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Stalingrad: The Battle That Broke the Wehrmacht
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The battle of Stalingrad reshaped the entire Eastern Front — two million casualties, a city reduced to rubble, and a German army encircled and destroyed. This chapter traces the full arc from Operation Blau's fatal flaw to Paulus's surrender in the Univermag basement.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There are battles that decide campaigns. And then there are battles that decide the shape of the world.
When the Luftwaffe arrived over Stalingrad on the twenty-third of August, nineteen forty-two, it didn't just bomb the city. It effectively erased it.
The fighting inside Stalingrad became a war within a war. The Barrikady gun factory, the Red October steel plant, the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, the grain elevator on the southern flank.
Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky had been working on the encirclement concept for weeks. The operation was called Uranus.
Paulus immediately requested permission to break out. Hitler refused.
By January nineteen forty-three, the Sixth Army had been compressed into an ever-smaller pocket. The Soviets launched Operation Ring on the tenth of January, a direct assault to collapse the remaining German position.
The strategic consequence was immediate and permanent. The Wehrmacht had lost its largest army in the field.
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