‘They would have preferred hell’: The Battle of Stalingrad, 80 years on

In this photo from early 1943, captured German soldiers, their uniforms tattered from the battle, make their way in the bitter cold through the ruins of Stalingrad. AP

The Second World War’s deadliest battle – and one of the most brutal of all time – started on August 23, 1942, when Adolf Hitler’s forces went all out to seize the city bearing Joseph Stalin’s name. If ever a battle was like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, it was Stalingrad. But when the USSR finally prevailed amid inhuman circumstances, it unleashed their inexorable momentum towards the moment three years later when troops raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag as a devastated Berlin smouldered. 

The most vivid chronicler of Stalingrad was the Soviet novelist and journalist Vasily Grossman, especially in his Tolstoyan epic Life and Fate. Countless lines jump from the pages of Grossman’s masterpiece, but the starkest phrase leaps from his diary: “It is like Pompeii”.