The end of the North African campaign at Tunis in May 1943 was one of the biggest Allied victories of the Second World War. But Andrew Mulholland has gone further, challenging the accepted wisdom that Stalingrad was a greater catastrophe for the Axis. Is he right?
I want to argue that Stalingrad was far more important. Potentially, the stakes were as high as the USSR’s continued participation in the war.
But to understand the battle’s full significance, we need to highlight the wider strategic context – and not focus on Hitler’s obsession with the city’s name and the horrific ‘rat war’ (Rattenkreig) in the city’s ruins. In fact, just as the Tunisian campaign was won mostly by ‘the hard facts of logistics’, so too are logistics the key to understanding why Stalingrad mattered so much.
