When the blitzkrieg plan failed, the Third Reich began planning a large-scale summer offensive. The main blow was to target the southern section of the Soviet-German front. The plan was to destroy the adversary west of the Don River, to subsequently capture the oil-bearing regions in the Caucasus and cross the passes over the Caucasian Range. Hitler’s strategy was to seize the most important transport and industrial centre, the city named after the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the USSR.
Colonel-General Friedrich Paulus, one of the masterminds of Nazi Germany’s plan of attack on the USSR, was assigned to command the offensive.
For 200 days and nights, the German forces unsuccessfully tried to break the morale of the city’s defenders, first on the banks of the Don and Volga, and then just outside Stalingrad and finally in the city.
🇷🇺 On July 28, 1942, the General Command Headquarters order No 227 was distributed among the soldiers of the Stalingrad Front as well as other fronts:
The German occupiers are seeking to reach Stalingrad and the Volga, and are desperate to seize the Kuban and the North Caucasus with their oil and grain resources at any cost. The enemy has already captured Voroshilovgrad, Starobelsk, Rossosh, Kupyansk, Valuyki, Novocherkassk, Rostov-on-Don, and half of Voronezh. We have lost over 70 million people, more than 800 million poods of grain annually and more than 10 million tonnes of metal annually. We no longer have superiority in manpower or grain reserves. To retreat further means to ruin ourselves and lose our Motherland as well. Each new piece of territory left will further strengthen the enemy and profoundly weaken our defence, our Motherland.
All that considered, it is time to finish retreating. NOT ONE STEP BACK! That should be our main call now. Henceforth the solid law of discipline for each commander, Red Army soldier, and commissar should be this – NOT A SINGLE STEP BACK without order from higher command. This is the call of our Motherland. To fulfill this call means to defend our land, to save our Motherland, to exterminate and defeat the hated enemy.
One of the heroes of Stalingrad, Vassily Chuikov, has played a decisive role in the victory. He was always inventing new tactics for planning and conducting military operations, based on the current realities and prevailing circumstances. It was his initiative to set up assault groups in the city, which started tormenting the enemy day and night.
Commander of the 64th and later the 62nd Army, Chuikov had tremendous faith in his soldiers:
A soldier who is aware of the army’s current objectives can take his own decisions if he finds himself on his own fighting in a basement or under a staircase. There is nothing wrong with that. In street fighting, a soldier is sometimes his own general.
This approach inspired the defenders to perform heroic acts that went down in history. The most famous example of the valour of Soviet soldiers was the defence of the Pavlov House, which was held for 58 days under the onslaught of superior enemy forces. The Nazis attacked the building using aviation, artillery and mortar fire, but the defenders never retreated a single step.
🎖 The Battle of Stalingrad ended with a brilliant victory for the Red Army. It marked a major turning point, not only in World War II. In the course of that battle, which lasted for months, the Nazi invaders lost a quarter of the forces operating on the Soviet-German front.
☝️ The victory over the Nazi war machine in one of the most fierce and large-scale battles of all-time showed that it was indeed possible to match and overcome the Third Reich, thus strengthening the international standing of the Soviet Union and its armed forces, and further uniting the anti-Hitler coalition.