Stalingrad

In the spring of 1942 Stalingrad was a working city - a thirty-kilometer ribbon of factories and rail yards strung along the west bank of the Volga, unwalled, with no citadel and no ring of forts. It had chimneys and cranes and half a million people. By the following winter it was the deadliest killing ground of the twentieth century, and the German Sixth Army - one of the finest fighting formations in the world - had ceased to exist. In two hundred days on the Volga, the tide of the Second World War turned.

In Stalingrad, E.B Cohen tells the full story of the battle that broke Hitler's army: the drive across the southern steppe toward the oil of the Caucasus, the catastrophic bombing of a city still full of civilians, and the descent into the Rattenkrieg - the "war of the rats" - where men fought floor by floor and cellar by cellar through the ruins of the Tractor Factory and the Red October steel works, and where the very rubble made by German bombs became the fortress the Germans then had to storm by hand. It follows Order No. 227 and its motto "Not one step back," the snipers and the myths built around them, and the workers who drove unpainted tanks straight off the factory floor into battle a few hundred meters away.

Then comes the trap. Operation Uranus, the Soviet pincers that closed behind the Sixth Army in November; the airlift that could not possibly supply an encircled army and the relief attack that failed to reach it; and the long, freezing death of Paulus's men in the pocket, ending in a surrender Hitler had forbidden. Cohen is honest about the numbers, which at Stalingrad are almost always estimates, and honest about the coercion as well as the courage - the blocking detachments and penal battalions alongside the genuine, ferocious will to resist that the German war of extermination had itself created.

Sweeping and human, grounded in the latest scholarship and unflinching about what we know and what we only guess, this is Stalingrad as it actually was: an industrial battle fought inside a battlefield, a study in how the same "no retreat" order can save one army and destroy another, and the hinge on which the war in the East - and the fate of the twentieth century - finally turned.