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Big Al
November 15, 2017

This article brought tears to Big Al’s eyes as it explains the mentality of the common people of Russia.

Remembering Stalingrad 75 years later

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded – and would soon destroy – a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942-43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.

Before Stalingrad, Adolf Hitler regularly boasted on German radio as his victorious forces pressed their offensives worldwide. After Stalingrad, Hitler went quiet, brooding in his various bunkers for the rest of the war.

During the horrific Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted more than five months, Russian, American and British forces also went on the offensive against the Axis powers in the Caucasus, in Morocco and Algeria, and on the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

Yet just weeks before the Battle of Stalingrad began, the Allies had been near defeat. They had lost most of European Russia. Much of Western Europe was under Nazi control. Axis armies occupied large swaths of North Africa. The Japanese controlled most of the Pacific and Asia, from Manchuria to Wake Island.

Stalingrad was part of a renewed German effort in 1942 to drive southward toward the Caucasus Mountains, to capture the huge Soviet oil fields. The Germans might have pulled it off had Hitler not divided his forces and sent his best army northward to Stalingrad to cut the Volga River traffic and take Stalin’s eponymous frontier city.

By the time two Red Army pincers trapped the Germans at Stalingrad in November, Russia had already suffered some 6 million combat casualties during the first 16 months of Germany’s invasion. By German calculations, Russia should have already submitted, just like all of the Third Reich’s prior European enemies except Britain.

Instead, the Red Army drew the Germans deeper into the traditional quagmire of Russia until the 6th Army was low on supplies, freezing in the winter cold, and trapped more than 1,500 miles from Berlin. How did the Red Army not only survive but go on the offensive against the deadly invaders?

In part, it had no choice. Germany was intent on not just absorbing Russia, but wiping it out or enslaving millions of its citizens. In part, Britain and the United States under the Lend-Lease policy began sending huge amounts of material aid, providing everything from boots to locomotives. In part, Red Army soldiers were terrified of their own communist strongman, Josef Stalin.

Prior to the German invasion, Stalin was responsible for some 20 million Russian deaths through forced farm collectivization, planned famine, show trials and purges, and the murders of his own Red Army troops. More than 10,000 soldiers were likely executed at Stalingrad by their own officers.

But most important, no European invader – neither Sweden under Charles XII in the early 1700s nor France under Napoleon in the early 1800s – had ever successfully invaded and defeated Russia.

The country was too large, both geographically and demographically. Good weather was too brief between the spring floods and the bitter Russian winter. And Russians always fought heroically as defenders of their own soil, even if this wasn’t always the case when they were fighting abroad as invaders.

Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia’s male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler’s vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.

The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians – about 60 times more than America lost in the war.

Due to memories of the Soviet Union’s Cold War ruthlessness, and because of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic government, it is now fashionable to demonize Russia. Moscow sent troops into eastern Ukraine, absorbed Crimea and has sought to tamper with a U.S. presidential election.

But most Americans have forgotten key aspects of Russia’s 20th-century history, a tragedy of unspeakable human losses. Outside Kiev in late summer of 1941, more than 700,000 Russian soldiers were killed or captured by Germans in a single battle.

In one of the costliest sieges in history, at Sevastopol in July 1942, 100,000 Russians were killed or captured in a failed effort to save the port on the Black Sea.

We rightly see Putin as an aggressive autocrat. But millions of Russians view Ukraine and the Crimea as sacred, blood-soaked Russian ground.

After the collapse of the nightmarish Soviet Union, Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd “city on the Volga.” Today, few in the West know exactly what happened there 75 years ago this month.

In bitter cold, and after losing hundreds of thousands of lives, heroic Russian soldiers finally did the unbelievable: They halted the march of Nazi Germany.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Email him at author@victorhanson.com.

Timothy Howe is providing KER Politics with information that we know you will find interesting. Thank you, Tim!

 

Discussion
7 Comments
    Nov 15, 2017 15:36 PM

    Thanks Al,Victor and Tim, War is hell, my father was a WW2 marine in the
    South Pacific

      Nov 15, 2017 15:53 PM

      Very brave patriot, Texan Mike!

    b
    Nov 15, 2017 15:56 PM

    WHERE DID THE NEW RED ARMY DIVISIONS COME FROM?

