Battle of Stalingrad

Introduction

The Battle of Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in the Second World War and marked one of its few major turning points . It was certainly the most decisive battle in the "Great Patriotic War " or the Second World War on the Eastern front . The battle lasted from 13 September 1942 until the final German surrender on 2 February 1943 . A few months earlier , the Russian Red Army seemed to be on the verge of complete defeat and Hitler 's evil war machine seemed irresistible . Though the German retreat from Moscow nine

months earlier brought a much needed respite to the Russians , it did not bring any real hope . At Stalingrad , however , the tide turned dramatically . In the titanic struggle that raged on the shores of the River Volga , the German Wehrmacht faced a crushing and humiliating defeat from which it never managed to recover . To the Germans , Stalingrad was the single most catastrophic defeat ever surpassing 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 victory ever , it represented a great symbol of hope , the triumph of Russian spirit over the most gruesome adversity that had fallen on them since the German invasion in June 1941

The War on the Eastern Front was a particularly brutal and destructive war , even by Second World War standards , unprecedented in its ferocity and lack of any moral constraint . This barbarized warfare exacted an immense death toll of 27-28 million people on the Soviet side , a majority of them being civilians . According to one estimate , each minute of this war cost 9-10 lives , each hour 587 , each day 14 ,000 for a of 1 ,418 days . The unleashing of the "naked power of evil " that Hitler stood for resulted in untold pain and inconsolable grief for the people of Soviet Union , but it also provoked their indomitable fighting spirit that eventually led them to a great triumph . That fighting spirit fully asserted itself at Stalingrad . However , more than Russian valor , the chief cause for the Russian victory at Stalin was Hitler 's ineptness

2 . Stalin - the biggest enemy of the Red Army

In 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 debilitated condition of the Red Army was the ruthless purging undertaken by Stalin in late 1930s . A devastatingly large number of officers (estimated around 35 ,000 , many of them belonging 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 Great Patriotic War Thus weakened , the Soviet army initially presented no effective opposition to the German onslaught in mid-1941

The Germans considered the Red army ill-suited to modern , mechanized warfare , so much...