The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII's Greatest Battle

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The drunken, terrified, mutinous conscripts who are being asked to fight in Putin’s self-glorifying war would seem utterly alien to them. MacGregor points out that “the mythologizing of the struggle for Stalin’s city can sometimes distort the true history, which in itself is unambiguously heroic. Carved into the brickwork is a message in Russian: “In this building fused together heroic feats of warfare and of labour. The ethnic mix of the soldiers under him encompassed the peoples of all Russia and, thanks to their endurance and cunning, they held out against overwhelming German opposition for two months.

The Lighthouse of Stalingrad by Iain MacGregor review — the The Lighthouse of Stalingrad by Iain MacGregor review — the

If you thought you knew all about the Battle of Stalingrad, Iain Macgregor' s gripping account will put you right. They began by walking up the 100-meter (328-foot) path, before climbing up the two hundred steps, representing the two hundred days of the battle, which took the cortege and the multitude of followers up to the Avenue of Lombardy Poplars.He notes that by the time of the battle for Stalingrad, more than two million Jews in occupied territories had already died, with the Sixth Army and other military units serving as “willing enablers” of mass executions.

The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre

In time for the eightieth anniversary, The Lighthouse of Stalingrad will shed fresh insight on this iconic battle through the prism of the men who fought one another over five months and the officers who commanded them. The cold snap had struck the steppe countryside surrounding the city the week before, blanketing it in snow, with the numbing cold still holding Volgograd in its grip.

He accepted some of the recommendations of his top generals, and even junior officers were allowed “a modicum of initiative in the field to make their own decisions. Representing the Soviet Armed Forces was the defense minister Dimitry Ustinov, who amiably talked to the younger man on his right, a rising star of the Party, recently elevated to secretary of the Central Committee—Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.