Sturmpioniere at Stalingrad - German Assault Engineers 

Why did Halder allow the 6th Army to be the only German Army on the Eastern Front not to receive replacements for its losses during Operation Fall Blau (62,000 men short)?

Totally agree. I also enjoy how relaxed the conversation is.

thank you! Well, there is one infamous video with Jens, where I interrupt him a lot of times, but yeah, it is a while back.

But he didn't ask him if he did Crack. At best he could stand to improve

On the nose! There are many youtubers out there who can`t stop interrupting (why do you ask somebody, if you wanna give the answer yourself anyway?). Maybe the interviewed person is wrong...or boring...I will never know, because you can`t shut up! :D (Maybe it`s just bad interview planing). Redlettermedia went this way...they used to have a lot of guests, but they almost never gave them room - and now it`s just the three guys talking (again, like in the beginning). And I never want to watch a video with TIK as the interviewer - he has some interesting opinions on stuff, but he comes off like a c**t... ;)

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized And it is still with me. Not only did I think: how rude! But also: he`s going down this road now, isn`t he? But I was happy to learn that your education got the better of you - for the benefit of your viewers. Besides your work as a historian, Charles Dexter Ward is totally right: the interviews are a very interesting part of your channel and you have a pleasant way of conducting them, so keep on soldiering. ;)

He said a German Stalingrad movie. The only one that I see are Russian movies. Is IMDB and the Googles failing me?

@@jasontrauger8515 Stalingrad from 1993

German combat engineers had a higher casualty rate than regular infantry.

IMO I would want y'all on deffensive battles to build forts and teaches and such, and mine the shit out of the area

Could you give us his name or at least his unit?

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized ich werde meinen Bruder fragen. Meine Mutter ist verstorben und er war derjenige, der Zugang zu den Dokumenten hatte. Soweit ich weiß, existiert die Feldpost-Nr. noch. Er hatte damit Nachforschungen angestellt, die ergeben haben, dass mein Großvater bei dem Versuch einen Brückenkopf an der Wolga einzunehmen verschollen ist. Wenn er noch Unterlagen hat, melde ich mich. Gibt es evtl eine E-Mail Adresse? Wäre mir lieber als das öffentlich zu Posten.

@@badpritt3845 ja, die email findet sich hier, runterscrollen: ru-vid.comabout

Flamethrowers were favourite targets on all sides, they were hated, they were easy to spot and even easier to light on fire. But, I don't know how effective this camouflage will be when the person is carrying a clearly visible fuel tank on his back.

It might also scare the enemy into mistaking a rifle for a flamethrower when under pressure.

@@paulshadow5727 well how often would a person see that. These people were sitting playing games of cat and mouse.

@@weakest17yrold I guess that is true, it is impossible to spot from the front but any flanking troops or snipers can easily spot it.

@@paulshadow5727 true, I could imagine the camo would be better than nothing though

Sorry to hear. You def did not want to be captured by the Russians back then. But he survived at least.

@@jeremyj5932 My first thought was you definitely don't want to be drafted into the Third Reich's army at the age of 17 but hey, whatever floats your boat... My own (french) grandfather was a just a kid back then, but after the war he was drafted and sent to fight our colonial wars in Algeria and so on, forced to witness and inflict upon others what the Militia and Gestapo did to his own parents during the occupation. Came back guilt ridden and broken, still can't talk about it without bursting into tears... Being a teenager at war isn't fun, period.

So he became a Trump supporter?

@@noanyabizniz4333 Obviously not a socialist as he has remorse for his crimes against humanity.

@@noanyabizniz4333 , dont be .....not looking on right or left person. "Bidens Admistration" if i can call it that way, is far more left and agressive in any way how can i look at them, as Trump somewhat calling system of balance.....

Naw, that was part of their equipment they carried in combat. Just kidding.

A Sd.Kfz. with a 75mm? I don't think that they were introduced yet in Stalingrad.

@@JohnJameson18y The sdkfz 251 "Stummel" variant were seen on the eastern front in limited early production numbers by June of 1942, although they certainly would not have been common until the following year, after Stalingrad. The L24 75mm could have come from an early StuG III, but that's not a vehicle generally associated with the sturmpionere.

I'm a pioneer, not a grenadier...

ANGRIFF,FEUR!

Move to Capture, Move to Capture!

Me too😀👍

Tch, SDII is where it‘s at.

Fuel shortages? No? It was because of the massive losses in vehicles

Indeed the Germans had a severe fuel shortage.

@@looinrims The entire point of Invading the Soviet Union outside of destroying Judeo-Bolshevism in the eyes of the Nazis was to seize the resource rich (food and oil) territories of the USSR to expand Lebensraum. Fuel shortages was a constant problem throughout the Axis push into the USSR and constantly forced stoppages and demotorizing certain battalions/divisions was an attempt to alleviate these stoppages, but losses was also a major contributing factor. By 1942 with Operation Fall Blau, the primary objective was to seize the oil fields in the Caucasus to mitigate the shortages and try to cut off fuel supplies to the Soviet Union's war effort. They failed obviously. Would highly recommend checking out TIK's channel for more in depth analysis of the Axis problems with fuel shortages as he does a fantastic job at breaking it down.

