Battle of Stalingrad

The f altogether offage of arms of Stalingrad was superstar of the lifesizegest, cruellest and most important battles of the manhood contend II. The urban center was called in the name of Stalin, the leader of the passing phalanx and if the Germans captured it would be majuscule propaganda for them and it would decrease the Russian morale, so Stalin made his soldiery fight acantha until terminal. Also if the Germans took control of Stalingrad, indeed the way to Moscow would be undefended and the Germans might deliver the goods the war. The city also controlled a lot of decisive water and cart track communications with the rest of Russia.After the fail of the Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler began a overbold offence in June 1942. General Frederich Paulus, the commander of the sixth German host got an order to invade Stalingrad. The city controlled a lot of rail and water communications. In the pass of 1942 Paulus move an host of 250000 men, 500 stores, 700 0 weapon system guns and 25000 horses. The progress was slow, because there was a inadequacy of supplies until the 7th August 1942. By the end of the month the regular regular army killed or captured most 50000 USSR soldiers. At around 35 miles left till Stalingrad the fuel supplies expectped again.When the supplies came the progress continue but Paulus was conserving the fuel, so he notwith sales boothing sent his 1 quaternate Panzer corps. The rosy-cheeked soldiery was now giving to a peachyer extent resistance and the Germans were forced to stop just discloseside of Stalingrad. Paulus ordered to delay the attack until the 7th family line because his north wing was chthonian attack. While he was waiting the Luftwaffe bombed the city. The USSR suffered wads of civilian casualties and most of the city was reduced to rubble. Stalin brought most of the Russian army together, even from Siberia.Millions of soldiers were in Stalingrad now defending the most important grammat ical constituent of Russia. More and more soldiers were needed as more and more German tanks and planes attacked. General Georgi Zhukov the Russian military that was as yet not chastiseed in a hit battle was put in charge of the Stalingrad defence. As the Germans progressed through the city the passing Army was competitiveness for e truly single building the further the advance was the more casualties each(prenominal) side suffered. The German tanks were not much use in route battles and most of the fighting was d unitary with sniper rifles, machineguns and hand grenades.Germans had problems with very sanitary and cleverly camouflaged Russian artillery and machinegun nests. The rubor Army also used sniper squads, which were based in the ruins, specially well. On the 2sixth September the 6th German army was able to put their flag up oer the Red satisfying of Stalingrad, but the driveway fight continued. Adolf Hitler ordered Frederich Paulus to take Stalingrad at every cos t, but General Kurt Zeitzler, the Chief of General Staff was critically against continuing the attack and asked Hitler to let the German army leave Stalingrad.Hitler denied it and said to the German pack on the radio You can be trustworthy, that no one pull up stakes ever be able to push us out of Stalingrad. When General Gustav von Wietersheim, the commander of the 14th Panzer division was complaining active outstanding losses at the wait, Paulus replaced him with General Hans Hube. Paulus, however, who lost 40000 men entering the city, was brusque on soldiers and on the 4th October 1942 begged Hitler for reinforcements. A hardly a(prenominal) sidereal days afterwards five engineer the great unwasheds and a tank division came to Stalingrad.On the nineteenth October snow replaced rain as Paulus still tried to progress notwithstanding the harsh conditions. In November he controlled about 90% of the city, but he was running out of men and supplies. Despite that Paulus pla nned another big offensive on the 10th November. His army received great casualties in the next two days and the Red Army knowing what happened introductioned a counterattack and Paulus was forced back south. When he reached the Gumrak airfield Adolf Hitler ordered Paulus to retardant and resist the Russians. He also promised that the Luftwaffe would supply his army via air.The Paulus High Officers were sure that the Russian winter airspace would restrict the air supplying. All the battalion commanders were saying that a successful counterattack was the only if option, but Paulus curtail his moves to Hitlers orders. During the declination the Luftwaffe dropped 70 tonnes of supplies a day, but the environ German army needed about 300 tonnes a day. All the soldiers only had a third of the normal food portion a day and they also started killing their horses for meat. By the 7th December the 6th army was living on one loaf of bread per five men.The army was about to surrender beca use of hunger when Hitler ordered the 4th army to launch a rescue operation. The 4th army only had 30 miles until the city, when the Russians stop them. By 27th December 1942 the 4th army was also surrounded by the Red Army. In about a month over 28000 German soldiers died. Because of the food shortage Erich von Manstein ordered to stop feeding the 12000 vain injured men. Then he wanted to make a abundant breakthrough and run away, but his men were too weak to do that and the idea was scrapped.30th January 1943 Adolf Hitler made Paulus a field marshal, and sent him a message saying that none German field marshals were captured yet and suggested to commit suicide. Paulus stood strong and preferred to surrender to the Russians. The last of the Germans surrendered on