'Battle of Stalingrad\r'

'The strife of Stalingrad was ace of the biggest, cruellest and intimately signifi dropt sputters of the institution war II. The urban center was c any in t proscribed ensemble in alled in the name of Stalin, the leader of the violent soldiers and if the Germans captured it would be great propaganda for them and it would decrease the Russian morale, so Stalin do his phalanx contr everywheret until death. Also if the Germans took control of Stalingrad, then the expression to Moscow would be open and the Germans expertness win the war. The urban center too controlled a lot of crucial pee and check communications with the rest of Russia.After the fail of the exercise Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler began a sassy worthless in June 1942. cosmopolitan Frederich Paulus, the commanding officer of the sixth German array got an order to invade Stalingrad. The city controlled a lot of rail and water communications. In the pass of 1942 Paulus direct an force of 2500 00 men, 500 tanks, 7000 artillery guns and 25000 horses. The leave was slow, because thither was a lack of supplies until the 7th dread 1942. By the end of the month the army killed or captured cozyly 50000 USSR soldiers. At closely-nigh 35 miles left till Stalingrad the arouse supplies stopped again.\r\nWhen the supplies came the progress continued promote Paulus was conserving the fuel, so he but when send his 14th Panzer corps. The cherry armament was direct giving much(prenominal) resistance and the Germans were coerce to stop just outside of Stalingrad. Paulus enjoin to match the attack until the 7th phratry because his spousal relationship flank was low attack. speckle he was waiting the Luftwaffe bombed the city. The USSR suffered lots of noncombatant casualties and most of the city was reduced to rubble. Stalin brought most of the Russian army together, hitherto from Siberia.\r\nMillions of soldiers were in Stalingrad now defending the most principa l(prenominal) part of Russia. much and more soldiers were indispensable as more and more German tanks and planes attacked. world-wide Georgi Zhukov the Russian military that was to date non oerpowered in a mavin action was put in charge of the Stalingrad defence. As the Germans progressed finished the city the florid legions was contend for all single building the further the r all(prenominal) was the more casualties apiece side suffered. The German tanks were non much use in street strifes and most of the skining was through with sniper rifles, forgeguns and hand grenades.\r\nGermans had problems with very well and smartly camouflaged Russian artillery and machinegun nests. The Red regular army alike used sniper squads, which were establish in the ruins, particularly well. On the twenty-sixth September the sixth German army was able to put their flag up oer the Red Square of Stalingrad, alone the street fight continued. Adolf Hitler enjoin Frederich Paulus to ap per centum Stalingrad at either constitute, unless General Kurt Zeitzler, the Chief of General Staff was critically against continuing the attack and asked Hitler to let the German army leave Stalingrad.\r\nHitler denied it and said to the German people on the radio: â€Å"You can be sure, that no one pull up stakes ever be able to bid us out of Stalingrad”. When General Gustav von Wietersheim, the commander of the 14th Panzer member was complaining somewhat great losses at the crusade, Paulus replaced him with General Hans Hube. Paulus, however, who lost 40000 men entering the city, was mulct on soldiers and on the 4th October 1942 begged Hitler for reinforcements. A few twenty-four hour periods recentr quintet engineer battalions and a tank division came to Stalingrad.\r\nOn the 19th October snow replaced fall as Paulus unagitated tried to progress despite the harsh conditions. In November he controlled about 90% of the city, just now he was unravelning out of men and supplies. nonwith jut outing that Paulus planned another big foetid on the 10th November. His army received great casualties in the next two days and the Red armament discerning what happened slinged a counterattack and Paulus was forced prat end southward. When he authoriseed the Gumrak pedigreefield Adolf Hitler arranged Paulus to retardant and resist the Russians. He also promised that the Luftwaffe would fork up his army via air.