Word: stalingraders
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Face. Yet there was hope on the Russian battlefields. It was not solely the fact that Bock and his Germans had yet to win Stalingrad, the lower Volga and the Caucasus. It was not the hope, almost the certainty, that if all was lost in the south, if the Red Army was no longer the saving bulwark of the U.S. and Great Britain, Russia would still survive for the Russians. It was not the hope, which even the hard-minded Russians seized and fondled last week, that the German losses in south Russia was irreparably weakening the German armies...
...Germans inched on into the environs of Stalingrad. Day by day, for four weeks, they had sent mountains of men and machines to batter the Red Army back across dusty steppes toward the Volga. Colossal expenditures bought each hillock, each ravine, each village, exacting of the Russians losses at least as heavy. The precise location of the battle line was not revealed by either Berlin or Moscow communiqués, but Moscow reported this week that fighting was going on "in Stalingrad." The heaviest pressure and steadiest German progress was from the southwest, toward the Volga bend directly below Stalingrad...
...Stalingrad's fate depended upon the success of such fighters. There were no natural defenses. Between the Don and Volga elbows, a strip from 45 to 80 miles wide, the plain rises imperceptibly from the west to east until it reaches about 240 ft. above sea level, then falls away sharply in a few miles to the Volga, which at Stalingrad is 40 ft. below sea level.* The few ravines dividing the plain are knee-deep brooks. There are no forests such as help to screen Moscow. The Nazis had merely to cross the plain between two rivers. Sprawling...
...smoke of German bombs already had blotted out much of the industrial smoke which rose over Stalingrad during three Five-Year Plans that changed a country town into a modern city, that upped its population from 150,000 to 500,000. From the great tractor plant on Stalingrad's northern outskirts to the metallurgical works on the southwest, chemical, machinery, leather, oil and many other industrial plants were scattered through the city. Most of them were turned to war production, so that when the battle neared Stalingrad tanks rolled from factory to front. Interspersed among the factories were workers...
...even as the city was modernized, Stalingrad's color and flavor still derived from the life teeming on the many-storied landing stages of the broad, slumberous Volga. A small part of the city lies on the river's east bank, with salt marshes and treeless wastes stretching on into Asia...