3 ideas
At Stalingrad, Chuikov's 62nd Army kept its positions within a grenade's throw of German lines, so that German aircraft and artillery could not strike Soviet troops without also hitting their own. This turned the Germans' superiority in firepower into a liability. It forced combat down into small-unit fighting among rubble, buildings and sewers, where defenders who knew the ground held the advantage.
Grossman's published dispatches for Red Star had to follow the official line, while his private notebooks recorded what could not be printed. These included executions for cowardice under Order 227, officers' incompetence and drunkenness, and mass rapes by Red Army soldiers in Germany, some of them of Soviet women freed from forced labour. For a writer under censorship, a record kept outside the approval system is where the real history survives, even when the author cannot use it at the time.
Grossman wrote about war mainly by listening to privates, snipers, drivers, nurses and refugees, and he recorded exact sensory details and offhand remarks rather than the strategic picture. Through this lens, morale, fear, cruelty and endurance show up as specific acts, like a sniper's routine or a peasant woman's bitter comment. Such details reveal how a war is actually experienced and sustained, which summaries written from headquarters miss.