Stalingrad, the turning point in World War II

Stalingrad

For more than one year, the Soviet Army kept retreating because of the German invasion of the U.S.S.R. and the Germans even arrived to Moscow, but failed to conquer the capital. In the summer of 1942, the Germans started a new offensive, called "Operation Blue" in which they planned to occupy the Caucasus and the Southern part of the U.S.S.R.. There was a very important city in the south of the Union, and that was Stalingrad.

Stalingrad was a city built in the late 1590s and it was converted to industrial city in the 1930s. It was one of the cities with the highest industrial capacity in the whole Soviet Union, and for this it was a strategic settlement which the Germans needed to control. The Germans, however, were also in charge of several divisions of Italian, Croatian, Hungarian and Romanian soldiers which were intergated into the massive German invasion corp (1,500,000 soldiers with 1500 tanks).. 

The battle started on the 17th of July 1942, when the Invasion Corp entered the city. The garrison of the city was of about 150,000 soldiers, and because they were less than the Axis' soldiers, they used urban warfare as their main tactic. Urban Warfare was the most modern type of warfare, because it was created only three years before, during the invasion of Poland. The Germans were let into the core of the city, but this was a plan. In fact, the Germans were then surrounded by the Soviet garrison and their reinforcements (the reinforcements were 1,650,000 soldiers and 3512 tanks).

The Germans did not surrender, but they set up a scheme of defensive tactics while their reinforcements arrived (the reinforcements were blocked in the south of Ukraine) and they defended their territory quite well, fighting the Soviets for four months. The Germans surrendered on the 2nd of February 1943. The battle was one of the largest and longest of the war, lasting for six months and employing more than 3,300,000 soldiers altogether.

The battle is also famous because the soldiers were forced to eat rats and worms because there wasn't enough food for them and because many men died for the extreme cold during the winter.