World War II lasted a full six years.
At first, Nazi Germany sang generously and overwhelmingly, and occupied most of Europe.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany tore up the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact and brazenly invaded the Soviet Union, intending to take the land guarded by General Winter and the military career of the French Emperor Napoleon, who had ruined the European icon.
Although, during the period of its march into the Soviet Union, Germany also suffered heavy losses in Moscow and Leningrad.
However, they achieved great success, occupying more than 1.5 million square kilometers of Soviet territory in just half a year, controlling nearly half of the Soviet Union's population and most of the industrial area.
However, the Germans were not always unstoppable, and the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in the summer of 1942, became the starting point for the collapse of the German fascist army.
By February 1, 1943, the Germans could no longer find their former invincibility, and Zeitzler, the chief of staff of the Army in Nazi Germany, even said:
"After this battle, our backbones on the entire Eastern Front have been broken."
In this 7-month campaign, what made the Germans so afraid, and why it became a turning point in the entire World War II.
01
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and its vassal states launched the "Barbarossa Plan", invaded the Soviet Union, and the Soviet-German War broke out, and the German army quickly occupied a large part of the western part of the Soviet Union. On September 30 of the same year, soldiers arrived in Moscow.
The over-depleted German army suffered a severe blow under The city of Moscow and was counter-attacked in parts of the city due to the lack of war equipment and stable supply lines for the winter, and due to a sudden drop in temperature one night, the German mechanized forces were completely unusable.
The Defense of Moscow
The fact that the Germans did not win the battle did not mean that their offensive against the Soviet Union was over.
In early 1942, when both the Soviets and Germans were rested and adjusted, a larger battle was ready to be fought.
In view of the heavy losses of the German Army Group Center in the Battle of Moscow, and the intention to continue to attack Moscow was too obvious, Hitler chose to temporarily abandon the Soviet capital Moscow for the time being and attack Stalingrad, the southern stronghold of the Soviet Union.
Stalingrad is located at the confluence of the Volga and Don rivers, with convenient shipping, highly developed railway transportation, and a high degree of industrialization in the city.
Stalingrad
Geographically, it is even more possible to go north to Moscow, which is the fuehrer's heart, and south to the Caucasus region, which is extremely rich in grain, oil, and coal resources, not to mention that Stalingrad has a very special political significance.
As a city named after the Soviet presidency, its attribution would have a great impact on the morale of both the Soviets and Germans. Thus, Hitler mobilized almost all of his forces on the Eastern Front and pounced on Stalingrad.
In 1942, the German High Command laid down a summer southern battle plan code-named "Operation Blue". The original Southern Army Group was abolished, and two new army groups, A and B, were formed.
Army Group A attacked the lower Don city of Rostov, and Army B attacked the upper Don city of Voronezh, and the two armies would attack Stalingrad from the north and south, and it was bound to take it in one fell swoop.
As for the Soviets, they also drew up a battle plan against the Germans at this time, but they felt that Hitler would not let Moscow go so easily, so they chose to deploy troops mainly in Moscow and the southern region. The soldiers of the Red Army, who had been rested and regained their strength, were not willing to wait only to defend the city.
Timoshenko
Under the leadership of Marshal Timoshenko, the Southwestern front and the southern front of the Soviet Red Army launched a counter-offensive against Germany, hoping to retake Kharkov, the second largest city in Ukraine, from their hands, and the prelude to the defense of Stalingrad, the Defense of Kharkov officially began.
02
On May 12, 1942, the Red Army marched into Kharkov, and at first they were invincible. However, on 23 May, german reinforcements bypassed the gap in the Strength of the Soviet Front, and after completing the encirclement with the defenders in the city, the situation of the Soviet Army took a sharp turn for the worse.
By 29 May, when the Soviets had declared defeat at the Battle of Kharkov, they had lost 250,000 troops, including two lieutenant generals and one admiral. The victory at Kharkov boosted the morale of the German army, and their offensive in the upper and lower reaches of the Don River became increasingly unstoppable.
Hitler
Seeing the victory of his troops, Hitler decided to strike iron while it was hot, preparing to concentrate all the troops scattered in the upper and lower reaches of the Don River and attack Stalingrad.
On July 2, 1942, Army Group B, which was about to attack Voronezh, attacked Stalingrad directly south under Hitler's orders. On 9 July, Army Group A also intensified its offensive in the lower Don.
Only when the Soviets were burning their eyebrows did they fully understand the intentions of the German army. On the basis of the original Southwestern Front, the Stalingrad Front was formed, and they wanted to defend Stalingrad as they defended Leningrad.
On July 17, 1942, the German army pressed the border and headed for Stalingrad, their armored forces were in the vast plains of the Soviet Union, and the soviet troops who met the enemy fled almost all the way back to Stalingrad.
Stalin
Furious at the collapse of his army, Stalin dismissed Marshal Timoshenko, who had made the wrong decision, and issued Order No. 227, stating that any soldier who disobeyed the order and left the combat post, or who withdrew, would be severely punished.
At the same time, he also sternly demanded that the Red Army troops of the Soviet Union should never take a step back. However, the decree could only affect the soldiers, and the situation was still tilted in favor of the Soviet Union.
On 28 July, Rostov fell. On 19 August, the main force attacking Stalingrad, the Sixth Army of the German B Army, approached the city of Stalingrad. On the 22nd, the Germans forcibly crossed the Don River. The next day, the front line of the two armies was pushed to the northern outskirts of Stalingrad.
