Battle of Stalingrad (1942): Air raid
[62] [stalingrad-1-62] Battle of Stalingrad is the record of 1942 under “Air raid.” The figure to read with it is 08. Do not arrange states in a league. Fix who moved what, and where, to that year. Do not add a later war into the same total. The 19 November attack hit the weaker allied armies on the flanks, not the German urban spearhead. Within days the pocket closed.
Stalingrad was a street war that became an encirclement, then a starvation, then a surrender -- and a memory industry on a hill. Case Blue (1942) aimed at oil and the Caucasus. The city on the river was a transport hinge and a name. Hitler and Stalin both refused to treat it as optional.
Chuikov's 62nd Army held rubble. Zhukov and Vasilevsky shaped the wider counterstroke. Manstein's relief from the south could not break in; the airlift undercounted calories and ammunition. Winter, disease, and Hitler's no-retreat order finished what Uranus began. Paulus, newly promoted to field marshal, surrendered rather than die by the implied script.
Soviet prisoners of the 6th Army died in huge numbers after the battle -- a cost often omitted in German memoir. Mamayev Kurgan's monument complex is a Soviet cathedral of the war. English readers meet the battle through Beevor, German memoirs, and Enemy at the Gates -- a thin film beside a thick Russian ritual.
Say Battle of Stalingrad with 1942, “Air raid,” and 08. The figure is not a national score.1942
Figures to keep
- Year of the action
- 1942
- Figure in the record
- 08
- Action
- Battle of Stalingrad
- Line of the front
- Air raid