For example, Walsh makes it clear that two factors allowed the Red Army to prevail: its artillery massed on the east bank of the Volga, which prevented the Germans from massing large attack groups, and the fact that it was able at great human cost to keep its supply lifeline of small boats and ferries open to the east side of the river, allowing fresh troops to be fed into the "meat grinder." (In fact, both Walsh and Beevor point out that at a certain point, the 62nd Red Army, which held its desperately contested piece of Stalingrad during the entire battle and must be considered one of the most heroic forces in the history of warfare, was essentially used as bait to keep the Germans in the trap. As the appallingly high Russian casualties mounted, the Soviet high command simply sent in enough reinforcements to keep the Germans at bay.)

Walsh's book also has superb photographs, accompanied by captions whose neutral tone can be disquieting. One reads: "Soviet soldiers defending a building during fierce fighting in Stalingrad. Once again, there is an emphasis upon occupying the upper floors. The soldier in the far right corner has just been hit." The photograph shows four soldiers firing their burp guns out the windows of a bullet-pocked room, strikingly dappled by light. It takes a moment to realize that the figure in the far corner is twisted at an odd, fake-looking angle, his head falling back on the sill as his right hand still holds the weapon. He is as insignificant and ignored as the tiny figure of Icarus hitting the water in Breughel's famous painting.

Walsh is even more detailed than Beevor in describing the street-fighting tactics adopted by the Russians who had graduated from what they ironically dubbed the "Stalingrad Academy of Street Fighting." General Chuikov, the iron-hard general in command of the 62nd Army, realized that if this battle was going to be won, it would be won house by house and factory by factory, with soldiers on the spot making the decisions. He therefore created a basic fighting unit called a "shock group," composed of 50 to 80 men and divided into three sections: the storm group, the reinforcement group and the reserve group. The storm group was made up of eight to ten soldiers, heavily armed with machine guns, grenades, daggers and shovels (shovels were used as axes in hand-to-hand situations). Its task was to infiltrate an enemy position, whether a building or trench, and kill the enemy. Having done so, they would signal by rocket for the reinforcement group. The reserve group would back up the other two units. The entire attack, from clearing to securing to reinforcing, was to take only three minutes. "Surprise and speed were heavily influenced by Chuikov's hand-grenade rule, which laid down that the distance to be covered should be no greater than 27m (30 yards), the distance of a grenade throw."

As both authors point out, Chuikov insisted that the Russian troops dig in only a few yards away from the Germans. This brilliant, if horrific, tactic neutralized the Germans' greatest advantage, their mastery in the air, and also made it even harder for German tanks to maneuver. The Russians also excelled in fighting at night, which demoralized the Germans. As the Russian airforce began to become a factor against the stretched-thin Luftwaffe, it consistently attacked the German positions at night, preventing soldiers from sleeping. Then they would have to pull themselves out of their freezing bunkers to another day of gruesome combat on the unrecognizable streets or within the huge, wrecked factories, where enemy troops would fire through the ceilings and walls at each other, stumbling across gray and green corpses, barbed wire, shattered pipes and burned-out machines.

If Walsh's clinical tone is both chilling and oddly appropriate (confronted with such horror, expressive language adds nothing), it can also be unintentionally funny -- as with his ghoulish use of the word "attentions." Apparently, in British military parlance, it is customary to use a word usually associated with buttered scones and tea to describe firing mortars and 88mm shells at the enemy, as in: "In the face of Stalin's determination to destroy 6th Army, a weakened 6th Army and 57th Panzer Corps would not have survived the attentions of 2nd Guards Army."

Walsh is strongest at analyzing the purely military aspects of the battle, both strategically and tactically. He explains the fatal weakness in the central German military doctrine, "Vernichtungschlacht" or "strategic military victory in one campaign," that gave Hitler and his generals the confidence to launch the largest military operation of all time, the 1941 invasion of Russia. The Germans were rashly convinced that they could defeat Russia in one five-month campaign ending in the fall, thus avoiding the dreadful Russian winter that doomed Napoleon. Walsh's overriding point is that German strategy in Russia from the beginning was plagued by a fatal disconnect between ends and means. They consistently tried to do more than their forces would allow them to, and as a result they lost everything.

Thus, the hideous fate of Germany's 6th Army in Stalingrad was sealed because its vast defensive perimeter was inadequately defended -- the inadequacy due in large part to the fact that Hitler, who as a general could be an inspired tactician but had no grasp of logistics and had serious strategic shortcomings, had sent one of his eastern army groups on an unrealistic expedition into the Caucasus in search of its far-flung oil fields. Hitler, who increasingly saw the battle as a contest of wills and refused to recognize that the inch-by-inch street fighting in Stalingrad played into the enemy's strengths and away from his, refused to allow the 6th Army to withdraw even after a massive Russian attack sliced through both sides of the perimeter and trapped it. In one of the great military blunders in history -- which, as both Beevor and Walsh point out, Hitler's sycophantic generals failed to seriously contest -- Hitler refused to allow the 6th Army to break out.

Starving, frostbitten, plagued by lice and rodents (Beevor recounts how one soldier woke up to find that mice had eaten two of his frostbitten toes), afflicted with typhus, jaundice and dysentery, with almost no ammunition, reduced to three ounces of bread a day, too weak to dig trenches when under fire, engaged day after day and night after night in all-out combat, it's incredible that the abandoned, hopeless German troops were able to resist the final Russian assaults as fiercely as they did. Even at the end, many of them still believed that Hitler would save them. After their surrender, they were marched away into captivity (those who couldn't walk were either shot on the spot or abandoned to die), newsreels capturing the endless lines, 95,000 men walking through the endless snow to the gulags. Ninety-five percent of the German enlisted men taken prisoner after Stalingrad died. Of the original 330,000 men in the 6th Army, about 5,000 survived the war. Other German armies also suffered appalling casualties, but the Russian losses were far higher: A million Red Army troops may have perished at Stalingrad.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"