    So the question is; who stopped the Germans in December 1941 if it couldn’t possibly have been hordes of newly arrived Siberian or East Front troops?

    The answer is a massive number of newly mobilised and deployed divisions and brigades. The Soviet land model shows that 182 rifle divisions, 43 militia rifle divisions, eight tank divisions, three mechanised divisions, 62 tank brigades, 50 cavalry divisions, 55 rifle brigades, 21 naval rifle brigades, 11 naval infantry brigades, 41 armies, 11 fronts and a multitude of other units were newly Mobilised and Deployed (MD) in the second half of 1941. If Mobilized and Not Deployed (MND) units are included then this list is considerably higher.(2) Even if the few Siberian divisions exhibited a higher than average combat proficiency in the winter of 1941/42, their contribution was almost insignificant compared to the mass of newly mobilised units.

    There is no doubt that the 1941 Soviet mobilisation programme was simply the largest and fastest wartime mobilisation in history.

    The multitude of average Soviet soldiers from all over the USSR that made up these units saved the day, and definitely not the existing units transferred west after June 1941, or the mostly non-existent and mythical Siberian divisions.

    It seems very likely the term ‘Siberian’ was applied to any division that exhibited an above average proficiency or resilience in combat. This was similar to, but less official than, a ‘Guards’ designation which the Stavka started awarding to such divisions in 1941. Ultimately it cost nothing to name a division ‘Siberian’, ‘Guards’ or ‘elite’, and if it enhanced morale, scared the enemy and enabled better divisions to be easily identified then it was certainly worth while. It is easy to forget that all combatants in WWII were waging a morale and propaganda war alongside the real one. Unfortunately much post WWII history calls on the same propaganda based stories as the basis of historical fact. This then results in certain war stories, legends and myths become cemented over the years as unquestioned historical events.

    Great Myths of WWII

    It seems that Stalin held back troops as opposed to having troops positioned for a Japanese invasion.
    If thats the case, he sure as heck released them at the right time.

      Nov 15, 2017 15:59 PM

      You do know a bit about history, b! Thank you

    Nov 16, 2017 16:03 AM

    An excellent account of Stalingrad is a book of the same name written by Anthony Beevor, a British military writer, published in 1998. It’s a riveting account that I couldn’t put down until I finished it. It’s a permanent part of my library and highly recommended.

    GH
    Nov 16, 2017 16:19 PM

    A good history for us all to be aware of. Thanks, guys.

    At the height of the tension over Ukraine I was regularly listening to the John Batchelor Show interviewing Stephen Cohen, a top Russia expert. Highly educational.

    https://audioboom.com/search/posts?q=stephen+cohen

    The episode on the 70th anniversary celebration of the WW2 victory in Moscow was particularly interesting, in particular the solidarity many nations, especially China, showed with Russia in their military displays, at the time that the West was demonizing and embargoing Russia.

    “We rightly see Putin as an aggressive autocrat.”

    Is this true? I’m not particularly knowledgeable about Putin, but on the world stage, at least, I don’t see much that’s objectionable. Where’s the aggression? The Ukraine narrative told by the Zionist Mass Media in the West was an inversion of reality, IMO.

    We rightly see Putin as an aggressive autocrat.

    b
    Nov 16, 2017 16:44 PM

    Putin did use a false flag to get him elected, but he also showed a loyalty to the “old guard”
    He showed he understood completely what was needed for Russia.
    If ya followed what he did with their military its unreal, he also is transforming their agriculture for example.

    But to answer your query, no he has not been aggressive other than with isis and their “terrorist” allys in Syria

    We like to lie about him and Russia alot (propaganda) for the reasons we all know.
    We need an enemy for our military budget.

    So funny actually. Its obvious just how much they lie to anyone that knows a little history and follows whats going on. (but,people dont of course)

    My favorite lie is the Russians annexed or even invaded Crimea.
    Its as if the world has forgotten Catherine and the Ottoman empire.
    Course people cant recall their own 200 years of history, how could they be expected to know what happened in Russia?.