Word: stalingraders
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...German legions swept past steelstubborn Stalingrad and liquidated Russia's power of attack, Hitler would have been not only man of the year, but he would have been undisputed master of Europe, looking for other continents to conquer. He could have diverted at least 250 victorious divisions to new conquests in Asia and Africa. But Joseph Stalin stopped him. Stalin had done it before-in 1941-when he started with all of Russia intact. But Stalin's achievement of 1942 was far greater. All that Hitler could give he took-for the second time...
...much claim to glory as the British people had when they withstood the blitz of 1940. But a strong people had not prevented the loss of White Russia and the Ukraine. Would they be any better able to prevent the conquest of the Don basin, of Stalingrad, of the Caucasus? The strongest will to resist can eventually crack under continued defeat...
Only Stalin knows how he managed to make 1942 a better year for Russia than 1941. But he did. Sevastopol was lost, the Don basin was nearly lost, the Germans reached the Caucasus. But Stalingrad was held. The Russian people held. The Russian Army came back with four offensives that had the Germans in serious trouble at year...
...first stages, the third offensive was in effect an extension of the drive to relieve Stalingrad. But as the Russian thrust widened, it also became an effort to destroy the Germans' entire system of communications and supply in the Ukraine, to endanger Axis forces both in the Don-Volga area and in the Caucasus. The great object of the Red Army's winter strategy was now clear: to slice up the Germans' winter lines, keep the Wehrmacht on the defensive from Rzhev to the Caucasus...
Germans waiting at home got no cheer. Their radios and newspapers told them to be "under no delusion about the seriousness of the fighting." A German radio propagandist moaned about the Red Army's "enormous mass of tanks" and admitted that the German army's situation at Stalingrad was "temporarily of a serious nature." German newspapers prepared their readers for "a war of many years" in Russia. Whoever was winning the battles last week, the Germans, by their own admission, were not winning...