Chapter 870: A Stubborn Fight

Akado sat quietly in his chair, listening as Field Marshal von Brauchitsch of the Army General Staff reported the casualty figures for N Army Group and the situation regarding troop replenishment at the front.

A casualty count of over ten thousand soldiers, yet the troops had not advanced more than a kilometer. This was the first time such a situation had presented itself to the German army’s generals. The immense losses made people involuntarily think of Verdun and the Somme, of the deep trenches and the endless barbed wire, a memory filled with trauma, like a cold iron plate.

“My Führer, our initial estimate was to lose over 200,000 men in Stalingrad. But from the current look of things, that number may be far from enough. The casualties could exceed 300,000, even 400,000. This is a situation we are unwilling to accept. Would you please consider the General Staff’s alternative plan and order N Army Group to halt its offensive?” Brauchitsch closed the file in his hand and asked Akado, who had been listening with his eyes slightly closed.

Any smart person would not let themselves be tripped by the same stone twice, let alone the German Army General Staff, which had always prided itself on being supremely intelligent. They loathed the memory of any failure and paid twelve-tenths of their attention to anything with even the slightest hint of a problem. These stubborn and meticulous Germans summarized and analyzed data, repeatedly studying and simulating, terrified of another unforeseen trouble.

And for the German General Staff, Verdun and the Somme were undoubtedly two areas that cast large shadows in their hearts. Following Akado from victory to victory had ultimately made them even more squeamish. Now, a loss of a thousand German troops was enough to cause a great fuss. It seemed everyone was becoming less and less able to bear the pain of losses.

“My Field Marshal! In war, how can there not be deaths? This is what you said to me when you were trying to persuade me,” Akado said, opening his slightly closed eyes and speaking to Brauchitsch. “All this way, we have come to the city of Stalingrad. And this loss of ten thousand men has made you, a Field Marshal… afraid?”

Field Marshal von Brauchitsch gave a bitter smile. As a Field Marshal of the Empire, he certainly would not lose his composure over the loss of 10,000 men. But when he thought about what would happen next, that was the reason for his anguish.

So he took a step forward, closer to Akado, and said, “My Führer, what I fear is not the 10,000 soldiers we have lost now, but the fear that these casualties will continue…”

“You are right. These casualties will certainly continue,” Akado interrupted him. He then stared at Brauchitsch with both eyes, and only when the other was thoroughly uncomfortable did he continue, “And these casualties will reach their peak in Stalingrad. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, will not be the end!”

As he spoke, he stood up and stood right in front of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch. “General Küchler sees things more clearly than you do. See for yourself his plan of attack! This is a soldier of the Empire. This is a general to whom I can entrust the front!”

Akado picked up a report from the coffee table and handed it to Brauchitsch. Brauchitsch took the document and saw that it was from the headquarters of N Army Group in the southern theater of the Eastern Front, signed by the army group commander, Küchler.

The contents of this document made Brauchitsch frown. It actually stated that in the first phase, they were prepared to sacrifice 50,000 soldiers to clear the outer defensive positions of Stalingrad. Seeing this, Brauchitsch almost couldn’t help but curse Küchler. Normally, to clear the outskirts of a city, the German army would use armored units, in which case the casualties would be suppressed to a very low level.

But even so, the report’s estimated German casualties would still reach a terrifying 50,000. It was hard to imagine what a heavy price the German army would have to pay once the real urban assault began. Küchler continued to read the document, and sure enough, in the second phase of the offensive plan, Küchler had also clearly pointed out the possible losses of troops—a full two hundred and fifty thousand.

No one had ever doubted the difficulty and bloodshed of urban warfare, but for a commander of hundreds of thousands of troops to state with such certainty that the price of taking a city, and not even completely occupying it, would be a full three hundred thousand men, was unavoidably and excessively cruel.

“My Führer.” After finishing the entire report, Brauchitsch felt as if he were struggling in a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood in Stalingrad. He felt that his clothes were soaked with blood, making his whole person feel sticky and very uncomfortable.

But he still managed to speak, to give his opinion. “General Küchler’s method of fighting, although it saves a lot of resources, the number of troops sacrificed is a bit… a bit too much.”

