The city was practically totally destroyed. Without infrastructure wouldn’t it have just been some pile of rocks on the Volga? Why did the axis not just set up shop a few miles down the river after destroying the city?
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A not insignificant reason for the bitter and ruthless battle for the city was its name. Stalin demanded that his troops hold the city that bears his name under all circumstances. And Hitler was determined to conquer it for the same reason.
Battles take two participants to fight, at a minimum. So if you want to fight your enemy you either go to them or make them come to you. Bypassing them works in some situations, but now you have an armed force behind you that can attack your supply lines and cut you off from allies/reinforcement/resupply.
Fighting over a city thats smashed to rubble makes sense when the enemy is already there, you have a front established, and disengaging will cost you time, soldiers, and resources. And potentially move you to a less advantageous location.
There is also a lot of propaganda value to taking the city of X, rather than taking the riverside 10 miles away from the city of X.
In addition the the points made by the other comments, I’ll say this:
Cities aren’t built by accident. They are where they are on purpose. A few miles down the river might be non-navigable waters, or unstable banks. A few miles upriver might have inaccessible cliffs or hills. If you find a city built along a river, and nothing upriver or downriver, that’s because the city is built at the best place to cross, and the next best places are going to be where the next cities are.
Also, ‘infrastructure’ is a really broad term. If you bomb a road, yes, it will be broken up and harder to drive… but that’s still going to be a faster and easier path for vehicles than cross-country through unbroken wilderness. And while bombing buildings to rubble is pretty direct, bombing roadways to an unusable status usually takes more munitions than its worth. Even a bombed-out port still has more foundational infrastructure and utility than an undeveloped random patch along the river.
To get a little philosophical, cities only exist in the minds of homo sapiens. I mean, there are objective measures of cities like population and structures, but that’s not what they really are. You could bomb the Soviet Union to smithereens, kill every citizen, and you still would not destroy the Soviet Union. Yet, at the stroke of a pen, the Soviet Union was destroyed totally.
3 big reasons are that cities have lots of roads leading in and out which makes them important once captured for logistics and coordination as well as being definite strategic objectives, they also hold large value in name and morale when conquering, and they quickly develop fronts which are much more permanent than the city because of you try to move troops away, the enemy will already have troops there and will break through a weakened line.
Mix of the name big the name of the big cheese, mix of humans being like “well we lost 250k people already defending/attacking this place, is that going be in vain if we don’t take it? Send in another 100k”. Also it was still full of buildings just destroyed ones, so instead of the forest with little cover the city at least you could hide behind a destroyed fountain or something once you had control of the city.
Because the Russians didn’t want the city to become a forward operating base for the Germans.
Having a city destroyed is bad enough, but it would be even worse if your enemy were to establish a permanent presence there, which they could use to launch more offensive operations later.
The city sat on a North-South Railway that was critical to Soviet defense plans. That railway was a vital supply line for Soviet troops further south in the Caucuses region. If the Germans could cut off that supply line, and then secure their front against the Volga River, they might turn their attention south and mop up the Soviet armies in the Caucuses. For that reason, in addition to the city’s name and Stalin’s infamous no step back order, the city could not be allowed to fall into German hands. And if it did, then all efforts had to be made to avoid the impending disaster in the south.
Stalingrad commanded the Volga River.
In 1942, Hitler’s aim was to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus Mountains. Germany was already critically low on oil, so succeeding here was pretty make-or-break for the German war effort. If they went down into there without guarding their rear, Soviet troops could follow them down the Volga and trap hundreds of thousands of soldiers between their guns and the mountains.
Even bombed to rubble, Stalingrad remained a place where an army could control the flow of people and material up and down this river – kind of like Vicksburg single-handedly keeping the Mississippi closed to Union during the US Civil War. It was also a route for British supplies to reach the USSR, up through Persia.
This strategic importance never went away entirely, but it’s also true that its symbolic value became more and more important as time went on. No one has ever accused Hitler of being a rational military mind. And looking back, we *do* refer to Stalingrad as the turning point of the whole war in the east.
*Führer Directive #45:*
>The task of Army Group B is, as previously laid down, to develop the Don defenses and, by a thrust forward to Stalingrad, to smash the enemy forces concentrated there, to occupy the town, and to block the land communications between the Don and the Volga, as well as the Don itself.
[[source](https://www.stalingrad.net/german-hq/hitler-directives/dir45.html)]
The purpose of taking Stalingrad was to cut off the Caucasus from the Soviets. Stalingrad (modern Volgograd) sits on the west bank of the Volga river. As long as the Soviets were there, they threatened the German operations in the Caucasus. This is the motivation for both armies to fight over Stalingrad.
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