The Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II and the bloodiest battle in the entire history of World War II and in modern world history: the total number of casualties on both sides in the 199-day campaign was estimated to be more than 2 million. The number of people involved in the campaign was also greater than in other battles in history. At 3:00 a.m. on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and its vassals gathered 190 divisions of 5.5 million men, 4,900 aircraft, 3,700 tanks, 47,000 cannons, and 190 warships to launch a surprise attack on the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg from the north, center, and south.
Within 18 days of the start of the war, the Germans had penetrated 600 kilometers of Soviet territory. On the first day of the fighting alone, the Red Army lost 1200 aircraft (800 of which were destroyed before they could take off). In the month or so since the start of the war, the Soviet Union has lost thousands of aircraft, more than 20,000 tanks, more than three million Soviet soldiers have been captured, and more than a hundred divisions have been maimed or annihilated by the Germans! The Germans seized 1,710 cities and more than 70,000 villages and towns in the Soviet Union, penetrated more than 1,000 kilometers into the Soviet Union, and lived in the territory occupied by the German army, where 40% of the population of the Soviet Union at that time lived.
The Soviet Union also lost 63% of the country's coal, 58% of its steel production capacity and 41% of its railway lines, 60% of its aluminium and 80% of its copper-manganese production areas were occupied by the Germans, and as many as 31,850 industrial and mining enterprises were destroyed. By September 30, 1941, the Germans had concentrated 74 and a half divisions of about 1.93 million men, supported by 1,700 tanks and 11,000 artillery pieces, to launch the Battle against moscow, the Soviet capital, and the German vanguard could even see the tip of the Kremlin. The German command once thought that the Soviets had lost their combat effectiveness.
However, the German army, which had been over-consumed on the long front, had begun to show fatigue due to the lack of war equipment and stable supply lines to cope with the winter. In sharp contrast, the Soviets were swearing to die under Moscow in a battle against the Germans. By January 1942 the Soviets had crushed the German offensive against Moscow. After the failure of the attack on Moscow, Hitler decided to shift the main direction of the attack to the southwest. The long Soviet-German front was relatively stable in early 1942, but both sides were preparing for a larger campaign.
By this time the Germans were no longer able to launch a full-scale offensive. General Halder, chief of the German Army General Staff at the time, proposed another offensive against the Soviet capital, Moscow, but Hitler believed that the target was too obvious. By this time the German Army Group Center had been greatly weakened, so Hitler believed that the German army should abandon its plan to attack Moscow again. Hitler's eyes were set on a city called Stalingrad on the west bank of the lower Volga. Stalingrad is a city named after Soviet leader Stalin.
Stalingrad was originally named Tsaritsin. During the Russian Civil War, Stalin emerged in the battle to defend Tsaritsyn. In 1925, Tsaritsyn, stalin's birthplace, was renamed Stalingrad. If the Germans could capture the city, named after Soviet leader Stalin, it would undoubtedly be a great blow to the morale of the Soviet military and civilians. Stalingrad was an important port on the Volga River, the most important inland waterway of the Soviet Union, and also a railway transportation hub in the south of the Soviet Union, not to mention that Stalingrad was an important industrial city with large military factories.
Not only is Stalingrad strategic in itself of great strategic importance, but the strategic value of the surrounding areas cannot be underestimated: west of and south of Stalingrad is the vast and fertile lower Don basin and the Caucasus region. This vast area was an important source of strategic materials such as grain, oil, and coal in the Soviet Union. By the summer of 1942 the Germans were approaching Stalingrad in all directions. The Germans sent 40 divisions and more than 1,000 warplanes to drop more than 1 million bombs at Stalingrad before launching an all-out offensive against Stalingrad.
The whole city was almost razed to the ground by the indiscriminate bombardment of the Germans, but then the Soviets and the Germans engaged in fierce street battles: street by street, building by building, ruin by ruin... Hitler's side was determined to win, and Stalin's side was dead set on letting go. On July 28, 1942 Stalin issued Order No. 227 of the National Defense Council: the defenders of Stalingrad were not allowed to take a step back. When the Germans gradually invaded the city, the Soviet army was reduced to pieces and fortified.
The Soviets used street buildings as fortifications to engage the Germans in a large-scale street battle. Most of the civilians in the city had been relocated before this, but those who remained in the city also chose to fight with the soldiers. More than 40,000 Soviet citizens were killed in a week of street fighting in the urban area. The city, now renamed Volgograd, has left too many sites commemorating the battle. The most famous of the war sites in Volgograd is the Pavlov Building. The Pavlov Building was just an ordinary staff quarter before World War II.