\r\nThe Paulus’ High Officers were sure that the Russian winter airspace would restrict the air supplying. All the battalion commanders were saying that a successful counterattack was the only option, but Paulus restricted his moves to Hitler’s orders. During the celestial latitude the Luftwaffe dropped 70 tonnes of supplies a day, but the surrounded German army ask about three hundred tonnes a day. All the soldiers only had a third of the normal food portion a day and they also started cleanup position the ir horses for meat. By the 7th December the sixth army was living on one loaf of bread per five men.\r\nThe army was about to surrender because of hunger when Hitler ordered the 4th army to launch a rescue operation. The 4th army only had 30 miles until the city, when the Russians stopped them. By twenty-seventh December 1942 the 4th army was also surrounded by the Red Army. In about a month over 28000 German soldiers died. Because of the food shortage Erich von Manstein ordered to stop feeding the 12000 useless injure men. Then he wanted to spend a penny a massive breakthrough and run away, but his men were too washed-out to do that and the idea was scrapped.\r\n30th January 1943 Adolf Hitler made Paulus a field marshal, and sent him a message saying that none German field marshals were captured in time and suggested to b lanecast suicide. Paulus stood strong and preferred to surrender to the Russians. The blend in of the Germans surrendered on the 2d February 1943. The skirm ish of Stalingrad was over. More than 91000 men were captured, and 150000 men died during the siege. All the German prisoners were sent to Siberia and 45000 of them died on the way there. but 7000 German survived the war.\r\nBattle of Stalingrad\r\nThe Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in the Second public contend and marked one of its few study turning points. It was certainly the most conclusive battle in the â€Å" considerable flag-waving(prenominal) War” or the Second human race War on the Eastern front. The battle lasted from 13 September 1942 until the final German surrender on 2 February 1943. A few months to begin with, the Russian Red Army seemed to be on the verge of peg frustration and Hitlers vicious war machine seemed irresistible.Though the German retreat from Moscow nightclub months earlier brought a much needed respite to the Russians, it did not bring every material hope. At Stalingrad, however, the tide moody dramatically. In the t itanic throw together that raged on the shores of the River Volga, the German Wehrmacht faced a stifling and humiliating defeat from which it never managed to recover. To the Germans, Stalingrad was the single most catastrophic defeat ever, particular(a) the annihilation of Prussian Army in the hands of Napoleon at Jena-Auerstadt in 1806.To the Russians, it was more than their greatest battle supremacy ever, it represented a great symbol of hope, the triumph of Russian spirit over the most gruesome adversity that had move on them since the German impingement in June 1941. The War on the Eastern front man was a particularly brutal and evil war, even by Second population War standards, unprecedented in its violence and lack of every moral constraint. This barbarized state of war exacted an immense death toll of 27-28 cardinal people on the Soviet side, a studyity of them being civilians.According to one estimate, each minute of this war cost 9-10 lives, each hour 587, eac h day 14,000 for a total of 1,418 days. The unleashing of the â€Å"naked might of evil” that Hitler stood for resulted in untold pain and inconsolable grief for the people of Soviet labor union, but it also provoked their indomitable scrap spirit that eventually led them to a great triumph. That fighting spirit richly asserted itself at Stalingrad. However, more than Russian valor, the chief cause for the Russian advantage at Stalin was Hitler’s ineptness.Stalin †the biggest oppositeness of the Red ArmyIn the summer of 1941, the Soviet Red Army was the largest in the world, but nowhere close to being the mightiest. It had significant weaknesses. Just a year or two earlier it had been humiliated by the Finnish army in the Russo-Finnish War. The chief reason for the undynamic condition of the Red Army was the unkind p press at a lower placetaken by Stalin in late 1930s. A devastatingly large number of officers (estimated around 35,000), many of them belon ging to the top echelons, were killed.Only a handful of capable commanders such as Zhukov, Rokossovsky, Chuikov, Malinovsky and Eremenko were spared to execute the dandy Patriotic War. thence weakened, the Soviet army initially presented no effective opposition to the German intrusion in mid-1941. The Germans considered the Red army ill-suited to modern, motorised warfare, so much so that Hitler did not think twice about chess opening a major loathly in the Eastern antecedent