World War II ( The Grear Patriotic War) in Russia | Page 6

The Battle of Stalingrad.
The Battle of Stalingrad(23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943)was a major battle of
World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for
control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in the south-western Soviet
Union. It was a turning point in the European theatre of World War II–the German
forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force
from the West to reinforce their losses.
The German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in late summer 1942 using the
6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by
intensive Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble.
The horror of Stalingrad lasted for 199 days, costing an estimated 1.5 million lives
from both sides. The besieged city quickly turned into a meat grinder. The Soviet
losses were so great that, at times, the life expectancy of a newly arrived soldier
was less than a day. Battles raged for every street, house, basement and staircase.
Areas captured by the Wehrmacht troops by day, were re-taken by the Soviet army
at night. The Germans dubbed this type of war Rattenkrieg – “rat war”, bitterly
joking about seizing the kitchen but still fighting for the living-room.
One building that the Germans failed to take was the so-called “Pavlov’s House”.
In September 1942, a Soviet platoon led by Yakov Pavlov turned an apartment
block in the city centre into an impenetrable fortress. Penned in and surrounded by
Nazis, a little more than a dozen men rebuffed assault after assault. They held out
for two months, until they were relieved by counter-attacking Soviet forces.
The cost of victory
In May 1945 Berlin finally fell.
The number of Soviet deaths was at first grossly distorted – the figure Stalin gave
in 1946 was seven million.
The USSR’s losses are now estimated at about 26.6 million, accounting for
half of all WW2 casualties. The memory of the war, referred to as the Great
Patriotic War, is particularly venerated in Russia.
In the USSR the end of the war was considered to be May 9, 1945, when German
surrender took effect. The date has become a national holiday – Victory Day – and
is commemorated in a grand military parade in Red Square.