Stalingrad was brutal combat. No quarter was given in the battle.
“Of the 91,000 German prisoners captured by the Soviets, fewer than 6,000 would live to return to Germany.”
What happened to the other 85,000 Germans?
I have read history pretty much my entire life (in fact, my degree is in History), and I’ve read scores of books and articles on Operation Barbarossa, and in particular the Battle of Stalingrad. Brutal is too weak a word for that carnage.
Long live the memory of General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov and the Soviet 62nd Army.
This tribute should not be construed as an attempt to denigrate the roll of the US or any other Soviet ally during WW II. Far from it. But make no mistake, it was the Red Army that bled the Germans white. Russian losses were staggering. They lost more soldiers at Stalingrad than we lost during the entire war.
The definite turning point in the war for the Wehrmacht. They would launch one more offensive in July 1943 against the Red Army at Kursk. It failed too. After that it was a long slow retreat all the way to Berlin.
“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.