The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most tragic battles in World War II and even in the history of human warfare. The battle, known as the "bloodiest in history," involved 2 million casualties. The average survival time of recruits sent to the front line between the Soviets and Germans did not exceed 24 hours, and the number of officers was 3 days.
How fierce was the battle at the Battle of Stalingrad? It is no longer a trench war, but countless battles for broken houses. A house that the Soviets and Germans could fight for dozens of times. You come and go, you attack and defend; so much so that a joke that was widely circulated within the Soviet army at that time was: "We have occupied the kitchen, but the living room is still in the hands of the enemy!" ”
The 62nd Army, the main force of the Soviet garrison, was reinforced by 24 divisions and 16 brigades. But the total strength has never exceeded 60,000 people. The entire Battlefield of Stalingrad was like a monster with a big mouth open in a basin of blood, and after 1 division was put into battle, it was destroyed in 3 days.
A German officer said that on the battlefield, groups of Russians poured into German positions behind tanks. Pieces of corn fell on both sides, and how many people instantly turned into incomplete corpses, which was the most brutal battle. For example, the front-line unit of the German 94th Infantry Division, where he was located, only had 535 men left.
The greatest success of the Battle of Stalingrad was the total annihilation of the German 6th Army. The German 6th Army was the core main force of the German army in both the Polish and French battles. In the Soviet-German theater of 1942, the 6th Army was the largest campaign group in the German army.
After continuous reinforcement, the German 6th Army has reached 430,000 people, more than 20 elite field divisions, and most of the soldiers are veterans of the German army's painstaking training and training. Most of the members were 20-27 years old and were the best part of the German army. Moreover, on average, 5 people were the backbone of the Nazi Party. It is precisely because of this that the total annihilation of the German 6th Army will become a turning point in the Soviet-German battlefield. The Germans no longer had the capacity and time to build the 2nd 6th Army.
The key to this battle was that in the final counteroffensive, the Soviet army gathered absolute superiority. Consisting of more than 1 million Soviet troops with 4 tank corps, 3 mechanized corps and 14 tank brigades as the core, 13,500 artillery and mortars, and more than 100 Katyusha rocket artillery companies.
The focus of the breakthrough was on the German flanks of the Romanian army positions, and the Romanian army's fortifications were poorly constructed, only three to five miles deep. No German reserves were found in the area, nor were there any signs of a change of deployment. The Soviets broke through the Romanian positions and encircled the elite German main force from both flanks.
On the battlefield, the German flank, with 8 infantry divisions and 2 cavalry divisions of the Romanian 3rd Army, controlled an area of about a hundred miles long. Also, the Italian 8th Army served as the left wing. The Romanian defense of tanks was dominated by the 37 mm guns eliminated by the Germans. It was useless to use this gun against soviet KV tanks and T34 tanks.
The German tactic was a pincer offensive, which simply meant being able to circumvent it, and then, with the cooperation of the Air Force, the spearhead of the large-scale mechanized division of the attack was used to quickly penetrate the weak points of the enemy's defense line, go around the rear of the enemy army and then make dumplings.
The Battle of Stalingrad was a move forward by the Germans through Stalingrad, encircling the main Soviet forces and seizing the large oil field in Baku. However, the Germans encountered a hard nail in the battlefield of Stalingrad. In the end, these German troops were regrouped by the main Soviet army, and the dumplings were directly wrapped from the two wings of the large tank cluster.
Stalingrad was certainly a turning point in the Second World War, as well as a psychological and political one. The Victory of the Soviets at Stalingrad greatly increased their confidence. Conversely, confidence in Hitler's leadership among Germany's satellite and neutral nations began to decline, especially in Mussolini.