Word: stalingraders
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From mid-July 1942 onward, the fighting intensified as the Germans advanced along the great bend of the Don River. Hitler ordered the German Sixth Army to conquer Stalingrad by Aug. 25. Stalin ordered the city to prepare for siege...
...Germans, however, could never quite take all of Stalingrad. While they held air superiority, they were unable to knock out the powerful batteries of Russian artillery across the Volga. And beyond the Stalingrad cauldron, the Red Army was on the move. In late November 1942 the Russians encircled the city, trapping thousands of German and Romanian troops. Hitler had committed a strategic mistake. He had dissipated his military strength and caused tremendous logistical confusion by splitting up the offensive -- sending a huge strike force toward the Caucasus simultaneously with the drive toward Stalingrad...
...Germans in Stalingrad fought on through January, even as the Russian military ringed the city. Hitler had promised reinforcements, and in the second half of December launched a major tank assault on the Soviet blockade. It failed. Wrote Chuikov: "Up to the end of December, ((the Germans)) continued to live in hopes and put up a desperate resistance, often literally to the last cartridge. We practically took no prisoners, since the Nazis just wouldn't surrender." Not until Feb. 2, 1943, was the enemy defeated in Stalingrad. By then the Germans were more willing to surrender: 90,000 were taken...
...Russia at War, the British journalist Alexander Werth recalls one sight in devastated Stalingrad at the time of the German capitulation: horse skeletons with uneaten bits of meat clinging to them; an enormous frozen cesspool; and, creeping into a cellar, the figure of a German soldier, his face a "mixture of suffering and idiot-like incomprehension." "The man," recalled Werth, "was perhaps already dying. In that basement into which he slunk there were still 200 Germans -- dying of hunger and frostbite. 'We haven't had time to deal with them yet,' one of the Russians said. 'They'll be taken...
...Germans had lost the battle of Stalingrad. The tide of the Russian war had turned against the Third Reich...