September 1942. Stalingrad. The grain elevator. Around thirty Soviet soldiers have held an industrial building on the southern edge of the city for five days against overwhelming German forces. They are out of ammunition. They are out of water. Many are wounded. They hold because this is their city, and this is the Motherland. They do not know they are bait.
This episode is about Operation Uranus — the audacious Soviet counter-offensive that encircled the German Sixth Army in November 1942 — and what makes it one of the most remarkable pieces of strategic deception in modern military history. About a million men assembled in secret on the open steppe, under absolute radio silence, only at night.
About a small meeting in Moscow where two generals persuaded Stalin to authorise the very tactic he had banned. About the warnings from the Romanian flanks that the German staff filed and ignored. And about Field Marshal Paulus, the methodical staff officer who could not bring himself to act without permission — and the question, finally unanswerable, of what he knew.
The book is Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (1998). Five hundred pages. Rigorously sourced from the Soviet archives that opened in the early nineties. Not light reading, but the writing moves, and Beevor has the rare gift of holding the eye of the sergeant on the ferry and the eye of the field marshal in the same paragraph.
Episode three of Contact Light: The Bookshelf. Travels in the country of ambition, between idea and reality. Hosted by Mark Zwinderman.