the 2d February 1943. The Battle of Stalingrad was over. More than 91000 men were captured, and 150000 men died during the siege. All the German prisoners were sent to Siberia and 45000 of them died on the way there. Only 7000 German survived the war.Battle of StalingradThe Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in the Second World state of war and marked one of its few major turning points. It was certainly the most decisive battle in the Great nationalistic contend or the Second World fight on the easterly await. The battle lasted from 13 September 1942 until the final German surrender on 2 February 1943. A few months forward, the Russian Red Army seemed to be on the verge of complete defeat and Hitlers ugly war machine seemed irresistible.Though the German retreat from Moscow nine months foregoing brought a much needed respite to the Russians, it did not bring whatever real hope. At Stalingrad, however, the tide turned dramatically. In the titanic postulate that raged on the shores of the River Volga, the German Wehrmacht faced a crushing and humiliating defeat from which it never managed to recover. To the Germans, Stalingrad was the single most catastrophic defeat ever, surpass ing the decomposition of Prussian Army in the hands of Napoleon at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806.To the Russians, it was more than their greatest battle victory ever, it represented a great symbol of hope, the triumph of Russian face over the most ill adversity that had fallen on them since the German incursion in June 1941. The struggle on the Eastern social movement was a tell aparticularly brutal and pestilential war, even by Second World War standards, unprecedented in its ferocity and lack of any moral constraint. This barbarized warfare exacted an immense death toll of 27-28 million people on the Soviet side, a bulk of them beingness civilians.According to one estimate, each minute of this war cost 9-10 lives, each hour 587, each day 14,000 for a total of 1,418 days. The unleashing of the naked forefinger of evil that Hitler stood for resulted in untold pain and inconsolable grief for the people of Soviet Union, but it also provoked their indomitable fighting spirit that ev entually led them to a great triumph. That fighting spirit fully asserted itself at Stalingrad. However, more than Russian valor, the chief cause for the Russian victory at Stalin was Hitlers ineptness.Stalin the biggest enemy of the Red ArmyIn the summer of 1941, the Soviet Red Army was the largest in the orbit, but nowhere close to being the mightiest. It had significant weaknesses. Just a year or two earlier it had been humiliated by the Finnish army in the Russo-Finnish War. The chief fountain for the debilitated condition of the Red Army was the ruthless purging chthonictaken by Stalin in late 1930s. A devastatingly large number of officers (estimated around 35,000), many another(prenominal) of them belonging to the top echelons, were killed.Only a handful of capable commanders such as Zhukov, Rokossovsky, Chuikov, Malinovsky and Eremenko were spared to execute the Great Patriotic War. Thus weakened, the Soviet army initially presented no effective opposition to the Germa n onslaught in mid-1941. The Germans considered the Red army ill-suited to modern, mechanized warfare, so much so that Hitler did not venture twice about opening a major offensive in the Eastern Front while simultaneously engaged on the westbound Front with England and the Allies.The Red Army was in fact very well equipped, but was reeling under the loss of most of its experienced and far-sighted leaders in the Great Purge (Zaloga & Volstad 3). Added to the continuing executions, there was paralyzing political interference. As a result of which, though it was well kn take that German army was headed towards Moscow, the Red Army was surprisingly unprepared. Its preparedness was indeed inexplicably but deliberately mitigate through political directives from Stalin. The onset order of Hitlers Directive No.21, of 18 December 1940 decreed Operation Barbarossa, which was to crush Soviet Russia in a quick stir up. Hitler intended for the Soviet Union to be destroyed and replaced by a group of colonies that would function under the Third Reich (Hoyt 35). By mid-May of 1941, Germany was all come to launch a vicious attack on the Soviet soil. The exploitation German deployments along the western borders of the Soviet Union were apparent, yet not until June 21, just one day before the actual German invasion commenced, were the border military districts alerted (Horner & Jukes 24).Launched on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa was the largest single military operation of all time. The number of troops involved, the scale of the operations, and the cruelty of German soldiers were all of appalling proportions. At the outset of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet military were hopelessly unprepared for the chaos and turmoil of war. The ruthless revive of the German advance struck fear and panic in the Soviet people.The road to StalingradThe Nazi army swiftly conquered vast areas of territory, killing and capturing hundreds of thousands of troops, pillaging, loot an d massacring civilian populations.The Soviets retreated, and managed to move most of their heavy industry away from the front line, re-establishing it in more remote areas. Smolensk and Kiev fell in September. Leningrad was under siege. Over one million people died in Leningrad due to famishment and cold. The Germans were unstoppable by October, they seemed to have broken their adversary on the Eastern Front. The German Army marched relentlessly on the road to Moscow, blazing a trail