“The Russians today apparently had stopped the German advance beyond Kharkov and had even regained the initiative on some sectors of the Donets. The turn of the tide came in Chuguyev, a town on the Donets River some 20 miles southeast of Kharkov. Yesterday the German radio said that Russin forces ‘encircled’ there had failed in attempts to break out.”
“Flags of two new kinds are flying in the city – white flags displayed by the panic-stricken populace, and the first Soviet flags that, Reuters says, are hoisted over what tall buildings are left within the captured districts. Three Soviet guards carried a blood-soaked banner 2000 miles from Stalingrad to Berlin. Pravda says the soldiers kneeled and kissed the flag and then raised it over a ruined building.”
After touring thousands of miles with a German press-pass throughout Nazi-occupied Russia, American journalist Hugo Speck (1905 – 1970) gave a thorough picture of the violence visited upon that land by both Armies:
“German-occupied Russia is in rags and ruins; huge sweeps of European Soviet territory have been systematically destroyed, partly by the Russians themselves and partly by the devastation of Stukas, panzers, guns and fire…”
Blaming it all on an “early winter”, Hitler ordered the volks on the home front to give their furs, woolens and long underwear to the German Army on the Eastern Front.
“The aspiration to be the first to meet the Red Army is aired all the way up and down the line, from division generals to the boys in the foxholes. And if the Yanks had their way, they’d hit the first road east and keep helling it eastward till they hit the vodka. As one soldier from an armored division put it:”
“‘This is what the hell we’ve been pushing across Europe for and I don’t want to lose the pie when I practically have it in my mouth.'”
“The Red Army has Berlin. The once fat, strong heart of German power, now a wreck, was taken in 12 days of [the] bloodiest battle by the overwhelming might of Marshals Zhukov and Konev. The surrender of the remnants of the Nazis in the ruins of the Chancellery where Hitler is said to have his end, and the smashed-up Tiergarten turned a page in history>”
“Berlin has fallen to all intents and purposes. Stalin in a May Day order announces that the victory flag of the red Army flies over the main part of the ruined Nazi capital.”
“Stalingrad continued to hold today. For three days now the Nazis have been stopped on both the northwest and southwest approaches to the key industrial city on the Volga, loss of which would be a grave blow to the Soviet war effort… Today’s first Soviet communique indicated that Marshall von Bock continues to pour in more men, more tanks and more planes, trying to overwhelm the Russian defenders by sheer weight.”
Within a few weeks, Winter again will be sweeping down on the greatest battlefield in history… At Leningrad, the Fall rains are almost over. Now comes a month of dangerously dry, clear weather and then the snow. The Moscow zone will be thickly carpeted in white in seven or eight weeks. Allied strategists hope that the second Russian war Winter will bring a repition of the first, when Soviet skill in cold weather fighting finally drove the Nazis back.
The largest tank battle in history was fought on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. In April of 1943, 6,000 German and Soviet tanks, supported by some 2,000,000 infantrymen, had-at-it near the Russian city of Kursk. This article was written a year before the clash, and it informed the readers that armored engagements were becoming larger and larger with each one.
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.
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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.
