Part I
"Verdun was chosen quite deliberately to act as a theater-level slaughterhouse. But it is easy enough to find considerable towns or cities in history that were enlisted, so to speak, for a strategic or operational purpose, not because they had any intrinsic quality worth defending to the last soldier.
Stalingrad was one such place. The Second World War battle that now epitomizes the modern siege was fought over a city that was certainly no crown jewel in anyone's empire. The battle lasted from the end of August 1942, until the end of January 1943, and before it was over, Stalingrad and its immediate surroundings would attract well over a million soldiers, fighting for or against the city, or, perhaps in the end, fighting only for their own survival.
Stalingrad was also unplanned. One could not say that it was selected as an element in a broad strategic and operational scheme by one national military staffer the other. It was not. When the Germans and the Russians began their calculations for the summer campaigning season, neither assigned much military importance to this Volga River town. The major question facing the German High Command was where on the vast Eastern Front the army's main effort should be fixed. As for the Russians, the major problem was how to combat what the Germans finally decided, for in the early summer of 1942, the Germans still had the strategic and operational initiative on the Eastern Front…"
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Part 2.
"By the end of August, there were good reasons for the Russians to leave Stalingrad. Russia's 62d Army counted only 20,000 soldiers at the time. The 62d had retreated into the city, herded eastward by the Sixth Army's advance across the Don River. Just as it took refuge inside Stalingrad, the 62d would be assigned a new commander. Sixth Army was then in the business of becoming the single largest formation of the entire Wehrmacht, with a strength approaching one-third of a million men. Its commander, General Friedrich Paulus, estimated that his army would need ten days to take the city and then fourteen days to regroup and cross the Volga to the steppes beyond.
The main body of the German offensive jumped off early in the morning of 24 August. Starting from its lodgment on the eastern banks of the Don River, 16th Panzer Division meant to race the thirty-five miles between the Don and Volga River and capture Stalingrad by coup de main. The night before, elements of the 79th Panzer Grenadier Regiment had made their way to the Volga, digging in along the river near the northern suburb of Spartanovka. All day long, the German advance was covered by the Luftwaffe's 8th Air Army, part of Luftflotte IV, which also staged saturation raids against the city. By the end of the first day, much of Stalingrad was wrecked. The systems for sewage treatment and water and much of the power were destroyed by the bombing, although somehow the power station in the southern part of the city managed to continue operating. The main hospital and all the major factory complexes suffered numerous direct hits. The streets were already full of rubble, and those inhabitants who could still function began burrowing into any protection they could find. Because Stalin had initially refused to let the citizens of the city evacuate, civilian casualties were already high. Stalin insisted, however, that the local militiamen would fight that much harder if they knew their fellow citizens were still in the city…"
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Amicalement
Armand