Now, we all heard about how brutal and deadly battle of Stalingrad was. Most of the accounts i ever came across, were from German soldiers though, not Russian. So i'm generally interested in their point of view. What i generally want to know is
a) How true are depictions of soldiers being herded like sheep into the German machine gun fire, most of them unarmed and all of them untrained?
b) Was there a certain separation between elite Soviet units made of experienced soldiers, which were highly effective in small-team fighting and weren't sacrificed as easily, and on the other side, expendable conscripts?
c) calculator says that on average 3000 Russian soldiers died daily in Stalingrad, for 150 days. That is an insane number for a city of few thousand buildings. Did most of the casualties happen in the city, or are those casualties actually referring to the whole front that included the whole ring around the Germans, in villages and fields, trenches west of Stalingrad?
e) What influenced Russian morale more, their patriotism or enforcement of order no.227?
Hi! I wrote a Fifty page paper on Stalingrad last year so I'm here to lend a hand; To answer A: Yes and no. For the most part the whole one rifle to three men stuff is Hollywood. That idea really only came to wide acceptance after the Enemy at the Gates movie, but records show on both sides that the Soviets were well armed and generally possessing a standard amount of training. When there were charges that were mown down it was usually men from Penal battalions, comprised of deserters and other criminals of similar ilk, who would be sent ahead of regular infantry to basically be human shields. It is through these charges that one gets the image of a Russian charging in filthy, ragged clothing armed with only a shovel.
B.) Again, that's mostly a Hollywood idea. The Soviet Union had no illusions that they had infinite manpower, while some units did see special treatment (usually through commanding officer connections to higher authority), for the most part they were all in it together. Due to the nature of the battle, the strategy employed by the Soviets was to take a house or apartment block and fortify it, turning it into a miniature fortress, to be "rocks in a stream" of fascist armor and infantry, dividing the German's more powerful combined armor infantry army, allowing the Soviets to defeat the fractured army. So in a sense everyone was fighting in small squads, generally the ones we think of now as elite were just the ones who survived and got a lot of medals.
C.) The casualties do refer to the whole front, which spread over hundreds of kilometers.
E.) Generally, I believe it was patriotism, however I wasn't there. However, the Soviet Propaganda machine was incredibly powerful and the Soviets were very aware of the atrocities that the Einsatzgruppen and the SS committed on Soviet Soil. So calling upon allusions of Napoleon and Alexander Nevsky, the Russians fought hard to make sure Russia was never conquered by a foreign power. Stalingrad too, was named after Premiere Stalin, who had led the defence of the city (then called Tsaritsyn) against the Tsarist Forces in the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
I hope I answered your questions well!