The Battle of Stalingrad Meets "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

In the movie "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" people wrongly believed that Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart's) character killed the outlaw Liberty Valance when it was actually John Wayne's character. This propelled a distinguished political career for Stoddard after he started out as a frontier lawyer in the old west.

Near the end of the movie, after Stoddard has told the real story to a reporter named Scott, we get the following exchange:

Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?

Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I thought of this while reading a review of the book The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II by Iain MacGregor in today's WSJ. The review was by Andrew Nagorski. See Click here to read it. Excerpts: 

"Mr. MacGregor points out that “the mythologizing of the struggle for Stalin’s city can sometimes distort the true history, which in itself is unambiguously heroic.”"

"what actually happened was never enough for Soviet propagandists: they felt compelled to spin an unabashedly heroic narrative that overlooks inconvenient truths. This valuable addition to the body of work about Stalingrad goes a long way toward righting the balance between myth and reality.

Mr. MacGregor vividly describes the frantic Soviet efforts to beat back Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army as it reached the city. House-to-house, factory-to-factory fighting became the order of the day, and Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the 62nd Army, quickly adopted the tactic of “hugging the enemy,” positioning his troops as close as possible to the Germans, then striking with small mobile groups.

To illustrate his point about the mix of fact and fiction, Mr. MacGregor zeroes in on one of Stalingrad’s most legendary episodes: the Red Army’s push to take control of a strategic building code named “The Lighthouse.” In the official version, Sgt. Yakov Pavlov led a small band of men, representing a symbolic mix of Soviet nationalities, as they charged into the house and wiped out its German occupants. Subsequently, “Pavlov’s House,” as it became known, was hailed by the 62nd Army’s newspaper as “a symbol of the heroic struggle of all defenders of Stalingrad.”

Investigating these events, Mr. MacGregor combed the records and interviewed Pavlov’s son and Chuikov’s grandson. While he does not doubt Pavlov was a fierce combatant, he discovered contradictory evidence about who really took command of the lighthouse—and whether the legend of the battle comes close to matching what really happened. He concludes that “the imagined story line was deemed more important than the actual truth.”"