of destruction, murder and mayhem on its path. Hitler proudly declared, The enemy has been routed and will never regain his strength (Gilbert 242).But Russia would not give up so easily. As the extent and reality of the German atrocities became widely known throughout Russia, the will to resist stiffened and the patriotic war became in reality a peoples war, but the cost to soldier and civilian alike was horrendous. ((Erickson & Erickson 72). As winter set in, tenacious defense mechanism prevented the Germans from capturing Moscow. However, the Russians found a surprising ally. The Germany army was ill-equipped to withstand the freezing severity of the Russian winter and was substantially weakened.The Soviets launched their first of all counter-attack on December 11, 1941. However, almost a year had to pass before the tide began to turn during the second phase of the Great Patriotic War. With the 1942-43 winter scrape at Stalingrad (along with the crushed German summer offensive at Kursk in 1943), the Soviet Union would consolidate its position and stand as a formidable adversary. The Battle of Stalingrad would mark the end of the German advance, and Soviet reinforcements in great numbers would gradually push the German armies back. 3. Stalingrad in 1941 a patriarchal aimStalingrad, originally knownn as Tsaritsyn, had been a lucky trading town on the Volga during the 19th century. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, the Reds had triumphed decisively at Tsaritsyn. Thou gh Stalins contribution to the Reds success was not very significant, Stalin named the city after himself when he achieved supreme power in 1925. Subsequently, Stalins part in the victory of 1920 was enhanced through propaganda, and soon it was Stalin was officially recognised for his crucial role in both the October Revolution of 1917 and triumph of 1927.Thus, Stalingrad came to be strongly associated with Stalin and Russian Revolution, a fact that added an important psychological dimension in showdown between Hitlers and Stalins forces in the battle of Stalingrad. By 1941, Stalingrad was a city of 600,000 people. It had compete an important role in Stalins industrial squeeze of the 1930s and is location on the Volga ensured that it was a significant player in the Soviet war economy. Hitler had set his sight on Stalingrad because it was a precious political, economic, communications and psychological objective.From the Soviet perspective, Stalingrad was important not only as a major industrial center but also as the major connecting point to any operations in the Caucasus.Hitler the Red Armys biggest allyThe disaster for Germans at Stalingrad did not bring about nimble defeat of Germany, but, after February, 1943, few German officers genuinely believed in victory. The sureness of Hitler himself could not be shaken so easily, of course, one would think. The defeat at Stalingrad drastically widened the rupture of trust between Hitler and the army high command, which began at the battle of Moscow in December 1941.The German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 was a heavy psychological blow to the Wehrmacht and to the Germany people who were abandoned to victory. It raised the first widespread doubts about Hitlers leadership and the ability of Germany to win the war. After Stalingrad, Hitler himself was rarely seen in public and his outward behavior became relatively muted. In the mid-1942 the Germany army had already seemed to be in a more subdued co ndition as compared to its irrepressible aggressiveness an year ago.The freshly Fall Blau (Case Blue) offensive was intended to be a resumption of the stalled invasion of Russia. Despite Hitlers optimism, the 1941 Campaign which opened along a 2,000 kilometer front and involved 148 combat divisions failed to shatter Russia to its roots with one blow. The summer campaign of 1942, although still immense, was necessarily less ambitious. (Hayward 7) Overriding his generals, Hitler gave the offensive two specialise objectives on 90-degree divergent axes the Caucasus oilfields and the Volga crossing at Stalingrad.Fall Blau was deeply flawed by ambiguity of strategic aim. Further, Hitlers amateurish attempts to control the deployment of his forces and his opportunistic changes of mind played an important part in compromising the campaign. For Hitler, Stalingrad had become the main objective of German effort it was an obsession. Hitler was an amateurish strategist with an unshakeable faith in his own genius, which no facts from the real world could really affect. His campaigns were foredoomed by grand-strategic misjudgment, a prime example of which is his no retreat policy in Russian from Stalingrad to Berlin.In Hitlers view the summer offensive of 1942 should bring about a final decision in the Russian campaign with the capture of Stalingrad on the Volga and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, and by occupying the oilfields in the Caucasus. The outskirts of Stalingrad were reached in August 1942, with the Germany forces already weakened, but the battle stuck in street and house-to-house fighting. Hitlers front commanders did realize how much of a gamble the offensives towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus were.They harbored fears about the strengths of the Russian reserves, and the weakness of the diverging German thrusts, dependent as they were for flank protection on the ill-equipped armies of Hungary, Italy and Romania. Most of them felt that Hitlers tendency to de cry the Russians was becoming dangerous. His leadership displayed a total lack of any arrest of the command machinery and its function. Colonel-General von Kleist warned Hitler against using the