History News Service

Why Baghdad Will Not Be a Stalingrad

By Geoffrey Roberts
History News Service

"Iraq will become a second Stalingrad for the British and American invaders," claimed Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's deputy, in an interview with Izvestia. Aziz's comments were prompted by the 60th anniversary of the German surrender at Stalingrad in February 1943.

His words would have struck a deep chord with the Russian newspaper's readers, but Baghdad is not Stalingrad. While Aziz might have hoped for a dramatic reversal of the Anglo-American invasion, the lessons of Stalingrad suggest otherwise.

At Stalingrad the Red Army drew the Germans into an exhausting war of attrition. By the end of the battle 150,000 Germans has been killed, while 100,000 more were captured by the Soviets. Defeat at Stalingrad marked the end of Hitler's invasion of Soviet Russia and the beginning of the Red Army's victorious march to Berlin.

Aziz is not alone in evoking the Stalingrad analogy. Many in the antiwar movement point to the massive casualties that might result from a prolonged street-by-street fight for Baghdad. Whether the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq could founder in the face of a desperate defense of Baghdad remains to be seen. But if the Iraqis hope to emulate the Red Army at Stalingrad it will take more than a few gun battles in the streets of Baghdad.

In summer 1942 Hitler launched a war for oil in southern Russia. His aim was to occupy the Baku oil fields, which lay on the other side of the Caucasus mountains. Capturing Stalingrad was deemed necessary because of its strategic position on the Volga -- the river being the main conduit for oil supplies to northern Russia.

By October 1942 Hitler's armies occupied 90 percent of Stalingrad but the German plan failed because of an awesome defense of the city by the Red Army. In three months of intense combat Soviet troops clung to their positions along the western banks of the Volga.

Supporters of Iraq hope for a repeat performance by Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard. But the important point about the Red Army's performance at Stalingrad is that it was only one of many such heroic episodes on the Eastern front. Driving that defense was the ferocious nature of the German campaign in Russia -- an unprecedented war of destruction, plunder, enslavement and annihilation.

The war against Iraq will be a war to secure western interests, but it will also be a war to liberate the country from Saddam. As long as the British and Americans avoid large-scale civilian casualties it is difficult to envisage more than a tiny minority of Iraqis being prepared to wage war to the death.

The Red Army's biggest asset at Stalingrad was not heroics, but the Volga. Soviet control of the east bank of the river meant essential supplies and reinforcements could be ferried across to Stalingrad's defenders on the west bank. These defenders were supported by hundreds of Soviet artillery guns on the east bank that rained down shells on German positions in the city, while in the skies above there was a daily battle for air superiority.

Another defensive plus was the battleground itself hundreds of square miles of rubble-strewn terrain -- created courtesy of massive German air attacks, which killed 40,000 civilians. After these raids most of Stalingrad's civilians were evacuated, enabling the Red Army to concentrate on battling the Germans for key positions in the city's ruins.

Such tactical factors will not feature in any battle for Baghdad. Iraqi firepower has been considerably depleted by a decade of United Nations containment. There will be no way of evacuating the civilian population and no source of supplies and reinforcements the key to Soviet success at Stalingrad.

A better analogy -- but one that will not appeal to Tariq Aziz -- would be with the battle for Berlin in April 1945. That operation cost the Soviets 80,000 lives, but the Germans' desperate defense was of no real strategic significance. Stalin opted for a direct assault on Berlin for symbolic, psychological and political reasons. A short siege of the capital of the crumbling Nazi regime would have done the job just as well.

That may well be the Anglo-American tactic if the Republican Guard should dig in for a fight. Saddam Hussein may speak of the "mother of all battles," as he did during the Gulf War of 1990-1991. But no battle for Baghdad could have the world historical significance of Stalingrad -- a battle that led to Hitler's inevitable defeat in the wider global struggle with the Allies, and to a very different future for Europe and the world.

Geoffrey Roberts is a senior lecturer in modern history at University College, Cork. He is the author of "Victory at Stalingrad: The Battle that Changed History" (2002) and a writer for the History News Service.

[Dr. Geoffrey Roberts, Department of History, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. Telephone: +353 21 4902442; e-mail: g.roberts@ucc.ie]