During the Battle of Stalingrad, the building was held by the Soviets as an important point of fire: a Soviet sergeant named Yakov Pavlov held the building for 58 days with 24 fighters from different nationalities in the Soviet Union and more than 30 people who stayed behind to help their civilians face germans several times larger than their own and the other side's powerful heavy firepower. The Pavlov Building is just an ordinary staff quarter, not a sturdy bunker. Even a bunker was vulnerable to the Germans with their mighty firepower.
The Germans could also send air forces to bomb it, and only 54 people (30 of whom were civilians with little combat experience) were guarding the building. But Pavlov and others were still tenacious about the building for 58 days. After the war, the Soviet government rebuilt the building and named it the "Pavlov Building". In fact, the Battle of Pavlov Building was a microcosm of the Battle of Stalingrad and the entire Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union: from these people, we can see what kind of spirit and morale the local Soviets were at that time.
The Germans could see the streets and buildings of Stalingrad, but they just couldn't occupy the city. Whenever the Germans occupied a building, the Soviets immediately launched a counterattack to retake it. In the face of stubborn resistance from the Soviets, the Germans had to admit that Stalingrad was near, but at the same time it was far away. Occasionally, soldiers of the two armies on the glued battlefield looked up and saw a cluster of white lilies blooming in the air beyond the ruins, wreckage, and smoke. This lily made the Soviet soldiers more excited, but it made the German soldiers more desperate.
800,000 women fought during the Great Patriotic War. At that time, female soldiers in other countries of the world were mainly responsible for logistics, medical care, etc.; in contrast, Soviet female soldiers were widely distributed in various units of the army: they could be seen by the wounded, they could be seen by digging trenches, they could be seen in trucks, they could be seen by operating cannons, and even female soldiers could be seen in pilots. Lilia, the first female pilot in Soviet history to shoot down an enemy aircraft, had taken off and fought 168 times and shot down 12 enemy aircraft alone by 1943.
The Soviet Air Force ace pilot's name is pronounced similar to "lily" in Russian, so she drew two clusters of lilies on her own fighter jet. The Germans therefore nicknamed her "The White Rose Over Stalingrad." Lilia even shot down a German ace pilot with a record of 35 air victories in one battle. On August 1, 1943, Lilia was killed in the air by eight German fighters, but she managed to shoot down one enemy plane before being shot down.
According to official Soviet statistics after the war, the average survival time of Soviet soldiers in the Battlefield of Stalingrad was less than one day, and the lifespan of each officer on the battlefield did not exceed seven days. There are 40,000 civilians killed in the war, and nearly 100,000 prisoners of war killed. These are still extremely incomplete statistics in the face of fierce battles. After the war, Stalingrad was full of ruins and walls. There is not a single complete house in the city, and there is not an inch of flat land outside the city. The Soviet 62nd Group, which defended the city, put in reinforcements around the campaign with a total of 2 corps, 24 divisions, 16 brigades, 40 regiments, and 20 battalions.
However, the total number of this army group never exceeded 60,000. An established division went up to the top for three days and disappeared. A soldier of an infantry division of the Red Army who participated in the Battle of Stalingrad wrote in his diary: "German planes swarmed, and enemy shells exploded around them. Under such intense artillery fire, even a sparrow could not survive. The comrades were besieged for three days. With no drinking water and no food, we had to find broken utensils to pick up our own urine to quench our thirst. The corners of our mouths are blistering."
The state of the German army was not much better than the embarrassing situation of the Soviet army. The street battles in Stalingrad were called a dogfight by soldiers on both sides: many houses had mostly collapsed, but soldiers on both sides were still fighting in houses that could collapse at any moment. One of the most memorable words of the German soldiers in the street battle was: "We occupied the living room, but the bathroom is still under control." A German soldier recalled: "There was no battlefield rescue after a comrade was wounded. Even a field doctor could not distinguish between the enemy and the enemy and could not reach the front line. Even when they were on the front lines, there was no rescue and treatment."
The Battle of Stalingrad was known for the casualties caused by the disregard of the soldiers and civilians on both sides. Civilians who did not have time to evacuate Stalingrad before the war had to hide in sewers, basements or caves on the outskirts. These unarmed elderly people, women and children had to run out of their hiding places between bombing and shelling because of a lack of food. They would cut some rotten flesh from dead warhorses to fill their hunger, and they would catch rats, bugs, and so on.
Hunger allows children to venture to German or Soviet quartermaster warehouses to steal. Thousands of children were shot and killed during the Battle of Stalingrad. The German Sixth Army, besieged after Christmas in December 1942, ran out of ammunition. The soldiers received less than 200 grams of bread a day. Since the clothes have not been changed for months, everyone is covered with fleas. German soldiers were either frozen to death or crippled that winter, and many of the frozen-mad men stripped naked and rolled in the snow. Because the corpses everywhere were fed to rats, soldiers often had their ears and fingers bitten off in their sleep.