Loudspeakers in the frozen rubble played a ticking clock and announced that a German soldier died in Russia every seven seconds. This episode treats the Battle of Stalingrad as a biography of a catastrophe, beginning with Case Blue's real objective, the Caucasus oil fields, and the flank-protection mission that became an obsession once Hitler split Army Group South to capture a city bearing Stalin's name. We look at the week-long traffic jam when the 4th Panzer Army was redirected across the path of the 1st Panzer Army, and how that delay gave the Soviets time to realize Moscow was not the target.

From there we descend into Rattenkrieg, the rat war, where Luftwaffe bombing created a rubble fortress that neutralized German armor, General Chuikov ordered his troops to hug the enemy within grenade range, and the main railway station changed ha ...