Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

Jesus...

I was drawn to Beevor's history of the World War II siege of Stalingrad by the glowing reviews I'd read of his forthcoming history of the D-Day invasions.

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 is an amazing, jaw-dropping, and horrific history of one of the turning points of the war in Europe. The chronicle of brutality -- of the Nazi push into the Soviet Union, the Soviet push back west, the siege itself, the encirclement of German armies -- is both shocking and all too familiar.

The only word to describe the conflict, over-used though it might be, is meat-grinder. Soldiers and civilians both were simply chewed up (at many points during the siege, quite literally, by vermin and their own bodies and sometimes by their fellows) in the battles, by the hunt for "traitors" and "revanchists", by the awful conditions, by lack of food and gear. Beevor chronicles the fate of individual soldiers (and thus the great mass of soldiers) and officers well and in detail, while also detailing both the political and strategic machinations that shaped the battles and the concomitant horrors.

Occasionally the sheer scope of unit names and numbers that Beevor casts about becomes a bit overwhelming, but the narrative he's built is so strong and compelling that any confusion is temporary (and perhaps in some very small, abstract way conjures a hint of the battlefield itself).

On the whole, though, words fail me. This is an important book. We need to be reminded, viscerally, of the horrors we commit against one another. And Beevor has given us, perhaps, one of the fullest portraits of such horrors of the none too distant past. The truly disturbing thing for me is the realization that thrust into just such a meat-grinder I would turn the crank as vigorously as the next. Not for Motherland, or Fatherland, or any ideology or affection for a leader, but rather, like most of the meat fed through the machine, in a desperate effort to survive.