Stalingrad And The Turning Point On The Soviet-German Front, 1941-1943
Stalingrad And The Turning Point On The Soviet-German Front, 1941-1943

Author: Captain Dennis W. Dingle

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2014-08-15

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 178289716X

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This study is an historical analysis of the Soviet-German conflict during World War II and focuses on the years 1941-1943. It examines the relative economic and military power of the two nations to determine if there was a shift in advantage, or turning point, during that period. To quantify those elements of power, it uses criteria taken from a current strategic analysis model. This model assesses elements of national power to aid in strategic problem solving and international policy formulation. Specific criteria are applied to four specific military events between 1941 and 1943. The resulting data is then graphed to compare relative military and economic power. The graphs serve as the basis for conclusions. Among the conclusions which may be drawn from this study are: the Battle of Stalingrad was not the economic turning point of the war when considering the criteria of industrial labor and armaments production; Stalingrad was the military turning point, considering military forces and equipment on the Soviet-German front. This study concludes that this method of assessing relative national power of nations can be applied in an historical context to evaluate past wars. It may assist historians to better understand the factors that led to various turning points throughout history.

The Wehrmacht Retreats
The Wehrmacht Retreats

Author: Robert M. Citino

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0700623434

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Throughout 1943, the German army, heirs to a military tradition that demanded and perfected relentless offensive operations, succumbed to the realities of its own overreach and the demands of twentieth-century industrialized warfare. In his new study, prizewinning author Robert Citino chronicles this weakening Wehrmacht, now fighting desperately on the defensive but still remarkably dangerous and lethal. Drawing on his impeccable command of German-language sources, Citino offers fresh, vivid, and detailed treatments of key campaigns during this fateful year: the Allied landings in North Africa, General von Manstein's great counterstroke in front of Kharkov, the German attack at Kasserine Pass, the titanic engagement of tanks and men at Kursk, the Soviet counteroffensives at Orel and Belgorod, and the Allied landings in Sicily and Italy. Through these events, he reveals how a military establishment historically configured for violent aggression reacted when the tables were turned; how German commanders viewed their newest enemy, the U.S. Army, after brutal fighting against the British and Soviets; and why, despite their superiority in materiel and manpower, the Allies were unable to turn 1943 into a much more decisive year. Applying the keen operational analysis for which he is so highly regarded, Citino contends that virtually every flawed German decision-to defend Tunis, to attack at Kursk and then call off the offensive, to abandon Sicily, to defend Italy high up the boot and then down much closer to the toe-had strong supporters among the army's officer corps. He looks at all of these engagements from the perspective of each combatant nation and also establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt the synergistic interplay between the fronts. Ultimately, Citino produces a grim portrait of the German officer corps, dispelling the longstanding tendency to blame every bad decision on Hitler. Filled with telling vignettes and sharp portraits and copiously documented, The Wehrmacht Retreats is a dramatic and fast-paced narrative that will engage military historians and general readers alike.

Stalingrad
Stalingrad

Author: David M. Glantz

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2019-07-13

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 0700628797

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The long awaited one-volume campaign history from the leading experts of the decisive clash of Nazi and Soviet forces at Stalingrad; an abridged edition of the five volume Stalingrad Trilogy. Stalingrad offers a sweeping synthesis of this massive confrontation, how it impacted the war, and why it matters today.

The Ninety Days
The Ninety Days

Author: Thomas N. Carmichael

Publisher: Konecky & Konecky

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781568523804

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"At Dawn on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler started his war on Poland? Three years later by October 4, 1942, Hitler?s Polish war was a war of vast proportions, a second world war? On that October 4, the decisive ninety days of the war began. In each of the five major battle areas of the war the vast surge of military power was now being sharply focused. The armies and the navies were now to meet in five head-on clashes. At the end of those ninety days, by January 1, 1943, it would be a very different war"--Page 16.

Stalingrad
Stalingrad

Author: Vasily Grossman

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 1089

ISBN-13: 1681373270

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Now in English for the first time, the prequel to Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, the War and Peace of the twentieth Century. In April 1942, Hitler and Mussolini meet in Salzburg where they agree on a renewed assault on the Soviet Union. Launched in the summer, the campaign soon picks up speed, as the routed Red Army is driven back to the industrial center of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga. In the rubble of the bombed-out city, Soviet forces dig in for a last stand. The story told in Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe, and its characters include mothers and daughters, husbands and brothers, generals, nurses, political activists, steelworkers, and peasants, along with Hitler and other historical figures. At the heart of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family. Even as the Germans advance, the matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna, refuses to leave Stalingrad. Far from the front, her eldest daughter, Ludmila, is unhappily married to the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum. Viktor’s research may be of crucial military importance, but he is distracted by thoughts of his mother in the Ukraine, lost behind German lines. In Stalingrad, published here for the first time in English translation, and in its celebrated sequel, Life and Fate, Grossman writes with extraordinary power and deep compassion about the disasters of war and the ruthlessness of totalitarianism, without, however, losing sight of the little things that are the daily currency of human existence or of humanity’s inextinguishable, saving attachment to nature and life. Grossman’s two-volume masterpiece can now be seen as one of the supreme accomplishments of twentieth-century literature, tender and fearless, intimate and epic.

