Word: stalingraders
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...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...
...again, and in their third winter drive they again made great initial gains. And again, as on the central front before Moscow, they struck where the Germans had expected an attack: on the middle Don, behind the positions where the Red Army and the Germans were locked west of Stalingrad...
...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...
Temporary Stalemate. After many days of local skirmishes between companies and battalions, the battles on the Stalingrad front suddenly increased in scope and fury. "Large groups" of Russians within besieged Stalingrad tried to break out and join Russian forces on the outskirts. On the Don front, west of the city, two German regiments and 80 German tanks drove back the encircling Russian lines. The Russians said only that they retreated. This week Moscow dispatches reported "a temporary stalemate," and said that the Russians were now looking to winter weather to win their winter offensive...