Episode 21 -Hitler’s hubris at a Munich Beer Hall as crack German engineers arrive in Stalingrad

General Paulus’ Sixth Army has been stymied in its quest to drive the Red Army out of the city – his last attack which began in mid-October has stalled.

He’s running low on both men and ammunition. The meat grinder that is Stalingrad has caused a 60% casualty rate in some German divisions – sometimes higher. There are few reinforcements.

But that’s not true of the Russians who are building up two forces. One to the north of Stalingrad near the Don River, and the other south of the city.

It doesn’t take much to realise what the Soviets are going to do. German and Romanian intelligence has picked up on the troop movements but General Paulus and Adolf Hitler appear largely unconcerned.

Then came the news on the 2nd November that the British had defeated Rommel at el Alamein in north Africa. A few days later came the Anglo-American landing in French north Africa news of which reached Adolf Hitler just before he was to address his party comrades at the Munich Beer Cellar.

That was where the Reich was launched in a failed putsh or coup attempt that started on November 8th 1923. It ended with Hitler thrown into prison.

Now almost twenty years later Hitler was heading back to the Beer hall where he would deliver one of his most tone-deaf speeches in the midst of Stalingrad death and destruction. The speech of course was broadcast to the Sixth Army divisions hiding behind rubble and now facing a terrible winter.

Word of the defeat at el Alamein as well as the American landings in Algeria shocked the German public. They had been fed copious amounts of propaganda about how swimmingly the war was going – to learn that the beloved Rommel had been outwitted by Field Marshal Montgomery caused a sudden shudder to ripple through the citizens of the Reich.

Propaganda and its consquences by themselves rarely win wars – or political battles. Eventually the truth descends upon those who lie and cheat, eventually the people of the nation realise the folly of fatally flawed leadership.

Back at General Chuikov’s headquarters hewn out of the Volga bank, officers of the 62nd army were discussing a strange reality. Why had the Germans not supported their flanks? Both south and north of the city the German’s were facing hundreds of miles of extended front with a dangerously exposed Sixth Army wedge which had formed from the Don to the West and into Stalingrad.