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Chuikov's Fingernails: Holding the Volga in the Rubble
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Inside the Battle of Stalingrad's most desperate chapter — Chuikov's hugging tactics, the factory battles, and how Soviet defenders turned German bombing into a trap. The city that refused to fall.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What does it take to destroy a city and still lose it? That's the question sitting at the center of what happened to Stalingrad in the late summer of nineteen forty-two.
On the twenty-third of August, nineteen forty-two, the Luftwaffe launched one of the most concentrated air raids of the entire war. Hundreds of aircraft flew sortie after sortie over Stalingrad.
To understand why German forces were even fighting street by street in Stalingrad, you have to go back to a decision made on the ninth of July, nineteen forty-two. Operation Blau had two objectives: take Stalingrad on the Volga, and seize the Caucasus oil fields at Maikop, Grozny, and Baku.
On the Soviet side, the picture was its own kind of chaos. Stalin's Order Two Twenty-Seven, issued in late July, forbade retreat without written authorization.
By October, the battle had compressed into a grinding struggle for specific locations. Three industrial complexes became their own separate campaigns within the larger battle: the tractor factory in the north, the Barrikady gun factory, and the Red October steel plant.
The sniper campaign that developed inside Stalingrad deserves its own moment here. Vasily Zaitsev became the most recognized Soviet sniper of the battle.
While the street fighting consumed attention, Soviet planners were looking at the larger picture. Zhukov and Vasilevsky had identified something significant about the German position.
Hitler ordered the Sixth Army to hold its position and wait for relief. He told Paulus and his commanders that Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe would supply the encircled force by air.
By late January of nineteen forty-three, organized resistance inside the Kessel was collapsing piecemeal. Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal on the thirtieth of January, a gesture that carried an implicit message.
The battle's strategic significance was immediate and lasting. The Wehrmacht had lost its largest single force in the war.
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