At Stalingrad the imitative appears to be slowly shifting into the hands of the Russians…The Russian attack was reported to be growing in vigor and German counterthrusts were repulsed with heavy losses.
The most devilish Hell on the 2,000-mile front was the battleground before Stalingrad, in the dusty, 50-mile-wide bottleneck between the Don and the Volga. After two months’ furious fighting, the great German offensive begun on June 28 approached its climax.
A short article explaining the significance of Stalingrad to Stalin (aside from its name) and the battle that took place there 24 years earlier during the revolution – when the city was called Tsaritsyn.
– two books from Amazon: KEY WORDS: Marshall Zhukov Berlin Campaign 1945,soviet army assault on berlin 1945,soviet onslaught 1945,soviet
When 22 divisions were cut off by the Russians at the gates of Stalingrad, the Nazis had to rely on air transport for contact with the surrounded troops. One mid-December day a German cargo plane was shot down on its way from the ringed divisions. The wreckage yielded some three hundred letters from doomed soldier of der Fuehrer. The Soviets selected and published a typical one:
It is hard to confess even to myself, but it seems to me that at Stalingrad we shall soon win ourselves to death.
Click here to read an assessment of the late-war German soldier…
Soviet counterblows have thrown the Germans back in some places in the Stalingrad area. The early communique announced today that several of the city’s streets were recaptured in bloody hand-to-hand battles.
The Red Army crossed the Don River at three points and advanced spearheads upwards of ten miles to the south of the Stalingrad Axis seige army, threatening it with more strict encirclement and at the time moving the key city of Caucacus. Moscow dispatches stressed the importance of this action which apparently swings a considerable weight along the railroad toward Rostov.
A Red Army officer, who said the German Army was being constantly harassed behind its lines by partizan activities and guerilla warfare, told me details of a number of recent incidents in White Russia. He said almost every village in German-occupied territory had supplied one or more groups of partizans who lived in the woods and used every opportunity to waylay detachments of infantry patrols and tanks.
The Russians shot down 18 enemy planes over Kuban on Sunday. Moscow estimated German plane losses on all fronts for the week ending Saturday at 381 against 134 Russian planes.
