I know the germans almost reached Moscow at one point and failed and why Stalingrad was fought for so hard I don't know but ive read a book called "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor the fighting both sides showed really shows how curel and morbid urban combat was.
Woulden't a bigger city like Moscow be 10 times more difficult to take over? Something would have to be done with Moscow if Stalingrad was won sooner or later or?
No river that russian reinforcments had to pass. Easier to surround the german army?
Larger city, larger room for tactical defence through buildings/sewers.
Also harder to seige and starve out? it's a huge city to surround and would take alot of manpower.
Alot more urban combat.
For a casual like me it looks like the german eastern campagin was doomed from the start in this regard. How would they take a city like Moscow if Stalingrad turned out so ugly. I know logistics and winter was a nightmare overall but urban combat really seemed to be a big problem for germans.
What are you historians perspective of this matter?
For a casual like me it looks like the german eastern campagin was doomed from the start in this regard.
You are right that the German campaign was doomed from the start, but not because of the difficulty in taking major Soviet cities (though this certainly didn't help). Before we begin, we need to know about two military concepts first articulated by Carl von Clausewitz in On War: the "centre of gravity", and the "culminating point of the offensive".
The centre of gravity is defined by the U.S. Department of Defense as "the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act." Your own must be protected, and the enemy's must be targeted. The culminating point of the offensive is the point at which an army can no longer effectively perform military operations, whether because it has taken too many casualties or has outraced its supply lines.
The German campaign in the Soviet Union was fatally compromised from the start because of their failure to identify both the enemy's centre of gravity and their own culminating point. The Soviet Union's centre of gravity was not the capital of Moscow (as the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, believed), nor was it the Red Army in the field (as Hitler believed), nor was it the agricultural breadbasket and rich industrial region of Ukraine. It was the very strength of the Stalinist state, the all-pervasive totalitarian system that allowed the Soviet Union to lose four million men in 1941 alone and then completely make good those losses for the next year through recruitment and conscription. How do you target that sort of centre of gravity? You have to break the people's faith in it or destroy its own infrastructure, but the Stalinist system survived the almost total loss of European Russia in 1941, and in any case, much of the capital's functions had already been moved much further east to Kuybyshev (now Samara) as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow, so it would probably have survived that as well.
The Germans also failed to identify their own culminating point, beyond which they could not conduct operations effectively. Logistics planning for Barbarossa was cavalier beyond belief. The plan assumed a "logistics pause" after the capture of Smolensk, where the German army would go on the defensive, beat back Soviet counterattacks, and allow their supply lines to catch up before making the final lunge to Moscow before the winter set in. The pause never occurred: Marshal Timoshenko led a relentless series of counterattacks around Smolensk, and defensive fighting consumes exactly the same amount of supplies as offensive fighting, just in different areas. There was also the well-known issue of the Soviet railway system being an entirely different gauge to the German one, thus requiring the Germans to relay the whole track (also, because of the larger American-style continental gauge, Soviet locomotives could be larger and so carry more fuel. Consequently, Soviet coaling and water stations were much further apart on the railways, beyond even the range of German locomotives before refuelling), not to mention partisan attacks behind the lines. As if that wasn't enough, Soviet transport infrastructure became dramatically poorer beyond Smolensk. All this conspired to create the infamous situation around Moscow in the winter of 1941 where the Germans had to choose between sending rations or cold-weather clothing forward because their supply lines were stretched so thin. This was before they had to even contemplate urban combat.
I can talk more about Case Blue (the operation that led to the Battle of Stalingrad) if you'd like. The issues are much the same: reckless planning leading to fatal over-extension and a complete failure by the Germans to actually keep their eyes on the ball (do you want to take Stalingrad or the Maikop oil fields? You can't do both at the same time). The slaughterhouse of Stalingrad was the culmination of these failures, just as the grinding struggle outside Moscow had been the previous year.
Sources:
Antony Beevor, Stalingrad
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought
Michael Howard, Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction
Robert Kirchubel, Atlas of the Eastern Front: 1941-45
Robert Kirchubel, Operation Barbarossa: The German Invasion of Soviet Russia
What do you mean. The battle of Stalingrad was actually never a major objective for the German offensive operation Blue, Initially after the Germans were pushed back a hundred miles from Moscow from being right on the outskirts, they focused the summer of 1942 on the Russian Caucus oil fields.