Eighty years ago the Germans win an empty propaganda prize in the battle for Stalingrad

 

After fierce fighting the Germans occupied the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. Or, more accurately, its ruins. The position had little operational significance in the battle for the city, but great propaganda resonance. Its output of tractors had been a key element in the much-touted modernisation of agriculture under the Soviets and the industrialisation of the USSR although it had been switched to tank production on the outbreak of war. It had also been named after Feliks Dzerzhinsky, one of the spiritual fathers of the Soviet state, as the founder of the Cheka and the OGPU, the predecessors of the KGB and today's FSB. A large statue of Dzerzhinsky still stands on the site.

The Red air force accomplished one of its occasional humanitarian missions when it evacuated thirteen monkeys from the research institute founded by Professor Ivan Pavlov in the beleaguered city of Leningrad, where they had been suffering from shortage of food in common with the city's human inhabitants, but had regained in weight and spirits during the spring and summer when they raided the strawberry patches planted by the Professor himself. It is unknown whether they participated in his celebrated stimulus/response experiments, but were reported to have behaved in exemplary fashion during the flight despite its coming under attack by a German fighter.

The German disguised commerce raider Komet, which had conducted a spectactularly successful cruise throught the Pacific the previous year, on which she had devastated the phosphate mining operation on Nauru, set out on her second voyage. This time she was not so fortunate and was intercepted by Royal Navy ships near Le Havre. She was sunk by an MTB under the command of a young officer, Robert Drayson, who went on to become a highly successful headmaster of Stowe School. He predicted that one of his pupils would go to jail or become a millionaire; the pupil was Richard Branson.

In the greatest secrecy Hitler issued the "Commando Order" under which any allied special forces troops made prisoner were to be executed summarily, whether taken in uniform or not. This represented an escalation of the public dispute over the binding of German soldiers captured by commandos. The first victims of the order were British soldiers who had survived failed missions to attack the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant in Norway. An unknown number suffered similar fates, including SAS men operating behind German lines in France. Application of the order was uneven and inconsistent; some officers including Rommel refused to pass it on to their commands, but two of Hitler's senior generals, Keitel and Jodel, were hanged at Nuremberg on charges that included their part in carrying it out.