He took a breath, feeling a little better, and then continued to say to Akado in front of him, “I know the offensive plan is to capture Stalingrad as soon as possible, but this ‘as soon as possible’ could be a month, it could be two months. To be in such a hurry to throw troops into the city to fight, isn’t that a bit too rash?”

“I think the importance of Stalingrad is something I no longer need to emphasize to you, Marshal, right?” Akado asked softly in return. “So my order for Küchler to capture this city as soon as possible is not improper. And you know that in the street fighting of Stalingrad, our army’s loss ratio will not be higher than one to seven. This has been planned. There is nothing worth repeating.”

Yes, many of the fallen troops were prisoners from the Soviet Great Purge who had only been trained for a few dozen days, and a portion were volunteers from Ukraine. To use these men to fill the pit of Stalingrad was an unspoken consensus among the German high command.

After thinking of this, Brauchitsch’s mood improved slightly. After all, it was foreigners who were being sacrificed, not a group of young German boys. For a high-ranking German general, this was a fundamental difference. At least in Brauchitsch’s view, Germany’s troops were all elite and were a resource that could not be easily squandered.

“But, my Führer,” he said after a moment’s thought, a hint of doubt in his voice, his tone no longer as firm as just now. “Even with the forces of our allies, for us to squander them like this is not necessary…”

“To weaken our allies is to maintain our rule.” When it came to this aspect, Akado was much more professional than Brauchitsch. The reason he had shown Küchler’s report to Brauchitsch was mainly to have the Field Marshal see if there were any problems with the basic tactics, and not for any other reason. “We must, at the fastest possible speed, capture Stalingrad!”

Küchler’s tactic was nothing more than to clear Stalingrad one city block at a time. If one had to evaluate this tactical arrangement, the only accurate adjective would be “rigid.” In the late Qing Dynasty of China, there was a founder of the Xiang Army named Zeng Guofan. The basic tactic he had drawn up against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was to “build strong fortifications and fight a stubborn battle.” The result was that this set of tactics was almost completely copied by Küchler 80 years later, written into a report, and submitted to Akado.

Küchler had divided the entire city of Stalingrad into countless small blocks, and then cleared and fought for each one. He used a heavy force to guard the front line areas and repeatedly fought with the enemy. His plan had even accurately calculated how many times a region would be fought over, to be able to eliminate the enemy’s forces most effectively.

He had also boldly advised Akado to deploy special forces to carry out repeated clearing operations in the small areas that had been cleared of the enemy, to prevent the enemy from using facilities like the sewers to infiltrate and sabotage. To deal with this kind of Soviet tactic, he had suggested using small, elite units to pin down the enemy, and then using a large force to encircle and annihilate them.

On the other hand, Küchler did not care about a counter-attack from Rokossovsky. He even felt that a counter-attack would cause even greater casualties to the Soviet army. Therefore, he boldly predicted that Rokossovsky would give up the method of a large-scale counter-attack within a month. This German general was certain that a steady, step-by-step advance by the German army, leading to the complete occupation of Stalingrad, was the most troop-saving and fastest way to fight.

He predicted that the Soviet army would defend Stalingrad to the death and would attempt to hold out for at least half a year. For this, the Soviet army should commit more than 1 million troops. But when the entire city had been turned into a pile of rubble, the Soviet army’s advantage would be completely lost. That place would become a place for the 300,000 elite infantry that the German army had tempered to gallop freely.

And in his report, in order to temper these 300,000 elite infantry in Stalingrad, even if it meant losing 300,000 men, it was worth it. At the very least, he felt that to create a battle-hardened N Army Group in three months, to help the German army stabilize the very front of the southern theater, was very worthwhile.

“Complaining about losses is of no use,” Akado said to this Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, who was highly respected in the army. “You carefully study General Küchler’s frontline operational report. If there are no problems, I will have him continue the attack according to this plan.”

“There are no problems with the plan itself. Küchler is a general whom I and many high-ranking army officers have high hopes for. So, as a frontline commander, the operational plan he has drawn up is undoubtedly flawless,” Brauchitsch answered Akado’s question directly with confidence. “I am just worried that the losses will cause panic among the frontline soldiers and increase the anti-war sentiment at home.”

“To end Stalingrad sooner is better than a long-drawn-out pain,” Akado said with a sigh. If he had a choice, he would also not want to launch a frontal attack and fight the most inefficient of urban assaults. But the current situation was that everything was out of his hands.

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