Stalingrad:Thousands of houses and blocks of flats were destroyed in the heavy bombing, and consequently the civilian population suffered heavy casualties. Approximately 40 thousand people died and than 150,000 were wounded. They took shelter in the gullies and in the basements of houses. By the end of August the population had been reduced to 400,000. To avoid further loss of life the City Defence Committee organised the evacuation of the population together with valuable property belonging to the state. From August 24th to September 14th some 300,000 people and a large amount of factory equipment were taken across the Volga under continuous enemy fire.
On September 13th, fighting began in the city itself. On that day the German at the cost of heavy losses succeeded in reaching the “Barricades” and “Krasny Oktyabr” (“Red October”) factories. On September 14th, the railway station was taken, and 8 km south the enemy reached the Volga.
For the next 143 days Soviet troops fought heroically for Stalingrad, street by street, house by house, staircase by staircase.
The well-known Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov wrote amid the fighting in Stalingrad: “Houses all over the city were burning and at night their smoky glow filled the horizon. Day and night the earth was shaken by the thunder of the bombing and the artillery barrage. The wreckage of crashed bombers lay scattered in the streets and the air screamed with shells from the ack-ack, but not for a moment did the bombing stop. The besiegers were trying to turn Stalingrad into a hell on earth. But it was impossible to remain inactive – you had to fight, you had to defend the city amid the fire, the smoke and the blood. This was the only way you could live, the only way you had to live.”
Hitler had thrown his crack troops against Stalingrad, and smashing these forces would be an important break-through in the campaign on the southern wing of the Soviet-German front.
At last the long-awaited day arrived – November 19th, 1942. At 7:30 in the morning the signal rockets shrieked and a volley of rocket shells announced the beginning of the offensive.
“At precisely 7:30 on the morning of November 19th, 1942, the misty quiet of the dawn was shattered by the thunder of artillery fire. Even we officers, who’d fought a few battles in our time, had never seen anything like this before. The air was filled with the screech of thousands upon thousands of shells and the echo of their explosions.” This was how Marshal of Artillery V.Kazakov remembered that morning.
The power and concentration of the attack, the carefully synchronised action on the Russia fronts and the high standart of the military equipment-all contributed to achieving the long-awaited success. On November 23rd Soviet troops advancing on the Southwestern front joined up with those on the Don and Stalingrad fronts at a point some 70 km from Stalingrad. 22 German divisions and 160 separate units of all were caught in an encirclement some 450 km in circumference.
But there were still many days of fierce fighting ahead before victory could be declared at Stalingrad. On February 2nd, 1943, were the final shots fired. The Battle of Stalingrad had ended with complete victory for the Soviet troops.
The victory at Stalingrad was a major turning point in the war on the Russian front and had a decisive influence on the course of the Second World War as a whole.
Those who saw the ruins of Stalingrad in 1943 would hardly believe it possible that on the site of such colossal destruction a new city would one day arise. Whole sections of the city were completely destroyed. In the centre not a single building was left standing, in other districts nothing more than a few gutted shells remained. All the bridges across the rivers and gullies had been blown up. Tramlines and railway lines were completely unusable and even the tram poles had been destroyed. The factories were in a terrible state. Iron girders, blackened, bent and broken, jutted out from among heaps of rubble and dirt.
And just as the whole country had rallied to Stalingrad’s defence, the whole country united to rebuild it. But first came the task of clearing up, defusing the mines and filling in the bomb craters. More than 1.5 million mines, shells and bombs were defused. From the Tractor Plant alone 9 thousand wagon loads of rubble were removed. Stalingrad received massive state help throughout the whole reconstruction period.
The town’s population began to grow rapidly. On February 2nd, 1943, there were only 32,000 people living in Stalingrad, but by September 1st this number had risen to more than 200,000.
(From N.T.Morozova, N.D.Monakhova, "Volgograd: A short guide". Moscow, 1979)
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The main German thrust was to be delivered against the industrial and oil-producing regions in the south; in the north, efforts to take Leningrad were to continue; the central front was to hold fast.
Nearly 150,000 Germans had died - three times as many as the Russians admitted they lost — all Paulus's guns, motor vehicles and equipment had been captured and the Luftwaffe had lost 500 transport aircraft.
The German Army, though far from being a broken force in early 1943, never recovered from the loss of an entire army, on top of casualties in excess of a million already sustained on the Eastern Front. All its great blitzkrieg victories were behind it. Hitler had overstretched Germany before the full might of the Allies could be assembled against him, and he would pay the price for such folly.
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