Germany never had the population that could absorb the sheer manpower losses inflicted at Stalingrad while the Soviet Union did. While we in the West can bemoan the fact that it was these two tyrannies fighting for last person standing, the war and the world would have been a completely different place without this battle.
Of course this pre-supposes different people in charge of these two nations. Herr Hitler and Comrade Stalin should go down in history as idiots fully capable of snatching defeat over and over from victory.
Still it is the unsung masses who are the heroes and victims of Stalingrad and Leningrad (places which no longer bear those names) who endured hardships we can barely acknowledge let alone imagine enduring ourselves. If I were to ever meet a survivor, let alone a fighting veteran, of those campaigns, I would have no difficulty in saluting him or her.
PS: What is your favorite Bolo story?
I still believe that had the Nazis taken Moscow, Stalin would have been deposed, and the Bolshies may have gone down with him, and replaced by a new regime, that would have rallied the Russians to victory.
“favorite Bolo story’
I like the ones with a bit of humor (Laumer’s Retief series should be a TV show!)
“destroyed the German Army’s reserve”
I’d throw in Kursk, also.
Unlike the movie, which was only about Vasily Zaitsev, the book describes the whole campaign. Lots of really great individual accounts give a real sense of what both sides had to endure.
When I read about Stalingrad and Dunkirk I start to think we should have given Herman Goering a medal at Nuremberg, and then had a trial.
“This battle lasted from August 1942 to January 1943 and destroyed the German Army’s reserve, that portion of ability that is needed to win campaigns.
Germany never had the population that could absorb the sheer manpower losses inflicted at Stalingrad while the Soviet Union did. While we in the West can bemoan the fact that it was these two tyrannies fighting for last person standing, the war and the world would have been a completely different place without this battle. “
It says something that being sent to the Russian front was considered the worst possible thing that could happen ot any Nazi, bureaucrat or soldier or concentration camp butcher. I am so thankful that the Russians never played by any rules and just went ahead and killed as many as possible. If we had done the same the war would have cost a lot less.
Hey!
Stop now.
Bolo? Most all of them.
Love those stories