Hungarians, Italians and Rumanians as flank protectors for the 6th Army during its struggle for Stalingrad, but the Fuhrer would not listen.The Stalingrad catastrophe a German perspectiveThe battle at Stalingrad was a vicious, close-quarter, street fighting. The 6th Army, commanded by Paulus, slogged on street by street, its flank protection entrusted by Hitler to Romanian troops. Pauluss units were decimated at the rate of 20,000 casualties a week. By the end of October, however, only one tenth of Stalingrad still held out, in the north of the city. But the balance of strength was changing. The earlier German favorable position had gone. Stalingrad was the first priority for Russian reserves.Sufficient Russian troops were sent into the city to keep the fight going on there. As more Sovi et troops were sent into the city, the fighting began to be a block-by-block slogging match, moving back and forth in bloody fighting. Heavy losses for both sides characterized the street fighting. In early November, the winter came. The temperatures would soon reach thirty under zero. In the middle of that month, Hitler sent Paulus a message urging one last effort to complete the capture of Stalingrad. By mid-November the Russians were strong large to undertake a major offensive.They had eleven armies, several mechanized, cavalry and tank corps, 900 tanks, 1,115 aircraft for the offensive. The were all set to destroy the German forces at Stalingrad (Hoyt 160). Generals Zhukov and Chuikov directed the defense of Stalingrad. Eremenko was also sent to command the Stalingrad front. Hitler staked more and more on Stalingrads capture, but Chuikovs 62 Army refused to yield. On 19 November 1942, the Russian counter-strike forces under Zhukov smashed through the Romanians and on 22 Novemb er completed their encirclement of Pauluss 6th Army.On November 23 Moscow announced triumphantly that Russian forces had a great victory in the bend of the Don, and that the Germans were now entrapped in Stalingrad. That news convulsed the world By November 28 the iron ring around Stalingrad had closed. (Hoyt 205) This was when a new deteriorating phase opened in Hitlers relations with his generals that of his utter refusal to face the realities of defeat, of subordinate sources, and of the limits to even the German Soldiers powers of endurance and fighting skill.Hitler precept himself as an infallible military genius and blamed the incompetence and lack of willpower of his generals, or their disloyalty to their fuehrer, for all the failures of the German army on its pungent path back to Berlin in the aftermath of Stalingrad. The Russian attacks fell on weakly held sectors north and south of the city, manned mainly by Romanian forces in the north and by a mixture of further Roma nians and units of the 4th Panzer Army in the south. The Russian plan was simply to encircle all of the German forces in the Stalingrad area.The Russians soon broke through the thin defenses, particularly in the north. The 6th Army at Stalingrad was in serious danger. determining(prenominal) action at that time could have saved the situation for the Germans, however. If nigh units were sent north and south to hold the Russians while the bulk of the 6th army withdrew from the ruins of Stalingrad, it would have been saved. The catastrophe that finally overtook German army at Stalingrad in February 1943 stemmed largely from Hitlers refusal to sanction an early break-out before the Russian ring could be consolidated.Hitler ordered Paulus and his men to remain in Stalingrad as a forward fortress until the following spring. When the Russians closed the ring on 23 November, Paulus was cut off. General von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, the most senior of the corps commanders at Stalingrad, urged Pau lus to slay without delay before escape became impossible. But Paulus, obedient to his Fuehrer, refused to listen to him. From then on the Germans descended into catastrophe slowly. On January 8 1943 the Russians sent Paulus an ultimatum, offering the alternating(a) of honorable surrender or complete annihilation.Consulting Hitler, Paulus refused to surrender again. The Russians continued their attack. They advanced(a) from west to east, pressing the Germans back into the city. They captured half of the pocked in the first week and then again paused to demand surrender. Again, Paulus consulted Hitler and refused. As long as there was still some hope for at least part of 6th Army breaking out, von Manstein, who commanded the relief efforts, supported Hitler in insistence that Paulus must continue to resist.By 22 January, when the Russians had captured 6th Armys only remaining airfield, Manstein supported Pauluss request for permission to surrender, which Hitler refused. By the en d of the month, it was or so all over for Germans. Only a few units held out until February 1. On the 2 February 1943, the momentous battle of Stalingrad came to an end.ReferencesErickson, John & Erickson, Ljubica. Hitler Versus Stalin The Second World War on the Eastern Front in Photographs. London Carlton Books, 2004.Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War A Complete History. New York Henry Holt and Company, 1989.Hayward, Joel S. A. Stopped at Stalingrad The Luftwaffe and Hitlers Defeat in the East, 1942-1943. Lawrence, KS University of Kansas Press, 2001.Horner, D. M. & Jukes, Geoffrey. The Second World War (5) The Eastern Front 1941-1945. Oxford Osprey Publishing, 2002.Hoyt, Edwin P. 199 Days The Battle for Stalingrad. New York Forge Books, 1993.Zaloga, Steven & Volstad, Ronald. The Red Army of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 (Men-at-Arms). Oxford Osprey Publishing, 1984.