09 BBC Paul Winterton on Stalingrad

The streets of Stalingrad, if you can give the name to open spaces between ruins, still bear all the marks of battle. There is a usual litter of helmets and weapons, stacks of ammunition, papers, pluttering in the snow, plucked books from dead Germans, and any number of smashed corpses lying where they fell, or stacked up in great frozen heat for later burial.

Stalingrad can never be repaired. It will have to be rebuilt from the beginning. But even though all its buildings are wrecked, there's life in it still. Along the narrow stretch of cement coloured cliff by the river, which the Russians held through long months of assault, there's a city of dugouts.

Dugouts occupied by the soldiers who's not yet left, and by a few women who stayed behind to launder and cook for the men. There's a real holiday atmosphere among these people today. The proudest men and women I've ever seen.

They know they've done a terrific job and have done it well. Their city has been destroyed, but they've smashed the invader by sheer stubbornness and unconquerable courage. These men and women fought and worked for months with their backs to the river that they sworn never to retreat across, facing an enemy who held the only dominating heightened styling

and the could pound them with shells and metals and fishing they by day and night. They clung to their narrow foothold and their feet never slip.