Comments by "Nicholas Conder" (@nicholasconder4703) on "Halder blames Hitler and Paulus! BATTLESTORM STALINGRAD E18" video.

Watching the video where you are talking about Soviet and German casualties during the 1st Kotulban offensive (around the 8 minute mark), I more or less agreed with how dubious you were about the estimated Soviet losses. That is until I looked at the area on Google Earth. The area where the battle took place is quite flat but slopes away to the north. The Germans were sitting on the higher ground (around 110m elevation) looking down on a billiard table (up to 30m below them in elevation). Any poor schmuck attacking you across this ground, which has very little cover, by the way, would be subject to targeted artillery fire for several kilometres during their approach. Every movement could probably be observed, if not by OPs, then by spotter planes. With such little cover in open steppe and farmland I could see units getting pulverised long before they even got into rifle range. Then they had to climb a shallow slope to get to the German front line. So, maybe Glantz is not that far off.
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I think it shows how desperate the German situation was at this time that Halder didn't "loan" the 3 divisions from 4th Panzer Army until fresh divisions arrived. If I am seeing clearly in my crystal ball, this is more or less a permanent solution with no divisions being transferred from other fronts as reinforcements for Paulus (upon which the divisions he just received would have been returned to 4th Panzer Army). The fact that there are no reserve divisions available again shows the OKH and OKW's lack of understanding in the field of logistics. Or, in a sense, modern warfare. As Citino says, the German Army wasn't that modern after all.
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10:54 Ah yes, Zhukov has a Montgomery moment, rewriting history to make himself look better.
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Thinking back on this conference, I suddenly realized that this meeting was probably the turning point of the Stalingrad campaign, in a sense. When Hitler asks Halder to send 3 divisions to Stalingrad to reinforce 6th Army, and Halder looks startled, should have been a warning sign that things were not good. Yet at no point do either Halder, von Weichs or Paulus suggest to Hitler that they might want to consider shortening their lines or pulling back because they are overextended. It is at this point, just before the Germans enter the city proper, that the wheels really fall off the cart. All four of them must share equal blame, because NONE of them have considered the fact that there are no more reserves, and even if they take the city, they won't have the troops to exploit their success. Because of the inability of these four individuals to recognize and state how tenuous the situation really is, I think you could make a good case that this is when the Wehrmacht ensnared itself in an untenable situation, and laid itself open to future events.
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@tamje1751 Yes, but the fact is he never even hints at considering shortening their lines to create a reserve. He doesn't even suggest moving units from other, quieter sectors to Stalingrad. Personally, I think all four of them had developed "target fixation", and were starting to ignore reality.
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@tamje1751 I'm not disagreeing with you, I am just commenting on the fact that none of them seemed to realize that if they didn't have reserve divisions to throw into the line, they were in deep doo doo. Rather like the French in 1940. I guess this comes down to the fact that the Germans, like the Japanese, front-loaded their offensives. As Citino points out, the Germans tended to hurl everything into battle and hold nothing back. As a result, if their opponent could hold out against the initial assault, neither the Japanese nor the Germans could maintain the pressure and their attacks failed. This will be seen at Kursk, the Ardennes and Alsace-Lorraine (Operation Nordwind) for the Germans; Buna, Guadalcanal, Arakan and Kohima/Imphal for the Japanese.
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@tamje1751 I agree. I always maintained that had the Germans taken a more "enlightened" approach to dealing with the Soviet Union, they could have equipped several divisions of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Ukrainians to help them fight the Red Army. It might have also had a synergistic effect of demonstrating they were not out to exterminate or enslave the peoples of the east (at least not immediately) and reduced the pool of manpower the communists would have been able to draw on, or trust in the front lines. However, the arrogance the Germans exhibited during WW1 was showing, exacerbated by nationalism and racial hatred.
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@tamje1751 Having read Glantz's Stalingrad Trilogy (in 5 books), I don't think Paulus had a choice. The had a single panzer division in reserve trying to play fireman against the whole Russian offensive. Even excluding the contradictory orders the commander received, there were just not enough forces available for Paulus to try to finish taking Stalingrad and have a large enough reserve to counter any Soviet offensives. Like Nagumo at Midway, Paulus was scapegoated for trying to do the best he could with insufficient forces and a fatally flawed battle plan fobbed off on him by High Command.
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Looking at the situation and the speed of the 6th Army and 4th Panzer Armies advances, one could make the argument that the German "Blitzkrieg" (sorry, my books are currently in storage so I can't dig out the right term right now) really died around the end of August in the Don bend. Although both German armies have made impressive lunges towards Stalingrad, there have been no real lightning advances, no real breakthroughs that have encircled and crushed the Soviet Armies. It has more or less been attritional warfare for almost a month now.
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@jakublulek3261 I don't know. As I recall Stalin dunked stuff on everyone. At least Marshal Alexander wasn't executed for it.
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