Russian generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky organized Russian troops in the mountains to the north and west of the city. Stalin’s forces lost more than 200,000 men, but they successfully held off German soldiers. Russian forces were initially able to slow the German Wehrmacht’s advances during a series of brutal skirmishes just north of Stalingrad.
The 6th Army of the Wehrmacht began their assault on August 23, 1942. Stalin ordered all Russians strong enough to hold a rifle to take up arms in defense of the city. When Hitler proclaimed that upon taking Stalingrad all of the city’s male residents would be killed and its women deported, the stage was set for a bloody, hard-fought battle. For similar reasons, the Russians felt a special need to protect it. Ultimately, Adolf Hitler wanted the Wehrmacht to occupy Stalingrad, seeing its value for propaganda purposes, given that it bore Stalin’s name. The Volga River, which runs through the city, was also an important shipping route connecting the western part of the country with its distant eastern regions. They set their sights on Stalingrad, because the city served as an industrial center in Russia, producing, among other important goods, artillery for the country’s troops. In the middle of World War II – having captured territory in much of present-day Ukraine and Belarus in the spring on 1942 – Germany’s Wehrmacht forces decided to mount an offensive on southern Russia in the summer of that year. But the Battle of Stalingrad (one of Russia’s important industrial cities) ultimately turned the tide of World War II in favor of the Allied forces. The battle is infamous as one of the largest, longest and bloodiest engagements in modern warfare: From August 1942 through February 1943, more than two million troops fought in close quarters – and nearly two million people were killed or injured in the fighting, including tens of thousands of Russian civilians. The Battle of Stalingrad was a brutal military campaign between Russian forces and those of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers during World War II.
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