Battle of Stalingrad 1942–1943: The Defeat That Turned the War Against Hitler

in june 1942, more casualties were about to be created in a single city on the volga river than the united states would suffer in the entirety of the second world war — on every front, in every theatre, combined. it didn't have to happen there. military logic didn't require it. the original objective was oil — the caucasus fields that kept the german war machine moving. but somewhere along the way, a name on a map began to matter more than the ground beneath it. and that single distortion in judgment drew a meticulous, untested general named friedrich paulus, 300,000 of his men, and the entire sixth army into a city that had been bombed into rubble — and then proved too dangerous for its own bombers to cross. this is the full story of stalingrad: the plan that split an army group in two, the ruined factory floors where men fought room to room with entrenching tools, the sniper who taught an army to make silence into a weapon, the airlift that was never mathematically possible, the relief force that turned back 30 miles short, and the field marshal's promotion that was designed as a death sentence — and which one proud man refused to carry out. the guns fell silent on february 2nd, 1943. the war ground on for another two and a half years. but nothing about how it was understood would ever be quite the same again.

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