Word: stalingraders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This week on the Stalingrad front, the Russians scored their biggest victory in nearly a year. In its immediate scope and consequences, the victory was "local"-the culmination of a prolonged, hitherto indecisive effort to relieve Stalingrad itself by blows at the Germans' flanks and rear, between the Volga and the Don. But its full possibilities, if realized-which they are still to be-might be immense. Disrupting Germany's winter line in the south, blocking the diversion of Nazi forces to the Mediterranean, perhaps cutting off the Germans in the Caucasus, were among the conceivable consequences...
Last week Berlin's radio complained that in the Stalingrad region the temperature had dropped to 29° F. below zero. Floating ice clogged the Volga, stopping Soviet shipping for the winter and robbing Hitler of the only bitter satisfaction he might have received from the whole Stalingrad adventure. Radiators froze; narrow-treaded German tanks slid along weakly on their bellies; breechblocks became stiff; transmission oil jelled...
Soviet scouts in the outskirts of Stalingrad bagged the season's first typical winter German. His head was wrapped in a woman's shawl looted from some Russian peasant hut. A threadbare blanket with a hole cut in the middle served him as a poncho. The Red Army men, dressed in the standard winter sheepskin shubas (coats), fleece-lined caps and warm valenki (knee-high felt boots), seized the shivering Fritz as he stood sentry duty over a zigzag trench full of freezing Germans. All he could mumble was "holodno" (cold...
Because of the weather or the demands of the Mediterranean front, the Luftwaffe became far less active. Soviet military dispatches reported that obsolete German planes were sputtering over the lines near Stalingrad to drop handfuls of small bombs and speed for home before Russian fighters arrived. During one 24-hour-period last week fewer than 200 enemy sorties over Russian lines were reported, compared with the previous daily average...
Hitler's 1942 campaign to knock Russia out of the war, to win oil and Lebensraum, had ended without having achieved a single important strategic objective. Leningrad and Stalingrad still stood at two ends of a ragged, frozen, 1,000-mile front...