Before becoming entrapped in the city the German armies had had supply problems anyway with their impossibly long lines of communication. It could not be said that they held Voronezh and Rostov in sufficient strength to use them as supply bases, and much of the materiel had to come from as far back as the Polish border area. Of the supply problems Hitler was completely aware but he went ahead in Russia with as little regard for them as he had for the size of country and the limitless supply of men it had. Once these logistical problems were compounded by the weather, then Hitler was in no better position than Napoleon had been in his day.
As noted before, stand-fast orders can be useful to strengthen the will of the soldier to fight but to give them and insist that they be obeyed in situations where a fighting force will be annihilated if it does not retreat, is the action of a madman or a dictator, both descriptions that fit Hitler. The German armies had reached Stalingrad on 23rd August, after fierce fighting on the approaches to the city. Stalingrad at this time was already huge, stretching 30 miles along both sides of the Volga and the decision was made to bomb it before the troops moved in to the city proper. The bombing was a catastrophe to both sides. Six hundred bombers took part and an estimated 40,000 people were killed, leaving ruins of such magnitude that it was impossible to deploy tanks in strength or to fight what might be termed a 'normal' battle. Instead, it became a killing ground of innumerable hand-to-hand encounters, individual tanks and guns stalking the passable streets, snipers, of forward movement measured in yards, and of buildings captured at terrible loss of life, only to be lost and then captured again. In this way, by the end of October, after two months of hell for the soldiers of both sides, the Russians had been penned into an area nine miles long and two to three miles wide. Paulus was even able to send a message to Hitler on 23rd October saying that he should be able to take the city by 10th November. This was sufficient to move Hitler back to the Wolfs Lair. In July he had moved his HQ to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, some 350 miles south east of the Lair, the better to control the fighting but, of course, even more inaccessible to his commanders in western Europe.
