The fight raged for every street, every factory, every house, every basement and every staircase. The Germans call this invisible urban war Rattenkrieg ("rat war") and a scathing joke spread about it:"Once the kitchen is captured, we always fight for the living room"...
The Soviet soldiers fought in a half-sleep, because they rarely slept more than three hours in a row:their nights were interspersed with alerts, attacks, counter-attacks... The Soviets and the Germans machine-gunned each other constantly at the indiscriminately, in addition to the incessant bombardments, to irritate the adversary. It was necessary to carry out night reconnaissances, crawling through the rubble, in order to carry out nocturnal surprise attacks, which terrified the Germans. Contact with the rear was frequently cut off, in particular with the general staff, installed on the other side of the Volga. The command posts were hastily set up in the basements (the only remaining shelters), but were quickly destroyed. A simple house could be considered a "strategic position".
On the Mamaev Kurgan, a hill 102 meters high, the fighting was particularly ruthless. The stake was crucial for the Wehrmacht who wanted to install artillery in order to destroy all the boats sailing on the Volga. The hill changed hands several times and the Germans were never able to install their heavy artillery. During a Soviet counterattack to retake Mamaev's Kurgan, the Soviets lost an entire division of 10,000 men in one day. At the Grain Elevator, a huge grain-processing complex dominated by a massive silo, the fighting was so close that Soviet and German soldiers could reportedly hear each other breathing. In another part of town, a building defended by a Soviet platoon under the command of Yakov Pavlov was turned into an impenetrable fortress, after being cut off from the rest of the forces by a German attack. The building, later called the "House of Pavlov", guarded a square in the center of the city. The soldiers surrounded it with minefields, machine gun nests in the windows and broke down partitions to improve communication. They lasted more than 27 days, which perhaps will serve as an example of the intensity of the commitment.
The Germans moved the heavy artillery inside the town, including several huge 600mm mortars. Soviet artillery on the eastern bank of the Volga continued to shell German positions. The Soviet defenders used the ruins wisely as a defensive position, including setting up traps (eg tank turrets statically positioned in the ruins). German tanks became useless in piles of debris up to eight meters high. If they could advance, they were caught by Soviet anti-tank fire from the rooftops.
It was in Stalingrad that we saw the emergence of the important role of a new type of fighter, later called the "sniper", including "Zikan", an unknown shooter, who killed 224 and Vasily Zaitsev who killed 225. during the battle. This is a sniper who discreetly aims at his victim from a great distance, without his knowledge, and kills or injures him seriously enough that his comrades try to help him and therefore expose themselves. This climate of permanent fear contributed to sapping the morale of the Axis combatants.
These conditions slowed the German advance.
For Stalin and Hitler, the Battle of Stalingrad became a matter of life and death. The Soviet command moved the strategic reserve troops of the Red Army in Moscow to the Volga and transferred all available aviation from the whole country to Stalingrad. The pressures on the two military commanders were immense:Paulus developed an uncontrollable twitch in his eye and Chuikov was experiencing a manifestation of eczema that required him to have his hands completely bandaged.
In November, after three months of carnage and a slow and costly advance, the Germans finally reached the banks of the river, capturing 90% of the ruined city and cutting the remaining Soviet forces into two narrow pockets.