Word: stalingraders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This week the battle of Stalingrad-perhaps the most decisive in the Russo-German war, if not in all of World War II-approached its end. The Red Army had killed or captured most of the German and Rumanian troops that had been hammering the city since last August. In the final stages even the Nazi Commander, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered along with 16 other generals...
...meant the complete failure of Hitler's 1942 strategy in Russia: to outflank Moscow from the south, render the Volga lifeline useless to the Russians and secure the German flank driving through the Caucasus toward Baku and the Middle East. It also meant that the Red Armies defending Stalingrad and the Volga were free to push west and join the armies smashing at Rostov and Kharkov...
...until last week did the Russians reveal how nearly the German Sixth Army had come to capturing Stalingrad. In September the Germans actually occupied the central part of the city. Concentrating their power in the industrial districts, they then stormed into the Stalingrad tank factory, but failed to drive on to the Volga. Often the opposing lines were only 15 yards apart. Most of the fighting was done with hand grenades, one Russian division using more than 100,000 in a single month's fighting...
Savior of Stalingrad and commander in chief of the armies threatening the German flank in the Caucasus from the northeast is Colonel General Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko, 50. Stocky, brown-haired, he was born in the Ukraine, left a farm to join the Czarist army in 1913. After the peace he organized guerrilla bands to fight the Germans in the Ukraine, served during the Civil War as a cavalry officer under Semion Budenny. When the Germans invaded Russia, Yeremenko assumed command of an army west of Moscow, played a leading role in the defense of the capital, shifted to Stalingrad when...
...advance or retreat." In this war he won the Order of Lenin for helping to defeat Colonel General Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist during the Red counteroffensive of 1941. Last December he smashed Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein's powerful effort to relieve the Germans at Stalingrad...