission to attempt a breakout. Hitler refuses.

Hitler is linked with the standfast order— where the German soldier sets foot, there he stays. Not taking Stalingrad is not an option. It has to do with public opinion, but Hitler knows the degree of the predicament he's in.

The Wehrmacht is now going to face not only a Soviet Army that is growing in capability, capacity, and credibility, they're also going to have to face the Russian winter. Soldiers don't have the right gear. Supplies become harder. Vehicles are harder to start. Maintenance is harder to do. Everything that should be easy becomes more difficult because people are cold.

How long till the ammunition runs out? How long till the medical supplies run out?

The Germans are hit by the full force of the Russian winter.

You're talking about bitterly cold weather. People suffering from frostbite.

People are literally dying of cold where they stand. The bodies are frozen solid. You could break off their arm, they're so frozen.

Soldiers are dying of dysentery, typhoid, and tuberculosis. By the end of December, their daily food intake is less than a handful of bread with weak, watery soup. The troops are starving.

There are dead men lying everywhere. There are rats everywhere. There's no fuel. There's nothing to burn. There's absolutely no thought of They're not fighting anymore. Even hanging on to life has become almost impossible.

You see German soldiers and officers asking the doctors for pills so that they could commit suicide.

They are frozen. They are desperate. It's a scene of hell on earth.

Back in Germany, the public is largely unaware of how serious the situation has become. But now some are getting letters from their loved ones detailing the horrors unfolding in the ruins of Stalingrad.

Try to put yourself in the place of these German troops. You're very far away from home, right? It's Christmas season and you're listening to the radio and they're playing Silent Night. At a certain point, you realize that they're basically writing you off.

Again and again, Paulus asks for permission to break out. Each time, Hitler's answer is no.

General Paulus's men are dying in the thousands every day. Any sense of military utility had long departed. And yet Paulus chose loyalty to Hitler over loyalty to the men under his command.

Hitler has created a command culture in which his commanders can't use their professionalism and their expertise on the ground to do what's best for their forces. And so this is also a failure of Hitler's management of his commanders.

By the end of January, Paulus informs Hitler that they cannot fight on. Hitler responds with a radio message promoting Paulus to Field Marshal and congratulating him on his new position.

Hitler does this not out of any great love or admiration for Paulus. He does it because no Field Marshal has ever surrendered in the field in German history.

He feels that this is one way of basically making Paulus commit suicide.

The next day, Paulus goes to Red Army headquarters outside Stalingrad. 150,000 of his men are dead.

Paulus is trapped. He faces an impossible choice.

Paulus surrenders what is left of the 6th Army. The remaining 90,000 German troops are led away as prisoners of war.

Of war.

Only a small number of them will ever see Germany again.

It really was a shock to the Nazi elite, but also to the people of Germany. Psychologically, it really was the turning point.

All of a sudden, the unthinkable, the idea you might lose this war, is right there in your face. And everyone back at home would have known about it. The morale is going to suffer. That's a turn-the-tables moment.

There's very few families in Germany that didn't have some tie to the 6th Army. A son, a father, a neighbor's son. The 6th Army was the largest army in the German order of battle, and now it's been completely destroyed.

When Hitler receives the news of Paulus' surrender, he's silent. In Ireland for several hours. Then he explodes.

He actually says, "Why didn't Paulus put a bullet in his brain? It only takes a second and he would have been immortal from then on." But instead he chose what Hitler said was the coward's way out. But Hitler knows the gravity of this defeat.

To lose 250,000 men in a moment, essentially, in other words, to have that military force wiped off your ledger, that hadn't happened to the Germans in the war. It changes the political calculation entirely, and this myth of invincibility is going to be shattered.

In a single campaign, Hitler has lost an army, and began to lose the faith of the German people. Following the defeat of Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler withdraws to his mountain retreat in Bavaria. On April 20th, 1943, his inner circle throws a party to mark his 54th birthday.

After Stalingrad, all the indicators are running against Germany. The campaign in North Africa has clearly gone bad. Increasingly, Hitler is losing control of himself. The entire 1942 campaign had been marked by gigantic tantrums against his officers. He is no longer up to the stress of running a global war. But Hitler knows that he has to launch an offensive in 1943, or he risks losing control of the war completely.

Completely.

The Germans have enough armor and enough energy and enough manpower to mount one final offensive on the Eastern Front.

The Soviets have advanced into an area to the south, creating a salient around a region called Kursk. Hitler sees an opportunity to seize the initiative.

The salient around Kursk in 1943 1943 was such an obvious target that basically both sides knew some type of offensive was coming.

Hitler is basically putting all of his chips on the table, but his resources are already stretched across Europe.

Everything is getting harder by 1943. The Soviet artillery is better, their tanks are better, their leadership is better. So it will take a lot of resource, it'll It'll take a lot of armor, and it will cost in order to do this.

