The Great Patriotic War against Hitler’s Germany (1941-1945) was one of the toughest tests for the Soviet people, a long road to victory that claimed 27 million lives.
Fascist Germany had all of Europe under its boots (except England, although it was subject to daily bombing raids). Together with Italy, its ally, it had all the resources of the occupied countries in addition to its own military and industrial power.
In the early morning of June 22, 1941, without declaring war, the Germans launched their powerful war machine against the Soviet Union. However, the morale of the Red Army and the decision of the Soviet people to resist, fight and win were never dampened by the severity of that battle.
The whole country was turned into a battlefield under a single motto: all for the front, all for victory. Against this background, the Battle of Stalingrad is a milestone of the Great Patriotic War.
MEANING OF STALINGRAD
For Gueorgui K. Zhúkov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Deputy Supreme Leader Iósif V. Stalin: “The struggle for Stalingrad had an invaluable politico-military dimension. If Stalingrad fell, the enemy command could cut off the south of the country and isolate it from the center, and we – stressed Zkukov – could lose the Volga, the main artery through which (oil and) cargo from the Volga region and the Caucasus flows”.
In addition, they could be made from the energy sources of Iran and Iraq to the south, bordering the USSR.
The battle lasted from July 17, 1942 to February 2, 1943. For almost seven months, without paying attention to large material and effective losses, the German command made several attempts to occupy the city, but all without success.
To resist and conquer was a conviction engraved like an inviolable oath in the conscience of the defenders of the Volga bastion. Every patriot was aware that it was there, on the banks of the river, that the fate of not only the Great Patriotic War, but possibly the entire Second World War, was decided.
No one could describe what is happening in Stalingrad better than the German military chief, General von Paulus: “As soon as we succeed somewhere, the Russians immediately respond with blows that often push us back to our starting positions.”
The fighting, which lasted 200 days and nights, was fierce and bloody. In the autumn of 1942, the military reports from the Stalingrad Front were short. Instead of towns and villages, streets and even isolated houses were named, house by house, floor by floor, stair by stair fought. In its eagerness to occupy the city at any cost, the enemy tried again and again without success.
The whole country helped the city on the Volga. The High Command moved reserves in that direction from the rear. The resistance was stubborn, to the limit, with the slogan: Not a step back, which gradually with blood and fire broke the enemy effort, which with the incorporated Soviet reinforcements reached the moment when they reversed, stopped and completely fenced.
HITLERIAN OFFENSIVE AND SOVIET COUNTER-OFFENSIVE
Faced with this situation, Hitler hands over a telegram to von Paulus: “Army personnel can rest assured that I will take all measures to ensure supplies in order to free the army from encirclement in time.”
On December 12, the German Shock Group Hoth began the offensive to join the encircled troops of the 6th. and from the 4th Panzer Armies. The enemy outnumbered the Soviets twice in personnel and six times in tanks.
At the cost of titanic efforts, the Soviet fighters managed to resist over the days until the arrival of the Don’s group led by the 2nd. Army of the Guard, with support from aviation, conventional, self-propelled and reactive artillery, T-34 and ISDM tanks. This radically changed the balance of power and allowed the enemy not to hold the Soviet counteroffensive.
On the morning of January 31, 1943, General von Paulus was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal; However, a few hours later he was a Soviet prisoner of war.
On behalf of the Headquarters of the Supreme Army Command, Iósif V. Stalin issued the following report: “On February 2, 1943 at 16:00, the troops of the Don Front completed the defeat and liquidation of the enemy group near Stalingrad … Since the encircled enemy troops were annihilated, hostilities ceased in the city of Stalingrad.’
The long line of hundreds of German prisoners, including the recently promoted Marshal Frederich von Paulus. Photo: Ernesto Perez Shelton
But the road to Berlin was very long. In 1943, 1944 and part of 1945, in the entire extent of a front from 3,000 to 6,200 kilometers of the territory occupied by the aggressor, fierce fighting did not stop.
The Red Army liberated the entire Soviet homeland and then overwhelmingly liberated European capitals, cities, towns and villages, all the way to Germany itself. The Soviet-German front was the most important and decisive in World War II, in which Hitler’s Wehrmacht held 80% suffered all losses.
From June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945, 607 enemy divisions were disabled, defeated or captured, three and a half times the number on the North African, Italian and Euro-Western fronts combined.
This is the historical truth that the Western media today seeks to ignore, misrepresent and conceal, amid a context in which the thoughts of our Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz are in force when he pointed to the rebirth of fascist ideas and the role that Russia would correspond in their confrontation.
For this reason, studying and remembering the Battle of Stalingrad is a duty in today’s struggle to save humanity, because as Fidel himself put it on May 8, 1975: “When the Soviets were fighting in Leningrad, in Moscow, in Stalingrad and died, in Kursk, in Berlin they also fought and died for us!».
Note: Stalingrad is now called Volgograd.
Sources: Memoirs and Meditations by Marshal GK Zhukov
Novosti Press Agency, Moscow, 1979.