@@JaesWasTaken yeah but that’s not why the army was demotorized, you can’t be motorized when everything is destroyed

@@looinrims go look up the numbers of men on the Eastern front for the wehrmacht, and then look up the production numbers for the most common panzers fielded by them. You'll be surprised if you think the "best in 41, beginning to wean 42, last gasp 43, nothing in 44" is accurate. Spoiler:German production peaked in 44, manpower peaked in 43. But Oil. Now that...

thanks!

yeah

thank you!

Rushing a fortified machine gun bunker with nothing but flamethrowers and gigantic balls? Absolutely not, their balls gave +5 Vitality

well i mean if i saw a guy pointing a flamethrower towards me i would just make myself scarce in that area

@@looinrims balls riddled with bullet holes

Thanks 👍

Most Germans propably think of "Ingenieur", a person who studied engineering at university.

It does not help that military engineers/pioneers are often inconsistently labeled within their own services, let alone when trying to bring the terminology of one nation to another. By way of example: I had an associate who was labeled a "Combat Engineer" even though he never was shot at or shot at anything during his two years building buildings in Afghanistan. Why? His unit was operating in a "combat zone" so they were automatically "combat engineers." I had an associate who was assigned to build and maintain railroads during WW2. His unit was regularly referred to as the "railroad pioneers" because they were often assigned to clear the land and collect wood for rails to be laid down. The other unit that often worked with his unit were called "railroad engineers" because they focused on maintaining the tracks already laid down. Last and not least was a fellow who was the "field engineer" because his unit, during the Cold War in Germany, was close to the East German border as opposed to the plain "engineers" who were guys operating in bases further back. Basically his unit was "in the field," because they were close to the possible enemy, even though everyone had permanent barracks with plumbing and central heating.

Obviously we have our own word for this, Pionier and a bit under 10 words you can set before it to describe what kind it is, from Tank to Railway Pionier we got everything.

The Panzer-Pioniere was the Engineer battalions of the Panzer Divisions. For instance, Panzer-Pionier Battalion 50, that was brought in for Operation Hubertus was the engineer battalion for the 22nd Panzer Division. Usually, only 1 company was mounted in armoured half-tracks, while the rest was mounted in trucks.

As Lars already said in his comment. Panzer Pioniere formed the engineer battalion of the Panzer Division. In the early part of the war 1939 - 1941 all of them were mounted in trucks although I think they had some Panzer I tanks that carried demolitions charges. As the war progressed, armoured halftracks became available and 1 company got those while the rest still had trucks. The engineers in armoured halftracks are sometimes called Gepanzerte Panzerpioniere.

@@user-lg4mm3mf8i brings me back memories of playing Steel Panthers and how silly my core troop formation would be. Yes, my over strength company/under strength battalion soze kampfgruppe will have a company of assault engineers in half tracks, as well as 2 88mm flak thank you.

Well unique to them was the usage of the flamethrower 251 and the Wurfrahmen 40 "Stuka zu Fuss". The Wurfrahmen wasn't an artillery piece, rather a demolitoin vehicle akin to the churchill avre.

@@meanmanturbo In the original SP1 there was literally no reason not to take engineers as your core troops, it was indeed very silly.

Reverb?

whenever i see them in a video game i imagine them as nutcases that one sends rushing towards some enemy obstacle or bunker and then blowing it up so that the regular units can pass

Helmut Welz second.wiki/wiki/helmut_welz

@@clazy8 thanks a lot, checking it out

;)

There is no serial number, therefore it has to be a fake one.

no

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized I'd love to see Bernard interview Indy Neidel. Thoughtful interviewer, meet ebulient subject..

The 93 film is fantastic. You can find the whole thing on RU-vid even

Could well be one of these. military.wikia.org/wiki/7.5_cm_KwK_37

@@chrisgibson5267 yeah, like the KwK from the Panzerkampfwagen 3 or 4

Probably the best movie of all times. In fact, I think I'll watch it tonight.

They couldn't have encircled Stalingrad

@@juanpaz5124 so they couldn’t surround it so…urban warfare? The hardest battle one can fight? There’s gotta be more than that

@@juanpaz5124 reason being?

@@austinmacneil9947 I think it had to do with the Volga being right next to the city and the Soviets guarding the river banks. TIK covered this in his Stalingrad series.

It was on the Volga so you could not surround it and the Soviets brought in troops across the river. Also Stalingrad was a long but shallow city along the river bank and the Germans tried to envelope it from the south to the north. If they wanted the city they had to fight within the city.