Considering the resources of Nazi Germany at this point, its economic reserves, its soldiers, this is a ridiculous thing to attempt.

Hitler is particularly excited about his giant tanks, the Tigers and Panthers, which he thinks are game changers.

In Moscow, the Soviet High Command is receiving intelligence about the Germans' upcoming offensive. Unlike earlier in the war, Stalin is now utilizing the intelligence he receives.

Stalin's instincts are always just attack now, attack on all fronts, attack at any cost. By the time of Kursk, he's learned that actually this is not the way to win a war. Now he's taking the intelligence on board. He's trusting it. The German attack is going to be massive. Zhukov persuades Stalin, we're going to dig in, we're going to prepare, and we're going to draw the Germans in.

As Zhukov prepares for the coming offensive, Soviet factories increase their production.

By this stage of the war, the Soviet economy is vastly outproducing the German economy. Stalin was now producing massive amounts of weaponry.

The United States has also been sending military supplies to the Soviets through its Lend-Lease Plan, which was designed to get American materials to Great Britain and the Soviet Union. By 1943, tons of military hardware are rolling off Allied ships each month.

The Soviets were especially impressed with the Willys Jeeps, American Sherman tanks, along with more than 12,000 warplanes.

The Soviets are also receiving hundreds of thousands of tons of food.

The Soviet Army is actually being fed by the American economy in 1943. Everything from the famous Tusonka pork Americans refer to as Spam to millions of packets of dehydrated borscht.

One of the ways that Hitler wants to defeat these people and whittle down their numbers is through starvation. But if they're being fed from outside sources, you can't do that.

The supplies help the Soviets build one of the largest defensive forces ever seen. 1.3 million troops. At Zhukov's command, civilians dig several thousand miles of trenches and tank traps outside Kursk. Nearly 1 million mines are laid.

It's the most densely defended area of the whole Earth in the course of the Second World War.

The Soviets are prepared for the full weight of the German Wehrmacht. July 1943, the Germans launch their colossal offensive against the Red Army in the Kursk Salient. Quickly, the German advance runs into Zhukov's fortifications.

It's the countermove to the idea of blitzkrieg. If you break through the front line, there's another line behind there with, you know, anti-tank efforts and trenches and men. If you break through that one, there's another one. Your forces as the German Wehrmacht are getting smaller and weaker and damaged, and eventually you just sort of whittle away the spear point here.

For 8 days, the German Wehrmacht German's grind against Soviet defenses. Two vast tank armies collide.

Astonishing intensity. Tanks helm to helm, hull to hull.

The German tanks are better built, have bigger guns, better armor. But if you've only got a few of them and you've got a mass of T-34s coming at you, you have a big problem.

Hitler's miracle weapons, the, the Tigers and Panthers, which are these giant diabolical metal machines, actually don't work too well.

Hitler's tanks are destroyed by the more maneuverable Soviet tanks. After 2 days The Wehrmacht is forced to withdraw.

Hitler has failed. He's rolled the dice 3 times inside the Soviet Union: Operation Barbarossa in '41, Operation Blue in '42, and now the great offensive at Kursk. And he's failed each time. Hitler's final gamble on the Eastern Front has been crushed.

They get nothing out of the Battle of Kursk. It's a huge defeat for the Germans. They're always going to be going backwards from this point on.

Kursk destroys enough of the German combat power that they can never take the offensive for the rest of the war. Therefore, the Soviets maintain the initiative to pick the time and place of their choosing where they're going to take their next act.

This is a decisive moment in Stalin's development as a supreme commander. Hitler is undergoing precisely the opposite transformation.

By this point in the war, Hitler is really losing his grip on reality. And people who thought he made some madcap moves in 1940, but they paid off. As the war lengthens, his decisions become more and more suspect.

The two great warlords of World War II are passing each other as one develops and one deteriorates.

In November 1943, Joseph Stalin meets with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It's the first meeting of the group that will become known as the Big Three.

The Big Three sat down in Tehran, round the table with their teams. Each of them said something, and Stalin said, Stalin really put it best. He said, "History has spoiled us. Never have three men had the vast and massive powers that we have today.

Let's get to work." Stalingrad creates a tradition that eventually spreads to the rest of the Red Army. Soviet soldiers passing each other in the street say, "Blind swap!" and exchange the items in their pockets without looking. Soldiers swap a single cigarette for a watch, or money for a scrap of paper. In Stalingrad, life is so uncertain—soldiers could be dead in an instant—that nothing has any value at all. The Battle for Stalingrad is the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front. Never again would the Wehrmacht take the offensive in the East. And in the West, the Allies prepare to cross the Mediterranean, the next step in their attack against the Third Reich.

World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by Nutopia Limited, A&E Factual Studios, Playtone Productions, Productions and Back Pocket Studios, in association with Motion Entertainment, for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd. Additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler. For Playtone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getzman. For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.