Posted on 01/31/2020 3:51:19 AM PST by Bull Snipe
As a followup and to paraphrase something a few other people have said: If you show up with a MILLION troops plus the declared intent to exterminate a civilization and LOSE, don’t expect to be remembered fondly. Or treated well in your defeat.
If Hitler had bypassed and cut off Stalingrad initially, he might have won the war. I have heard that he was obsessed with taking the city carrying the name of his enemy. It sounds like the sort of thing that megalomaniac would do.
about half of the Stalingrad prisoners never made it to the gulags. They died on the march to the prisons.
“Stalingrad was Case Blue....”
Yup. Hitler’s plan was to take the Russian oil fields in the Caucasus, especially those at Baku; and in order to isolate that objective the German strategy was to use Army Group South to eliminate the Soviet threat in the Crimea and the Soviet forces between the Donets and the Don, west of Stalingrad. The initial plan for Stalingrad was not to attack and destroy it but to cut it off and neutralize its industrial and communications assets. As you know, things quickly spiraled out of control.
“Todt im Osten.”
Death in the East.
The opening sequence of the first level of the 2004 video game Call Of Duty: Their Finest Hour, while not totally factually accurate, always seems to me to be a good vehicle to convey how brutal the fighting for Stalingrad was. In the first six minutes, you see representations of:
1. Several penal battalions and rural levies charging into German machine gun positions because there wasn’t any other option.
2. A representation of how tenuous the supply chain for the Red Army could be at times (”First man takes the rifle” probably never happened at Stalingrad itself as the men were armed before being sent over in boats, but it *did* happen several times during Operation Barbarossa - and it did happen at Brest Fortress where the Russians only had one weapon per two men!) and how desperate it could be.
3. Pretty accurate representations of political commissars rousing troops to attack, and everyone went despite knowing that they were probably going to be killed by the German guns.
4. Great swaths of infantry getting vaporized, and should they get in among the Germans, no quarter is given.
Nasty, nasty, nasty fight.
Yup. Forced march on no rations, no medical care, often tattered uniforms and gear that wasn’t great in the local environment in the first place, no tolerance or allowance for wounds or weakness from the very pissed off troops guarding you... Yeah, whole lot of people wouldn’t make it.
And don’t forget it is February in Russia.
Still well in the depths of Russian winter, yup. Frostbite and related conditions took many.
“The Motherland Calls”
Yes, she does, something very special about her.
Some interesting engineering, but its what she represents.
I would like to visit her someday.
No Russian blood here, not a drop. The family lost six KIA at Culloden and my Great ^6 and his brother fought WITH Cornwallis at Yorktown.
It would be an honor to walk the”Two hundred steps, symbolizing the 200 days of the Battle of Stalingrad”
donaldo (above) already made note of the massive losses the Nazis inflicted on the Russian forces during Barbarossa. At the start of 1942, 1/4th of all the medium and heavy tanks in the Russian army were of British manufacture. By the end of 1942 the US had provided the Russians nearly 4 million tons of military hardware. The Red Army ran on Studebaker deuce-and-a-halfs. Over the entire war, 53% of the ordnance employed by the Russians was Made In America. Absent the aid from its western allies, Russia never could have stopped Hitler's advance.
"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war. We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
-- Soviet General Georgy Zhukov
It would be interesting to learn how many of the missing simply walked away and went home.
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