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Pavlov's House, the Grain Elevator & the Street-by-Street War
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Battle of Stalingrad reaches its most brutal chapter: Soviet soldiers holding shattered buildings metre by metre against a Wehrmacht that couldn't fight in the rubble it had created. From the Barrikady factory to Pavlov's House, this is how the Sixty-Second Army refused to die.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's the summer of nineteen forty-two, and a Soviet soldier on the eastern bank of the Volga is watching the city burn. Across the water, Stalingrad is a furnace.
To understand how the world arrived at that moment, you have to go back a few months. By the spring of nineteen forty-two, Operation Barbarossa had already failed in its original ambition.
By August, the Sixth Army was approaching the city itself. And then the Luftwaffe arrived overhead.
Stalin's Order two-two-seven had teeth. It wasn't a slogan.
The rubble created another kind of warfare. When you can't move armor and you can't call in effective air support, the most valuable soldier on the battlefield becomes someone who can kill from a hidden position and disappear before the enemy can locate them.
Through September and October and into November, the Sixty-Second Army bled and held. German units captured roughly ninety percent of the city at their peak advance.
The Soviet pincer drove from the north and southwest simultaneously. By the twenty-third of November, four days after the operation began, the two arms of the encirclement met at Kalach, roughly forty miles west of Stalingrad.
Through December and into January of nineteen forty-three, the situation inside the Kessel deteriorated in ways that go beyond any standard military description. Soldiers fighting in temperatures that dropped to minus thirty Celsius.
The numbers from Stalingrad are almost too large to hold steady in the mind. Two million total casualties across both sides.
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