Some things never change
Until then, assume that everything you read on any topic of even the remotest contention is propaganda.
Of all the places not to be, Stalingrad during the winter of 1942-43 is certainly among them. So far, so uncontroversial.
One of the 20th centuries’ various meatgrinders – Verdun, the Somme, and Kursk to name some others – it was surely about as close to hell one could ever imagine; apart from the weather, that is. Minus 40 degrees Celsius, nothing to eat and only death or capture (usually followed by death anyway) to look forward to.
It was about at the extreme of human experience. Reading of the battle is to read of a situation beyond the ken of most. Certainly, you can understand each word in a description of a young frostbitten soldier starving to death, but the reality is surely beyond the rationalisation of most of us, cosily ensconced in the relatively peaceful modern West.
Hopefully, few of us will ever have to go through such an ordeal, at least as long as humanity decides to refrain from the kind of murderous insanity that swept over wide swathes of the world between 1914 and 1945.
This does not mean there are other lessons to learn. Reading of the battle, one learns the propaganda that German troops were fed whilst kettled inside the cauldron.
Soldiers’ newspapers promised that morale on the Soviet side was near collapse, that their supplies were low, and that the German army would weather the storm, come what may.
It was nonsense, of course. The massively overstretched and now cut-off Germans were up against an increasingly well provisioned force with a serious axe to grind. The 300,000 men of the 6th Army were doomed.
It’s almost like you can’t always believe what you read.
Today, media coverage of the current war in Ukraine is desperate to create parallels with World War Two, with Putin as Hitler and Bakhmut as Stalingrad.
On the whole, whatever you read from either side is nonsense, serving only to convince modern readers that an easy historical parallel exists that fits neatly into the Goodie-Baddie dichotomy of the Second World War. Using such a template is now standard practice, as per the ‘everyone I disagree with is Hitler’ line of argumentation.
The only constant that I can readily see is the sheer amount of propaganda that is spewed out. After all, how many times have we been told since February 2022 that the Russians were on the verge of collapse – without sufficient boots, food, or materiel to carry on the fight? Or that it makes sense for Russia to blow up its own pipe lines and destroy its own dams?
I suspect it will only be many decades after the conflict eventually ends that any kind of accurate reckoning will be had.
Until then, assume that everything you read on any topic of even the remotest contention is propaganda.
Apart from this, of course.
