Beevor - Stalingrad

PENGUIN BOOKS

STALINGRAD

My choice this year is, without any doubt, Antony Beevors Stalingrad, a magnificent winter tapestry it reads like an accessible novel rather than the superb history book which it really is Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph

Antony Beevors Stalingrad is superb: a gripping and dispassionate account of alternating folly and endurance Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

I have recently read and been hugely impressed by Stalingrad by Antony Beevor Ben Elton, Sunday Telegraph

Stalingrad is distinguished not only for its exhaustive research and sheer narrative drive, but for its portrayal of the ordinarily human during one of the most atrocious battles of the century Colin Thubron, Sunday Telegraph

A brilliantly researched tour de force Sarah Bradford, Sunday Times

Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor is the best battle history for many years balanced, dramatic, dreadful Robert Conquest, The Times Literary Supplement

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor cannot fail to leave one moved Victoria Mather, Daily Mail

As good a piece of war history as I have ever read Jeremy Paxman, Sunday Telegraph

Revealing, profound and thoroughly unputdownable, Stalingrad is an extraordinary achievement which transcends its genre It felt as if I was reading a classical epic drama of the scope of War and Peace Vitali Vitaliev, Daily Telegraph

A classic Stalingrad is only bedtime reading for those who do not dream Amanda Foreman, Independent

This book is overpowering Beevors description of the events of the battle remain with the reader long after the book has been closed Toronto Globe and Mail

This retelling of the Battle of Stalingrad has proved to be a surprising runaway hit. It is no small achievement to have reached such a wide audience with the pity of this particular war Economist

Truly powerful David Pryce-Jones, Daily Mail

Stalingrads heart-piercing tragedy needed a chronicler with acute insight into human nature as well as the forces of history. Antony Beevor is that historian Philadelphia Inquirer

A wonderfully readable work of history Wall Street Journal

A masterly account of hubris and nemesis on a classic scale he has written an authoritative and profoundly human study Patrick Skene Catling, Irish Times

The Stalingrad story is biblical in its extremes of barbarism and heroism, and Antony Beevor has told it superbly Andrew Roberts, Literary Review

Superb a story youll never forget. There has never been a battle like this one, and there has never been a book about a battle such as this Australian

Antony Beevor has produced a compelling and extraordinary story, richly detailed and engrossingly written. Western scholars owe him a very great debt. We now have the real history of Stalingrad without myth or embellishment Richard Overy, author of Why the Allies Won and Russias War

One is convinced by his scholarship, and increasingly moved by the drama he succeeds brilliantly Nigel Nicolson, Spectator

This brilliant tapestry Alan Clark, New Statesman

Antony Beevor

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Viking 1998
First published in Penguin Books 1999
This edition published 2007
3

Copyright Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 1998
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192610-0

PART ONE
THE WORLD WILL HOLD ITS BREATH!

PART TWO
BARBAROSSA RELAUNCHED

PART THREE
THE FATEFUL CITY

PART FOUR
ZHUKOYS TRAP

PART FIVE
THE SUBJUGATION OF THE SIXTH ARMY

APPENDIX A:
German and Soviet Orders of Battle, 19 November 1942

APPENDIX B:
The Statistical Debate: Sixth Army Strength in the Kessel

. Autumn 1941. Soviet prisoners of war being herded to the rear

. July 1942. German infantry marching towards Stalingrad

. A village destroyed in the advance

. German tanks on the Don steppe

. August 1942. German artillery outside Stalingrad

. Dr Beck, chaplain of the 297th Infantry Division

. Paulus, Hitler, Keitel, Haider and Brauchitsch at the Wolf sschanze

. September 1942. Tanks of the 24th Panzer Division advancing

. September 1942. Red Army tank troops listening to a speech from Khrushchev

. The view which greeted Russian reinforcements about to cross the Volga

. German officer and soldiers attacking factory buildings

. Russian infantry defending

. October 1942. Round-up of Stalingrad civilians

. 62nd Army HQ. Krylov, Chuikov, Gurov and Rodimtsev

. Red Army assault squad in the Stalingrad Academy of street-fighting

. One of Chuikovs divisional commanders with a young woman signaller

. October 1942. German infantry occupying a destroyed workshop

. Noble Sniper Zaitsev from the Siberian 284th Rifle Division

. November 1942. Operation Uranus: the encirclement of the Sixth Army

. Junkers 52 transport taking off

. December 1942. German artillery from Hoths Fourth Panzer Army

. Trapped Sixth Army soldiers retrieve parachute canisters

. January 1943. General Rokossovsky

. January 1943. German infantry retreating through a blizzard

. January 1943. General Edler von Daniels marches into captivity

. January 1943. Goering on the tenth anniversary of Hitlers assumption of power

. January 1943. Field Marshal Paulus and General Schmidt after surrendering

. A German soldier booted and prodded out of a bunker

. Remnants of the Sixth Army marched off to captivity

. German and Romanian prisoners

I am particularly grateful to the Arkhiv Muzeya Panorami Stalin-gradskoy Bitvi (the Archive of the Panoramic Museum of the Battle of Stalingrad) in Volgograd for providing illustrations 10, 14, 18, 19 and 20.

Helmut Abt Verlag, Bis Stalingrad