while at the same time engaged on the Western wait with England and the Allies.The Red Army was in occurrence very well equipped, but was reeling under the loss of most of its experienced and far- fortuneed leading in the Great Purge (Zaloga & adenine; Volstad 3). Added to the continuing executions, there was paralyzing political interference. As a result of which, though it was well known that German army was headed towards Moscow, the Red Army was affectly unprepared. Its preparedness was indeed inexplicably but delibe prescribely mitigated through political directives from Stalin. The invasion order of Hitlers guiding No.21, of 18 December 1940 decreed proceeding Barbarossa, which was ‘to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid c adenosine monophosphateaign. Hitler intended for the Soviet Union to be destroyed and replaced by a group of colonies that would function under the trio Reich (Hoyt 35). By mid-May of 1941, Germany was all set to launch a vicious attack on the Soviet soil. The growing German deployments on the western borders of the Soviet Union were apparent, yet not until June 21, just one day onwards the actual German invasion commenced, were the border military districts alerted (Horner & Jukes 24).Launched on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa was the largest single military operation of all time. The number of host involved, the scale of the operations, and the cruelty of German soldiers were all of appalling proportions. At the outset of the Great Pa triotic War, the Soviet military were dispiritedly unprepared for the chaos and turmoil of war. The unpitying speed of the German advance struck fear and panic in the Soviet people.The road to StalingradThe Nazi army fleetly conquered vast areas of territory, killing and capturing hundreds of thousands of troops, pillaging, plundering and massacring civilian populations.The Soviets retreated, and managed to move most of their heavy effort away from the front line, re-establishing it in more remote areas. Smolensk and Kiev fell in September. Leningrad was under siege. Over one meg people died in Leningrad due to starvation and cold. The Germans were unstoppable; by October, they seemed to have downhearted their adversary on the Eastern Front. The German Army marched relentlessly on the road to Moscow, blazing a trail of destruction, collide with and mayhem on its path. Hitler proudly declared, â€Å"The enemy has been routed and lead never regain his personnel” (Gilber t 242).But Russia would not give up so easily. As the extent and reality of the German atrocities became widely known throughout Russia, the will to resist stiffened and the â€Å"patriotic war” became in reality a ‘peoples war, but the cost to soldier and civilian alike was horrendous. ((Erickson & Erickson 72). As winter set in, long defense prevented the Germans from capturing Moscow. However, the Russians found a surprising ally. The Germany army was ill-equipped to withstand the freezing severity of the Russian winter and was considerably weakened.The Soviets launched their branch counter-attack on December 11, 1941. However, most a year had to pass before the tide began to turn during the second stagecoach of the Great Patriotic War. With the 1942-43 winter struggle at Stalingrad (along with the crushed German summer offensive at Kursk in 1943), the Soviet Union would consolidate its position and stand as a formidable adversary. The Battle of Stalingrad w ould mark the end of the German advance, and Soviet reinforcements in great numbers would stepwise push the German armies back. 3. Stalingrad in 1941: a prime objectiveStalingrad, originally knownn as Tsaritsyn, had been a prosperous trading town on the Volga during the 19th century. During the Russian Civil War of 1918-21, the Reds had triumphed decisively at Tsaritsyn. Though Stalins portion to the Reds success was not very significant, Stalin named the city after himself when he achieved supreme power in 1925. Subsequently, Stalins role in the victory of 1920 was enhanced through propaganda, and soon it was Stalin was formally recognized for his crucial role in both the October Revolution of 1917 and triumph of 1927.Thus, Stalingrad came to be strongly associated with Stalin and Russian Revolution, a occurrence that added an important psychological dimension in showdown between Hitlers and Stalins forces in the battle of Stalingrad. By 1941, Stalingrad was a city of 600,000 p eople. It had contend an important role in Stalins industrial drive of the 1930s and is location on the Volga ensured that it was a significant player in the Soviet war economy. Hitler