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Rubble, Rifles & the Fingernail Line: Inside the Street Fighting
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Battle of Stalingrad turned into a war of inches — ruined factories, fortified apartment buildings, and Soviet snipers in the rubble. This episode follows Chuikov's 62nd Army holding the western bank of the Volga by sheer, brutal will.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By the autumn of nineteen forty-two, the German Sixth Army had fought its way to the banks of the Volga River. They could see the water.
To understand how the Sixth Army ended up surrounded and starving, you have to go back to the summer of nineteen forty-two. Germany's push east the previous year, Operation Barbarossa, had failed to take Moscow.
The Luftwaffe hit Stalingrad hard. The aerial bombardment in late August was equivalent to roughly two thousand sorties over the city.
The man responsible for holding Stalingrad was Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Sixty-Second Army. He's worth understanding.
Inside the city, individual locations became their own wars. Pavlov's House was a four-story apartment building that a Soviet sergeant named Yakov Pavlov and a small defensive unit turned into a fortified position.
While the Germans pressed deeper into Stalingrad, Zhukov and Vasilevsky were watching the flanks. The bigger issue was that the Sixth Army's southern flank was held not by German forces but by the Romanian Third Army.
Paulus requested permission to break out westward while the encirclement ring was still thin and the Sixth Army still had fuel. Hitler refused.
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched a relief attempt from the south in December. Operation Winter Storm.
The numbers are the most immediate measure. Two million total casualties across the battle.
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