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By December one German soldier was writing despairing entries into his diary. Dec. 5: "Heavy snowfall. My toes are frostbitten. Gnawing pain in my stomach . . . There is very little food. All is lost. Constant bickering. Everybody's nerves are on edge." Dec. 12: "O God, help me return home safe and sound! God Almighty, put an end to all this torture!" With rations slashed in December, army horses were slaughtered and cooked.
The Germans in Stalingrad fought on through January, even as the Russian military ringed the city. Hitler had promised reinforcements, and in the second half of December launched a major tank assault on the Soviet blockade. It failed. Wrote Chuikov: "Up to the end of December, ((the Germans)) continued to live in hopes and put up a desperate resistance, often literally to the last cartridge. We practically took no prisoners, since the Nazis just wouldn't surrender." Not until Feb. 2, 1943, was the enemy defeated in Stalingrad. By then the Germans were more willing to surrender: 90,000 were taken prisoner.
In Russia at War, the British journalist Alexander Werth recalls one sight in devastated Stalingrad at the time of the German capitulation: horse skeletons with uneaten bits of meat clinging to them; an enormous frozen cesspool; and, creeping into a cellar, the figure of a German soldier, his face a "mixture of suffering and idiot-like incomprehension." "The man," recalled Werth, "was perhaps already dying. In that basement into which he slunk there were still 200 Germans -- dying of hunger and frostbite. 'We haven't had time to deal with them yet,' one of the Russians said. 'They'll be taken away tomorrow, I suppose.' "
The Germans had lost the battle of Stalingrad. The tide of the Russian war had turned against the Third Reich.
Almost immediately after Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941, Stalin began imploring Churchill -- and, after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt -- to open a second front in Europe to draw German forces away from Russia. The pressure from Moscow was especially intense during the battle for Stalingrad. Even after the German advance was halted and reversed in 1943, Stalin continued to declare that as mighty as the revived Red Army was, it could not win the war on its own.
The Soviets took some -- but not much -- comfort in British and later American operations in North Africa. Until the invasion of Italy in July 1943 and D-day in June 1944, the fighting in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt was the only major military distraction for the Third Reich.
North Africa was not originally Germany's theater of war. But the stunning defeat of 200,000 Italian soldiers in Libya by a force of 30,000 from the British empire forced Hitler to send reinforcements to the region in February 1941. The brilliant Erwin Rommel, who had helped lead German forces in the lightning conquest of France in 1940, quickly turned back the Allied advance in Libya and in April besieged an Australian division in the strategic seaside fortress of Tobruk as troops from Britain and New Zealand retreated to Egypt. Rommel called Tobruk's defenders nothing but rabble and promised that the panzers of his fabled Afrika Korps would soon be parked by the Suez Canal.