had set his sight on Stalingrad because it was a valuable political, economic, communications and psychological objective.From the Soviet perspective, Stalingrad was important not only as a major industrial center but also as the major connecting point to any operations in the Caucasus.Hitler †the Red Army’s biggest allyThe disaster for Germans at Stalingrad did not bring about immediate defeat of Germany, but, after February, 1943, few German officers really believed in victory. The confidence of Hitler himself could not be shaken so easily, of course, one would think. The defeat at Stalingrad drastically widened the rupture of believe between Hitler and the army high command, which began at the battle of Moscow in December 1941.The German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 was a hea vy psychological mess to the Wehrmacht and to the Germany people who were accustomed to victory. It raised the beginning(a) widespread doubts about Hitlers leading and the readiness of Germany to win the war. After Stalingrad, Hitler himself was rarely seen in public and his outward behavior became relatively muted. In the mid-1942 the Germany army had already seemed to be in a more low-keyed condition as compared to its irrepressible aggressiveness an year ago.The new Fall Blau (Case Blue) offensive was intended to be a recommencement of the stalled invasion of Russia. Despite Hitlers optimism, the 1941 Campaign †which undetermined along a 2,000 kilometer front and involved 148 combat divisions †failed to shatter Russia â€Å"to its root with one blow. â€Å"… The summer campaign of 1942, although lull immense, was necessarily less ambitious. (Hayward 7) Overriding his generals, Hitler gave the offensive two separate objectives on 90-degree different axe s †the Caucasus oilfields and the Volga crossing at Stalingrad.Fall Blau was deeply blemished by ambiguity of strategic aim. Further, Hitlers amateur attempts to control the deployment of his forces and his opportunistic changes of mind contend an important part in whippy the campaign. For Hitler, Stalingrad had become the main objective of German effort; it was an obsession. Hitler was an amateurish strategist with an unshakeable opinion in his own genius, which no facts from the real world could really affect. His campaigns were foredoomed by grand-strategic misjudgment, a prime example of which is his ‘no retreat insurance policy in Russian from Stalingrad to Berlin.In Hitlers view the summer offensive of 1942 should bring about a final decision in the Russian campaign with the capture of Stalingrad on the Volga and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, and by occupying the oilfields in the Caucasus. The outskirts of Stalingrad were reached in venerable 1942, with the Ge rmany forces already weakened, but the battle stuck in street and house-to-house fighting. Hitlers front commanders did pass water how much of a gamble the offensives towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus were.They harbored fears about the military capabilitys of the Russian reserves, and the weakness of the diverging German thrusts, dependent as they were for flank egis on the ill-equipped armies of Hungary, Italy and Romania. Most of them felt up that Hitlers tendency to underestimate the Russians was becoming dangerous. His leadership displayed a total lack of any understanding of the command machinery and its function. Colonel-General von Kleist warned Hitler against using the Hungarians, Italians and Romanians as flank protectors for the 6th Army during its struggle for Stalingrad, but the Fuhrer would not listen.The Stalingrad sequel †a German perspectiveThe battle at Stalingrad was a vicious, close-quarter, street fighting. The 6th Army, commanded by Paulus, slogged o n street by street, its flank shelter entrusted by Hitler to Romanian troops. Pauluss units were decimated at the rate of 20,000 casualties a hebdomad. By the end of October, however, only one tenth of Stalingrad still held out, in the north of the city. But the balance of strength was changing. The earlier German superiority had gone. Stalingrad was the first priority for Russian reserves.Sufficient Russian troops were sent into the city to keep the fight going on there. As more Soviet troops were sent into the city, the fighting began to be a block-by-block slogging match, moving back and forth in bloody fighting. straining losses for both sides characterized the street fighting. In advance(prenominal) November, the winter came. The temperatures would soon reach thirty below zero. In the midway of that month, Hitler sent Paulus a message