Hell Furnace September 13, 1942 - February 2, 1943 - The Battle of Stalingrad (CD-ROM Version of Major Battles of World War II)

Author: (English) Stephen Walsh
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century: In this large-scale battle fought along the Volga River, the Nazi German army was defeated by the Soviet army. Just a few months earlier, the Soviet army had been on the brink of being annihilated by the Germans. The Battle of Stalingrad began on September 13, 1942, and lasted until February 2, 1943, ending with the final surrender of the German army. Unlike the situation in the Battle of Berlin in April 1945. During the Battle of Stalingrad, the forces opposing the Soviet army were not a severely understrength and elderly/adolescent army, but a highly elite force of up to 300,000 soldiers—the German 6th Army, commanded by the beloved general of Hitler, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. Stalingrad was both a strong fortress where the Soviet army gradually regained its strength and a spiritual graveyard for the German army, which was increasingly declining. Although it took three more years to completely defeat Nazi Germany, it was precisely at Stalingrad that the scales of war began to tilt against the German army on the Eastern Front. Of course, the catastrophic failure at Stalingrad did not immediately lead to the complete collapse of the German army, but after February 1943, few German officers still harbored much hope for victory. On the other hand, for Hitler, even if he privately might have been very worried that the victory on the Eastern Front would gradually slip away from his hands, he still believed that the soldiers' firm determination and their fanatical loyalty to the Nazi Party were the decisive factors in winning the war. For the Germans, since the defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon in the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, the failure at Stalingrad was the only time they suffered such a heavy defeat. Now, the German army faced an enemy determined to take revenge after gradually recovering from the brutal war, while the war they were fighting was one with no hope of winning. For the Soviets, the victory at Stalingrad marked their successful survival from the nightmare of the German invasion that began on June 22, 1941. At 3:15 a.m. on June 22, 1941, the German army launched an unprecedented military offensive—the "Barbarossa" operation—the scale of the forces involved, the scale of the operations, and the brutality of the war were unprecedented. "Barbarossa" was the racial war launched by Hitler to secure "living space" in the East. If successful, Germany would still be able to obtain the agricultural and economic resources needed for the war even under an Allied blockade, laying the foundation for Germany to achieve its grand goal of a "Thousand-Year Reich." At the same time, through this large-scale war, Hitler intended to completely destroy his ideological enemy—Soviet socialism. Hitler believed that the Soviet Union had been infiltrated by international Jews and would eventually fall under Jewish control. Additionally, in Hitler's eyes, after destroying the Soviet Union, the fervent and warlike British Prime Minister Churchill would be forced to acknowledge Germany's control over Europe as a fait accompli, thereby making peace with Germany. In the "Barbarossa" operation, the German army successfully employed its skillful tactics, but as Hitler had hoped, it did not achieve a decisive victory over the Soviet Union through a single battle. Why did Germany, which had achieved great victories from September 1939 to November 1941, fail to achieve a comprehensive victory in the war against the Soviet Union by the end of 1941? It is astonishing that many of the reasons for Germany's failure on the Eastern Front were vividly proven at Stalingrad, with the fundamental reason lying in the operational methods of the German army, namely the well-known "blitzkrieg" tactics. The German army's understanding of strategy stemmed from the 19th-century concept of achieving strategic military victory through a single battle. Under this concept, the German army believed that by leveraging its tactical advantages to destroy the enemy's army in a specific battle, it could achieve a strategic military victory and thereby achieve the political objectives of the war. In the 1920s and 1930s, the German army drew rich lessons from World War I, but it refused to accept the fact that the famous "Schlieffen Plan" implemented by Germany in 1914 had failed not because of tactical flaws in its execution, but because the plan itself was unrealistic—unless the United Kingdom and France