On the 5th, 6th, and 10th of September, the Germans repelled three consecutive Soviets preparing for hasty counterattacks, and the Soviets had to continue to retreat. By the 12th, the Soviets had retreated to the city of Stalingrad.
On the same day, Hitler flew to the Eastern Front and gave the Sixth Army the order to attack the city the following day. On the 13th, the Germans began to attack the city.
Before officially entering the city of Stalingrad, Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army, let the German air force perform a performance, and successive air raids blew Stalingrad to ruins. Soviet reinforcements on the volga river were also pinned down by them.
At this time, the Germans felt that they were only one step away from taking Stalingrad, but it was this small step that exhausted all the Germans and made them bleed.
As soon as the Germans entered Stalingrad, they felt something strange, because the ruins they passed began to speak Russian and set off cold guns. They naively thought that their aircraft cannons would scare the Soviets.
In fact, the ruins became the best bunkers for the Red Army, who were going to fight until the last streets of the city fell and the last soldiers who defended the city were killed.
In the words of an officer in the Sixth Army, Hansdel:
"Stalingrad was a fierce battle between the enemy and us for every house, workshop, water tower, railway embankment, even for a wall, a basement and every pile of rubble."
The armored forces that the Germans were proud of were useless on the city's narrow roads. In contact with the Soviet army, even if they had the upper hand in equipment, it was difficult to compete with the Soviet army, which was familiar with the terrain and was mysterious.
The battle between the two sides was extremely intense, and there were gunshots and battles in every street, every factory and even every room in every building.
The Germans who invaded the city died countless deaths, the Soviet Red Army was also full of corpses, and the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory, which was once the industrial star in Stalingrad, became an arsenal at this time, relying on poor rations, the workers produced 12 hours a day, sent countless machine guns, shells, tanks to the front, and sometimes even did not care about painting.
Enraged to see the Soviet people so complete and bloodthirsty, the Nazis brought in more heavy weapons and clamored to wipe Stalingrad off the map, and the Red Army defenses in the city still used the rubble to fight.
Soldiers under the city stills
In addition, Soviet snipers were very successful in using the ruins as cover, inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans.
One of the most successful snipers, Zikan, had killed 224 enemies by November 20, 1942, and thus became the prototype for Vasily Zaitsev, the protagonist of the Hollywood film "Soldiers In the City.".
The battle had long since gone beyond its strategic significance, and both Stalin and Hitler had repeatedly stressed that the battle must be won, and both sides had given everything they could, and Stalingrad had become a meat grinder, and the survival time of soldiers was calculated in hours.
After three months of bloody alleys, Stalingrad became a sea of corpses, and although the Germans successfully occupied almost 80% of Stalingrad's land, they did not feel the joy of victory, only the cold like the weather.
03
The reckless and stubborn resistance of the Soviets was not reckless or stubborn, they needed to delay the time inside the city, let General Zhukov gather his forces outside the city, and then break through the weak periphery of the enemy army and surround this Sixth Army inside Stalingrad, annihilating them all like prey.
On November 19, 1942, the Red Army began Operation Uranus. Vatutin's Southwestern Front and Rokossovsky's Don Front launched a counterattack in the snow, and the Romanian 3rd Army, which was responsible for defending the flank of the German 6th Army, was absolutely inferior in numbers and lacked good equipment, and the positions of the Romanian 3rd Army were breached by the Soviet Red Army within only one day of the start of the battle.
On November 30, 1942, the 3rd Front of the Soviet Red Army surrounded 5 corps and 22 divisions of the German 6th Army, Romanian and Italian troops, and part of the Croatian army in an area of about 270,000 square kilometers of Stalingrad, and only about 50,000 troops of the 6th Army were divided out of the encirclement.
Seeing that his Sixth Army had become the turtle in the urn, Hitler hurriedly sent one of his men, General Manstein, to his aid.
But the Overwhelmingly Superior Red Army had already encircled Stalingrad into an iron wall, and unless the Sixth Army also set out to break through, even General Manstein could do nothing.
Manstein
Unfortunately, paulus, the commander of the Sixth Army, was a coward who did not dare to disobey Hitler's orders or continue the battle with the Red Army.
In January 1943, the Soviets took the German troops stationed in Rostov 250 kilometers away from Stalingrad, cutting off the possibility of the Sixth Army's last support.
On 22 January, the Soviets occupied the airfield of the old Menrak, and the Sixth Army, which had lost its air force, was completely left alone, and Paulus repeatedly asked for surrender, but Hitler refused.
On 30 January, Hitler even awarded him the scepter of the German Field Marshal and told him that the Marshal of Germany had not yet surrendered in history, forcing him to fight to the end. However, military orders are still inferior to human nature.
Paulus
On 31 January, after the Soviets captured the German headquarters, Paulus surrendered. The next day, he sent a final telegram to Berlin in the name of the Sixth Army, and by this time the battle of Stalingrad had settled.
A German officer who witnessed the battle said: "Stalingrad is no longer a city, but a murderous stove ... The streets here are no longer counted in meters, but in corpses. ”
The war was brutal, almost a victory made with blood. Although the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad was good, its course was terribly bloodied.
Although the Red Army was victorious at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Union still suffered higher losses than the Germans. The German army, which lost the initiative, was destroyed step by step in the subsequent battles, and the Soviet people who defended their homeland were forever recorded in history, and the city is still known as the Hero City.