Stalingrad

I’ve taught 20C European history a bunch of times and figuring out how to frame the two “hot” world wars always presents a challenge. Students expect some coverage of each war, but I’m much more interested in their cultural and epistemological effects than tanks and tactics. While WWI was nominally global, almost all the military action occurred in and around Europe. WWII, arguably started and finished in East Asia, with European military action confined to 1939-45.

Even so, I think it’s useful, especially for US students, to consider the European War in  six phases: 1) Germany & Russia vs. Poland (1939), 2) Germany vs. Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, and France (+ the Battle of Britain) (1940), 3) Germany vs. Russia (1941-43), 4) Russia vs. Germany (1943-45), 5) US and Britain vs Germany and Italy in the Mediterranean (1943-44), and US and Britain vs. Germany (1944-45).

We in the US have a pretty intense mythology around the European War, centered on D-Day and the triumph of American arms. The most recent popular video treatment is Spielberg’s “Band of Brothers,” which is quite good. But it is too easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking that WE won the war, defeating the evil Nazis and their Italian henchmen. Yeah, we had some help from Churchill and the Brits, and a little from the French, and—oh, yeah—the Russians did their bit, but they’re kind of coarse, and besides, they’re Commies. So, as is too often the case, our history makes it seem that it’s all about us. However, a pretty good case can be made that in terms of sacrifice, firepower, and strategic impact, there would have been no V-E day without Russia/Soviet Union. The pivot on the “Eastern Front” took place in 1943: the Battle of Stalingrad.

Stalingrad is a city (known until 1925 as Tsaritsyn and after 1961 as Volgograd) about 500 miles SE of Moscow and now has more than a million people. When the Germans decided to attack the Soviet Union in 1941 they swept eastward, reaching the fringes of Leningrad (now (and previously) St. Petersburg) in the north and nearing Moscow in the middle of the country. In the south, they scooped up all of the Ukraine until they were finally stopped at Stalingrad.

The battle in and around the city lasted about seven months and was noted for its intensity. It remains the exemplar of urban warfare in the modern world. The Germans were already strategically overextended and proved unable to sustain the projection of massive military power 1400 miles from Berlin. Several Axis armies were surrounded and surrendered and the long campaign to reach and destroy the entirety of the Nazi war machine was launched. Sixteen months later, the Western Allies landed in France and the European war was concluded in another eleven months.

Throughout the ebb and flow of the battles on the Eastern Front, both Germans and Russians were acutely aware of the historical echoes of the previous mass invasion of Russia: by Napoleon and his “Grand Armee” in 1812. Napoleon was defeated by poor French planning and smart Russian strategy, and a brutal winter rather than by superior force of arms.  In many ways, Hitler fell into the same traps—the rhyming of history.

All of this was brought back to me by a recent reference to an underappreciated Russian novel: Vasily Grossman’s “Stalingrad,” which was written in the aftermath of the war and which is now available in a new (2019) translation. I’m only partly through the massive (900+ pages) book, but so far, it lives up to its billing. Much of the critical respect for the book draws on a  pair of parallels: Napoleon’s 1812 expedition: Hitler’s 1941-43 invasion; and Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and Grossman’s works. Tolstoy’s epic chronicles the impact of Napoleon’s invasion on a set of Russian families and Grossman (fully aware of the precedent) does the same for his 20C story.  While Grossman’s book is large, it is only the first half of a saga (continued in “Life and Fate”) which, together outweighs “War and Peace.”

Both bring a sharply observed sense of the individuals involved (the fictional equivalent of the anthropological “thick description” that gives the reader access to psychological and sociological understandings of the subjects). Both combine a fictional history (although Grossman was writing current events and Tolstoy was writing from fifty+ years distance) with philosophical reflections on the nature of war, family, and history. Both are self-sufficient as door-stops.

Big books aren’t everyone’s taste. I rather appreciate the opportunity for deep immersion and have a decent set of this distinctive genre, both in fiction and in history. Perhaps it is a certain fatalism and the long, dark winters that make the Russians particularly prone to write them (see, e.g., Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago).

Such a novel brings an important perspective to the usual historical treatment of a major geopolitical event such as the Battle of Stalingrad. We have to bear both the macro and the micro in mind. The travails of the people in Grossman’s story tie down the gloss of the summary “the Germans invaded, got beaten, and pushed back” historical take. Such great events are, after all, entirely comprised of dozens or thousands of such individual experiences. The death and destruction of war makes it hard for historians to capture this level of detail (sources are sparse) and it often falls, therefore, to novelists to fill the gap. Tolstoy did it with a stunning scope of imagination. Grossman, present in the specific time and place, brings more of a reportorial eye. We can learn much from both.

I don’t know when I will teach 20C European history again; but I’m sure my handling of this aspect of the war will be different as a result of Grossman’s deep dive.