He has videos with Prof Neitzel

Have a look for "Island of Fire" an extremely detailed account of the battle for the Barrikady Gun Factory and/or "Into Oblivion" the story of Pionier-Bataillon 305 - both by Jason D. Mark. These books nicely overlap and complement each other to provide the reader with a visceral account of the fighting in this sector of Stalingrad. In particular both books detail the role / expectations of the Sturm-Pioniers as part of the combined arms teams that took part in the assaults. There is ample discourse to inform the reader about the strengths and weaknesses of the Pioniers vs Infantry or the paradigm around troops specifically trained for assaulting fortifications vs the raw experience of the infantry who "learnt on the job" and were indeed hardened street fighters by this stage of the Battle. Particularly interesting are the accounts of changes in tactics from initially larger scale assaults on broader frontages, all the way to brutal assaults by combined arms attacks against isolated houses / blocks, which in the end paid the greatest dividends for the German's in trying to unhinge an equally stalwart resistance by the Soviet defenders, all be it too little too late.

@@Raf-xl3oz WOW Thanks a lot. See I am part of a small team of PC game developers and we are looking into making a Stalingrad break out game with survival features like food and the elements in addition to fighting.

@@Lance-Urbanian-MNB I think you will find it a challenging endeavour, unless you're thinking of creating some alternative reality scenario. I think the distances to be covered for the "escape" are already limiting any realistic scenarios, particularly if you're thinking of getting out of Stalingrad itself, rather than the western most point in the Malinovka salient. Notwithstanding access to appropriate maps/compass, navigation across the featureless steppe was challenging enough in summer, but you now have snow obscuring many of the landmarks and so the opportunity for error increases exponentially. Add to this the fact that all the intervening villages were firmly in Soviet hands, and given the soviets were expecting a break out attempt on the most likely axes towards the known German HKL, they had those well covered by ground and air patrols. Even if you were to move only by night this still doesn't account for the fact that there is no place to provision yourself along the way for a 40-50Km trek and that's a rough distance from Malinovka to the closest german lines. If you extend that to Stalingrad its probably another 50-60Km or so across enemy held territory... Any interaction with the soviets would tip them off to your location irrespective of any immediate success and the potential rate of advance would not be sufficient to escape aerial observation. I suppose you could try a hypothetical disguise but I doubt Soviet security would be that lax or that the local population would not report you as you left. The most feasible scenario would probably be around elements of 3rd ID which were in the tip of the Malinovka salient and you could time the break out with the commencement of operation Koltso around 10 Jan, where the Soviets started to reduce the pocket, and Maliovka had to be evacuated. Your potential narrative might be around rear guard troops which had to hold the line for as long as possible. Realising they're cut off either way you can develop a potential scenario to try to fight/sneak through the 40-50Km to the German lines...

Simon from top tenz sells beard oil

Overrrated????????.........for 40 years was UNDERRATED..........in the West under the "Cold War· ideology only Normandy or the Alamein were really important!!! The end of the USSR and the opening of the records to the West show the colossal battle of Stalingrad.in the true context.

@@alejandrocasalegno1657 And why is that exactly? The Allies shot themselves in the foot by helping the Soviets only to replace one lunatic at the head of a dictatorship with another bigger one. Soviet tank lined up the West European border after the war and threatened to invade the free world while their occupied territories were struggling and people trying to escape to the west. There are still many Soviet documents kept secret by Putin's government because they're afraid of the truth of their ex-regime and probably many were also destroyed so they'd never be uncovered lest we all know what actually happened beneath all of the propaganda.

@@TigerBaron A alliance with the bad........to defeat the worst, and the nazi Germany the worst all the way!!!

@@alejandrocasalegno1657 Close to a hundred million that died in cold blood at the hands of the communists beg to disagree with you on that.

@@TigerBaron I am happy the USSR ended, i am NOT a communist fan, Churchill and Roosevelt were anti-communist the two..........but at the time Stalin was the less bad option.

???

@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized , look at Tik visualitions..... 😉, Your shot isnt bad, but little pointless. Im from ex kommie land anyway.... 🤣

@@miroslavdockal9468 first no and second you probably mean "Grab" not "Grad" or something.

You do know Stalingrad was 1 of only 3 places that produced the T-34 during the war but they produced it uninterrupted before the German 6th Army came and kicked in the door. The other 2 places was Kirov and Tankograd complex when it finally was able to get started in mid 1942. That and the October steel and chemical works was also very important for everything from steel, to armor plate to ingredients for explosives and smokeless/artillery powder. Stalingrad was far from impoverish. In fact almost everything that came out of the Soviet Union photo wise about the benefits and strengths of a communal economy and society was taken in Stalingrad during the early to lat 1930's.

@@ChrisS-fh7zt respect your view. Germany lost two wars. How would the British and American generals have dealt with it? Strategic heavy bombers and surrounding the city. Ever since ancient times, it was known that to capture a city, surround and immure . Don't send in your best troops into the maze to be slaughtered. The Germans are not clever enough to win wars.

@@beachboy0505 Well British and American generals also took many cities by storming them in WW2 and up to this day. Seems like they are ignorant of your armchair generalship.

@@beachboy0505 fighting against the world in 5 different fronts.