Episode 18 - A massive attack begins on the 14th October as the Germans target the Tractor Factory

It's the middle of October 1942 and the Sixth Army just cannot take Stalingrad as the Russians hold onto the West Bank of the Volga despite being outnumbered and outgunned.

The most critical assault of the entire battle had just been joined – and that was the German attack which began at dawn on the 14th October. For the next three days it represented the point at which had the German’s succeeded, Stalingrad would have fallen immediately and the course of the war may have been different.

While historians don’t believe Germany would have ultimately been victorious, what this period did was reinforce the belief amongst rank and file Russians that they could overcome the Nazis.

The official version of the period 14–17 October is that Stalingrad’s defence remained resolute in the face of devastating enemy pressure.

Chuikov himself is at pains to say that, despite the terrible fighting and the proximity of the Germans to his HQ, ‘we had no thought of withdrawing’. That’s not entirely true as we will hear.

For personal and political reasons this became the accepted truth. Yet the reality – as on the earlier critical day of 14 September – was far darker. And it’s by peering more closely into this darkness can we make sense out of the Rattenkrieg – the rat war.

Five German divisions, three infantry and two Panzer, 300 tanks with mighty air support, moved off in one great wall of steel and fire to overrun the factory districts, to break through to the Volga in strength and to blot out the Soviet 62nd Army once and for all.

‘These three days were utterly exceptional – even by Stalingrad’s standards’, said Russian Captain Mereshenko.

‘Only on 17 October did things get back to normal.’

Normal meant hundreds dying every day, not thousands.

By mid-morning on the 14th a blanket of smoke hung over Stalingrad that was so thick visibility had been cut to a few hundred yards. Stukas flew over in packs bombing relentlessly. At 11.30am two hundred German tanks broke through Russian defences around the all important Tractor Works.

General Erwin Janaecke’s 398th Infantry Division burst into the mile-long labyrinth of workshops that made up the Tractor Factory. The scenes inside this building almost defied description. The works became a charnel house.