An Artilleryman in Stalingrad

In August 1942, Wigand Wüster was a twenty-two-year-old officer in the German Wehrmacht. The short life expectancies of the Eastern Front made him a veteran commander even at that age. He led a battery in an artillery regiment as it approached Stalingrad for a World War II–defining clash with the Soviet Red Army. For Wüster, the preceding months had been marked by heat, dust, endless marches, and brief skirmishes with the enemy—but mostly by an ongoing battle with his bullying battalion commande