Posted on 11/09/2017 7:04:26 AM PST by Kaslin
Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded --and would soon destroy -- a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany's best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942-43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.
Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war.
During the horrific Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted more than five months, Russian, American and British forces also went on the offensive against the Axis powers in the Caucasus, in Morocco and Algeria, and on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.
Yet just weeks before the Battle of Stalingrad began, the Allies had been near defeat. They had lost most of European Russia. Much of Western Europe was under Nazi control. Axis armies occupied large swaths of North Africa. The Japanese controlled most of the Pacific and Asia, from Manchuria to Wake Island.
Stalingrad was part of a renewed German effort in 1942 to drive southward toward the Caucasus Mountains, to capture the huge Soviet oil fields. The Germans might have pulled it off had Hitler not divided his forces and sent his best army northward to Stalingrad to cut the Volga River traffic and take Stalin's eponymous frontier city.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
I did not realize the scope of this until I read the Gulag Archipelago.
“Tenners”. Standard sentence, usually converted to a 20 year sentence before they were ready to be released (if they were still alive) on any pretext...or no pretext.
What a sad thing...to have gone through that viscous fighting with the Nazis, only to have your own country imprison you for being exposed to the American or British armies, or being captured by the Germans.
And the Germans treated their Soviet POWs just as bad or even worse than the Jews in their concentration camps.
What a terrible, sad, and pathetic thing.
> I still think had the Nazis put all their efforts into taking Moscow, Stalin would not have survived it <
I remember reading somewhere that when the Germans pushed to the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin refused to leave the city. So who knows. If Hitler hadn’t turned his forces to the south, the Germans might have bagged Uncle Joe.
“Even after the Stalingrad disaster, the Germans could’ve recovered had Herr Dumbass listened to his generals.”
Correct...
There are so many things the can be pointed to as “turning points” in the war that the phrase loses meaning.
Stalingrad was a disaster, but it was not unrecoverable. The Russians were just as stretched as the Germans were after it. The real “turning point” for Germany was the allied invasion of Sicily.
The Diversion of 1500 aircraft, and almost a third of the follow-on forces for Kursk, including veteran and best-equipped armor and motorized divisions to Italy, would have likely made all of the difference.
The Russians committed nearly all of their aircraft and artillery, and almost all of the reserve forces to the defense of Kursk, and the follow-on offensive.
Had that been defeated, or as Guderian advocated, a defense in depth along the Dnieper been allowed, the war could have dragged on for years.
The Russians left many of their dead lay where they had fallen during WW2. There are groups of people there that search for their remains.
We should ALSO remember that if the Russians had not colluded with Germany over the invasion and seizure of Poland, millions of lives on ALL SIDES would not have been lost.
This.
The main thing Hitler could have done, is to treat the Russians humanely, along the lines of in Vichy France.
Many Russians originally greeted the Wehrmacht as Liberators from Stalin.
General Vlasov raised an army to fight alongside the Germans, and he had plenty of volunteers. But Hitler was afraid of allowing the Russians to have arms, even to fight on his side.
I respect your point, in time, and probably a lot of it, the Germans would’ve lost a war of attrition in the East. We can’t ignore the pressures from other Allied fronts either and what that did to force them to shuffle limited forces.
While the American production miracle was unprecedented, what is also amazing is what Russian industry pulled off, being as most of the pre-existing infrastructure and supply chain had been overrun by the Krauts.
Both sides were essentially morally bankrupt. The Germans killed innocents on their way in, the Russians raped what was left on the way out. There was a lot of under-toned sentiment that said ‘let them bleed each other to death.”
They sure as hell did. Many Russian soldiers were ferried across the Volga with no rifle and being told that when the guy ahead of them gets shot, there’s their new rifle. Anyone running in the wrong direction would be machine gunned as well. I don’t know if you call that guts or depraved desperation.
I understand the fixation that Hitler seemed to have on that city. But I have often wondered why they just did not bypass it like MacArthur did in the Pacific. Just bypass the city and level it with air forces.
If they had gotten across the river either north or south of the city, they could have flanked the Russians supply line.
But, if wishes were horses...and all that.
It’s the nature of war... always has been...
The Man He Killed
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.
Khrushchev was the Communist party Politruk (Commissar) on the Stalingrad front.
The Forsaken Army.
Heinrich Gerlach.
The author spent five years in a Russian Prison of War camp. The Soviets held them for two years after the war ended. Used as labour. Gerlach hammers away at Hitler, whom the German soldiers at Stalingrad despised.
Hitler did not give a damn about their plight. (It was said).
One aspect of the war I have been meaning to read about is one rarely mentioned: Japanese POWs held in Russia.
I don’t disagree with you in general but there are lot of scenarios that defy your prediction.
Roosevelt wanted to fight in Europe — he had been plotting to with Churchill behind the scenes for more than two years — but if Hitler hadn’t declared war on the USA after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, it is entirely possible that the USA would have fought on only one front.
Remember, the “unconditional surrender” decision was not made until 1944 when it was pretty clear that Hitler would eventually lose.
It is entirely possible that a negotiated outcome in Europe would have been Hitler keeps Russia and Eastern Europe but eventually leaves Western Europe. That would have been consistent with Mein Kampf.
Without the USA fighting in Europe there is no invasion of Sicily. Without Sicily, Hitler probably prevails on the Eastern Front in 1943, the year after Stalingrad, or at least maintains parity with the USSR. Once the futility of lend lease is revealed, the USA backs off providing provisions to the Communists in exchange for an end to the carnage.
Lots of alternate scenarios than just the USA leading the invasion of Western Europe and taking on the entire burden on conquering Germany.
Au contraire. The Germans might well have succeeded in winning the war. Long term control over 200 million people would have been another problem. All scenarios which have Germany winning in Russian in 1941-42 show them having a very hard time holding onto all the territory for very long due to partisan and sabotage.
Yes. Paulus was a staff officer promoted to field commander. He could only take a brute force approach to the Stalingrad campaign. A better general would have been more deft and might have been better prepared for the Russian pincer movement.
But in the end, it was Hitler’s decision to split the Army Group into two pieces, over the violent objections of his generals, and try and accomplish two years’ objectives in one. That’s what doomed the Sixth Army.
Hitler was counting on the fact that the non-Russian peoples in the USSR would end up supporting him — the Aryan peoples, especially.
Eventually, there were SS units comprised of men from all the conquered USSR territories like the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. They fought long and hard for Germany. Some were evil and also persecuted the Jews and helped round them up. Most of the conquered peoples, not surprisingly, just laid low and tried to survive until the end of the war.
Curiously, the one ethnic group that embraced the German invasion wholeheartedly was the Cossacks. It didn’t really happen until 1942, when the German Army occupied Crimea and nearby lands, but the Cossacks became very fierce, brave, and loyal parts of the German military machine.
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