Just before midnight on 26 November, 1942, Hitler addressed a personal message to every soldier in his Sixth Army, then trapped in the Stalingrad pocket. He ordered them to stand fast and assured them he would do everything in his power to support them. What he meant was that he would supply them by air with fuel, food, and ammunition until a relie

The plant was near the river, to the north of Mamayev Hill, the highest ground in the city. Both the tractor plant and the hill, scenes of some of the most bitter hand-to-hand fighting of the entire war, were to become familiar navigational landmarks for the bomber crews as the months went by.

Lily became known as the White Rose of Stalingrad.

There was nothing undignified about the way they behaved. He would come and sit and talk to her in a corner of the girls' bunker. They would hold hands and sometimes they wouldn't say very much to each other. They would just sit together quietly. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence between them. They seemed content to be together.'

It was the middle of September and the Germans were only two miles from the centre of Stalingrad. Only supreme optimists could honestly have seen any light at all at the end of the tunnel of despair - and Baranov was above all a realist.

The evacuation of the city's 600,000 residents continued, as did the round-the-clock aerial bombardment of enemy positions. In its way, this bombing was to prove more effective in providing ready-made defences than anything the Soviet army could have erected, And while the Germans advanced into the city, the air force raced against time to build ne

What she came to realize was that most of her friends and colleagues were undergoing the same rapid maturing and toughening process. In direct proportion to the mental toughening grew a bond of loyalty so intense it could never be shared or even properly understood by those who had not served with these elite units.

They have since disputed the effects of the PO-2 night bombing in terms of physical damage, but they found the effect on morale devastating. Troops nicknamed the aircraft the 'sewing machine' and the 'duty sergeant', and the pilots were dubbed 'the night witches'. Troops already exhausted after a day's march were obliged to hack deep trenches for s

Then into this totally male stronghold dropped a ravishingly pretty woman, Valentina Petrochenkova, one of the last recruits to the women's regiments.