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Paulus in the Cauldron: The Sixth Army's Road to Ruin
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The battle of Stalingrad unravels from the inside — Operation Blau's fatal split, Chuikov's suicidal close-combat doctrine, and the moment the Sixth Army crossed a point of no return. This is how two million casualties happened in a city smaller than some modern suburbs.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht looked unstoppable. After Stalingrad, everyone knew it wasn't.
By the spring of nineteen forty-two, the German campaign in the east had already hit its first serious wall. The assault on Moscow the previous winter had failed.
The Luftwaffe arrived over Stalingrad on the twenty-third of August, nineteen forty-two. What followed was one of the most concentrated aerial bombardments of the war.
The man given the impossible job of holding the city was Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Soviet Sixty-Second Army. By September, his forces held a strip of the western bank of the Volga that was, in some places, less than a mile deep.
Inside the city, the battle took on a character that had no precedent in modern warfare. The Tractor Factory, the Red October steel plant, the Barrikady gun factory.
While the city ground through its terrible arithmetic, Soviet planning was already looking elsewhere. Generals Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky had identified a critical vulnerability in the German position.
On the nineteenth of November, nineteen forty-two, three thousand five hundred Soviet guns opened fire along the Romanian front simultaneously. The bombardment lasted hours.
By late January nineteen forty-three, the Sixth Army had been split in two by converging Soviet forces. Paulus was given one final decision by Hitler.
The significance of what happened at Stalingrad wasn't just military. The Soviet Union had encircled and destroyed the most powerful army Germany had committed to the eastern front.
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