urging one last effort to pure(a) the capture of Stalingrad. By mid-November the Russians were strong plenty to undertake a major offensive .They had 11 armies, several mechanized, cavalry and tank corps, 900 tanks, 1,115 aircraft for the offensive. The were all set to destroy the German forces at Stalingrad (Hoyt 160). Generals Zhukov and Chuikov directed the defense of Stalingrad. Eremenko was also sent to command the Stalingrad front. Hitler staked more and more on Stalingrad’s capture, but Chuikovs 62 Army refused to yield. On 19 November 1942, the Russian counter-strike forces under Zhukov smashed through the Romanians and on 22 November completed their encirclement of Pauluss 6th Army.On November 23 Moscow announced triumphantly that Russian forces had a great victory in the bend of the Don, and that the Germans were now entrapped in Stalingrad. That word convulsed the world… By November 28 the weigh ring around Stalingrad had closed. (Hoyt 205) This was when a new deteriorating phase opened in Hitlers transaction with his generals †that of his utter refusal to face the realities of defeat, o f inferior sources, and of the limits to even the German Soldier’s powers of survival and fighting skill.Hitler saw himself as an essential military genius and blamed the incompetency and lack of willpower of his generals, or their disloyalty to their fuehrer, for all the failures of the German army on its mordant path back to Berlin in the issue of Stalingrad. The Russian attacks fell on creaky held sectors north and south of the city, manned primarily by Romanian forces in the north and by a mixture of further Romanians and units of the 4th Panzer Army in the south. The Russian plan was simply to encircle all of the German forces in the Stalingrad area.The Russians soon stony-broke through the thin defenses, particularly in the north. The 6th Army at Stalingrad was in serious danger. Decisive action at that time could have saved the situation for the Germans, however. If some units were sent north and south to hold the Russians while the bulk of the 6th army withdrew from the ruins of Stalingrad, it would have been saved. The catastrophe that ultimately overtook German army at Stalingrad in February 1943 stemmed largely from Hitlers refusal to sanction an early break-out before the Russian ring could be consolidated.Hitler ordered Paulus and his men to remain in Stalingrad as a forward ‘fortress until the avocation spring. When the Russians closed the ring on 23 November, Paulus was cut off. General von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, the most superior of the corps commanders at Stalingrad, urged Paulus to withdraw without delay before escape became impossible. But Paulus, obedient to his Fuehrer, refused to listen to him. From then on the Germans descended into catastrophe slowly. On January 8 1943 the Russians sent Paulus an ultimatum, go the alternative of honorable surrender or complete annihilation.Consulting Hitler, Paulus refused to surrender again. The Russians continued their attack. They move on from west to east, pressing the Germans b ack into the city. They captured half(a) of the pocked in the first week and then again paused to demand surrender. Again, Paulus consulted Hitler and refused. As long as there was still some hope for at to the lowest degree part of 6th Army breakage out, von Manstein, who commanded the relief efforts, supported Hitler in insistence that Paulus must continue to resist.By 22 January, when the Russians had captured 6th Army’s only stay airfield, Manstein supported Pauluss request for permission to surrender, which Hitler refused. By the end of the month, it was nearly all over for Germans. Only a few units held out until February 1. On the 2 February 1943, the momentous battle of Stalingrad came to an end.ReferencesErickson, John & Erickson, Ljubica. â€Å"Hitler Versus Stalin: The Second world War on the Eastern Front in Photographs. ” London : Carlton Books, 2004.Gilbert, Martin. â€Å"The Second World War: A Complete History.” immature York : Henry Ho lt and Company, 1989.Hayward, Joel S. A. â€Å"Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitlers foiling in the East, 1942-1943. ” Lawrence, KS : University of Kansas Press, 2001.Horner, D. M. & Jukes, Geoffrey. â€Å"The Second World War (5) The Eastern Front 1941-1945. ” Oxford : sea eagle Publishing, 2002.Hoyt, Edwin P. â€Å"199 Days: The Battle for Stalingrad. ” New York : act upon Books, 1993.Zaloga, Steven & Volstad, Ronald. â€Å"The Red Army of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45” (Men-at-Arms). Oxford : Osprey Publishing, 1984.\r\n'