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 ...
>Russians got a lot of help from us, but they hushed that up
>>Yeah, umm, when you sacrifice an entire generation of men who bled themselves white on those fields, you don’t exactly chalk up the victory to the folks who supplied some of the hardware. They deserve the national pride that came from Stalingrad. It saved millions of lives, and possibly the world, and easily many thousands of American lives (if not hundreds of thousands). We should be grateful, not they.
We should be greatful to each other. With Russia and the US in the war Germany would have won.
The Cornelius Ryan Trilogy - A Bridge Too Far; The Longest Day; The Last Battle
‘The Last Battle’ was the battle between the Germans and the Russians. So much death and destruction that was far worse then the western allies went thru. It was hard to understand the brutality.
https://www.amazon.com/Cornelius-Trilogy-Bridge-Longest-Battle/dp/B000IE8MIU
The old adage "to kill a snake, cut off it's head," applies here."
Agreed. While Army Group Center paused for two months some good things happened down south -- the capture of Kiev and 650,000 troops, for example -- and Hitler was able to straighten out his front line.
But the Generals were now firmly behind blitzkrieg and the value of armored thrusts deep into enemy territory in sowing terror and fear among the troops they had passed. Had German armored divisions blown through the line and surrounded and penetrated Moscow there would have been no defense, the government would have panicked and run, and the other Russian Armies north and south would have collapsed due to poor leadership, poor training, and lack of of desire to fight.
There were a number of SS fighting divisions that were recruited from the conquered countries, and they were not called Hiwis as well. They were largely recruited from the free population. In Lithuania, a large number of Soviet forces deserted and went straight over to join the German forces; they never spent a day in a POW camp and were rapidly recruited to join rearguard security forces.
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