WaybackWire

MOSCOW, Friday.—German troops fought their way into Stalingrad in mid-September, and Berlin’s news agencies twice announced more than the high command’s own communiques.

The high command said on 4 September that its troops had reached the suburbs. Red Star said 25 Axis divisions, among them ground troops from France, were assigned to the assault, with pilots from Egypt in the enemy air squadrons, in battles that “have no precedent in their violence.”

On 14 September, Berlin said, German infantry pierced the Red Army lines and occupied heights overlooking the city northwest of the central district. The defenders, backs to the Volga, held on under the heaviest bombing yet. “It is impossible to retreat any farther,” a Russian correspondent reported from the city.

On 15 September the Transocean agency said the main railroad station had fallen, though the communique said only that “the victorious advance on Stalingrad is gaining further ground”. The German agency DNB said it had learned from a high command man that Stalingrad had been occupied, Domei reported from Berlin in the Japanese-run Syonan Shimbun in occupied Singapore. On 17 September the Berlin radio said a wedge had been driven through the city to the Volga: “Stalingrad has ceased to be a solid block of resistance.”

On 18 September Moscow said the Germans had rushed into the city proper from the northwest and pushed almost to the cliffs above the Volga, but two German wedges had been wiped out.

MOSCOW, Friday.—The fight for Stalingrad had come down to bayonets and gun butts, the Associated Press reported from Moscow on 22 September; in some buildings, Red Star said, the Germans hold one storey and the Russians another. “Hand-to-hand clashes are going on in the square, on street crossings and in houses,” Pravda reported.

Buildings change hands several times, Domei’s Military Review says in the Japanese-run Syonan Shimbun in occupied Singapore. From a Moscow dispatch it describes the German method: three or four blocks levelled at once by guns, mortars and bombs, then machine-gunners moving house to house, then infantry and engineers who fortify the houses.

German tanks cruise the streets, Red Star says, met by anti-tank guns and grenades; one push behind a shield of 200 tanks was thrown back. Russian fighters armed with explosives blew up a large building the Germans had seized, with the Germans inside. Allied sources say the worst fighting is in the city’s huge plants and shipyards along the Volga.

“Torrents of blood have flowed through the streets of the city for the past two days,” a German military spokesman said on the Berlin radio on 19 September. On 25 September a military commentator quoted by Tass said the Germans had lost more than 35,000 dead in the previous week.

BERLIN, Wednesday.—Adolf Hitler pledged today that Stalingrad would be taken, calling it a “key position” controlling traffic between Central and Southern Russia. “You may rest assured that no human being will be able to oust us from there,” he said.

He was opening the winter relief campaign at the Sportpalast, before a Nazi party audience that included 10,000 German wounded, with Field Marshal Rommel and General Keitel present.

Germany was preparing for a second front wherever its foes might strike, he declared, though he could not say where it would come, since he had to deal with an enemy who was a “military idiot”. Of any new British landing he said: “They can deem themselves lucky if they stay for nine hours on the continent, as at Dieppe.”

He did not name the United States, and referred to President Roosevelt only as a “certain President”. “We shall never capitulate, never,” he said.

MOSCOW, Saturday 26 September.—Wendell L. Willkie, President Roosevelt’s envoy, ended his visit to Russia today with a written statement on a second front, warning that “next summer might be too late”.

“It is easy to sit in comfort in America and read about Russians dying by the thousands to hold Stalingrad,” Mr Willkie wrote. He said he had found it difficult to explain to one Russian soldier at the front why America and England were not ready now to fight in Europe in direct attacks on Germany.

In London, reporting to the Commons on 8 September on his Moscow talks, whose details he said must stay secret, Mr Churchill praised Stalin as a great rugged war chief, “a man of massive outstanding personality”. He said plainly that “the Russians do not think that we or the Americans have done enough so far to take the weight off them.”

MOSCOW, Friday 11 September.—“Fight to the last, but keep Stalingrad.” So Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, charged the city’s defenders in its editorial of 11 September, adding that “now as before there is no way back from Stalingrad.”

The paper recalled the grim measures Stalin took in 1918 to defend Tsaritsyn, as the city was then called: he ordered no retreat and sent all river vessels up the Volga.