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Sixty years on, the battle fought along the banks of the Volga River remains one of the most brutal in the history of warfare.
The arrogance of Adolf Hitler and the German high command was heightened by the enemy's stupendous losses in Operation Barbarossa. The great offensive of 1941 might not have destroyed the Soviet Union, but more than 3 million Russians were dead. Three million more were in German prison camps. Add to those grim statistics the tens of thousands murdered, or dead from deliberate starvation and mistreatment at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS. German flags flew over the Ukraine, Russia's granary, and over the Donbas, industrial heartland of the Soviet Union. A third of the country's rail network was in German hands; its heavy industrial production was down by three-fourths. The Red Army had become a blunted instrument, its tanks and aircraft destroyed, its best divisions chewed up and spat out by the blitzkrieg, its winter 1941 counterattack met, then checked, by a German army at the very nadir of its own resources and fortunes.
German damage to the Soviets, however, had not been achieved without cost. More than 900,000 Germans were dead, wounded or missing-- almost a third of the invasion force. As late as May 1942, some German infantry formations were at little more than a third of their authorized strength. More than 4,200 tanks had been destroyed or damaged, and an overburdened industrial system no longer had any hope of replacing all of them. Roughly 100,000 trucks and other motor vehicles were gone, as were more than 200,000 horses-the latter arguably more important than the lost machines.
Since June 1941, Nazi Germany had been at war with both the world's largest land power, the Soviet Union, and its greatest mercantile empire, Great Britain. In December it added the biggest industrial power, the United States, to its list of enemies. Hitler understood that his Third Reich did not possess anything like the resources to match such a coalition. He did not intend to try. On December 10, 1941, he had assumed personal command of the Eastern Front. Many of the key figures of Operation Barbarossa, such as Heinz Guderian, Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock, were...