Stalingrad
Stalingrad

Author: Jochen Hellbeck

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2015-04-28

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1610394976

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The turning point of World War II came at Stalingrad. Hitler's soldiers stormed the city in September 1942 in a bid to complete the conquest of Europe. Yet Stalingrad never fell. After months of bitter fighting, 100,000 surviving Germans, huddled in the ruined city, surrendered to Soviet troops. During the battle and shortly after its conclusion, scores of Red Army commanders and soldiers, party officials and workers spoke with a team of historians who visited from Moscow to record their conversations. The tapestry of their voices provides groundbreaking insights into the thoughts and feelings of Soviet citizens during wartime. Legendary sniper Vasily Zaytsev recounted the horrors he witnessed at Stalingrad: "You see young girls, children hanging from trees in the park.[ . . .] That has a tremendous impact." Nurse Vera Gurova attended hundreds of wounded soldiers in a makeshift hospital every day, but she couldn't forget one young amputee who begged her to avenge his suffering. "Every soldier and officer in Stalingrad was itching to kill as many Germans as possible," said Major Nikolai Aksyonov. These testimonials were so harrowing and candid that the Kremlin forbade their publication, and they were forgotten by modern history -- until now. Revealed here in English for the first time, they humanize the Soviet defenders and allow Jochen Hellbeck, in Stalingrad, to present a definitive new portrait of the most fateful battle of World War II.

Death of the Wehrmacht
Death of the Wehrmacht

Author: Robert M. Citino

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2007-10-22

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 0700617914

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For Hitler and the German military, 1942 was a key turning point of World War II, as an overstretched but still lethal Wehrmacht replaced brilliant victories and huge territorial gains with stalemates and strategic retreats. In this major reevaluation of that crucial year, Robert Citino shows that the German army's emerging woes were rooted as much in its addiction to the "war of movement"-attempts to smash the enemy in "short and lively" campaigns-as they were in Hitler's deeply flawed management of the war. From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions. He examines every major campaign and battle in the Russian and North African theaters throughout the year to assess how a military geared to quick and decisive victories coped when the tide turned against it. Citino also reconstructs the German generals' view of the war and illuminates the multiple contingencies that might have produced more favorable results. In addition, he cites the fatal extreme aggressiveness of German commanders like Erwin Rommel and assesses how the German system of command and its commitment to the "independence of subordinate commanders" suffered under the thumb of Hitler and chief of staff General Franz Halder. More than the turning point of a war, 1942 marked the death of a very old and traditional pattern of warmaking, with the classic "German way of war" unable to meet the challenges of the twentieth century. Blending masterly research with a gripping narrative, Citino's remarkable work provides a fresh and revealing look at how one of history's most powerful armies began to founder in its quest for world domination.

The Battle for Moscow
The Battle for Moscow

Author: David Stahel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1316195619

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In November 1941 Hitler ordered German forces to complete the final drive on the Soviet capital, now less than 100 kilometres away. Army Group Centre was pressed into the attack for one last attempt to break Soviet resistance before the onset of winter. From the German perspective the final drive on Moscow had all the ingredients of a dramatic final battle in the east, which, according to previous accounts, only failed at the gates of Moscow. David Stahel challenges this well-established narrative by demonstrating that the last German offensive of 1941 was a forlorn effort, undermined by operational weakness and poor logistics and driven forward by what he identifies as National Socialist military thinking. With unparalleled research from previously undocumented army files and soldiers' letters, Stahel takes a fresh look at the battle for Moscow, which even before the Soviet winter offensive, threatened disaster for Germany's war in the east.

Why the Allies Won
Why the Allies Won

Author: Richard Overy

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2024-11-12

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 0393651762

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"Overy has written a masterpiece of analytical history, posing and answering one of the great questions of the century."—Sunday Times (London) Richard Overy's bold book begins by throwing out the stock answers to this great question: Germany doomed itself to defeat by fighting a two-front war; the Allies won by "sheer weight of material strength." In fact, by 1942 Germany controlled almost the entire resources of continental Europe and was poised to move into the Middle East. The Soviet Union had lost the heart of its industry, and the United States was not yet armed. The Allied victory in 1945 was not inevitable. Overy shows us exactly how the Allies regained military superiority and why they were able to do it. He recounts the decisive campaigns: the war at sea, the crucial battles on the eastern front, the air war, and the vast amphibious assault on Europe. He then explores the deeper factors affecting military success and failure: industrial strength, fighting ability, the quality of leadership, and the moral dimensions of the war.

Stalingrad
Stalingrad

Author: Antony Beevor

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1999-05-01

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 1101153563

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The Battle of Stalingrad was not only the psychological turning point of World War II: it also changed the face of modern warfare. From Antony Beevor, the internationally bestselling author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem. In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that bore Stalin's name. In the five-month siege that followed, the Russians fought to hold Stalingrad at any cost; then, in an astonishing reversal, encircled and trapped their Nazi enemy. This battle for the ruins of a city cost more than a million lives. Stalingrad conveys the experience of soldiers on both sides, fighting in inhuman conditions, and of civilians trapped on an urban battlefield. Antony Beevor has itnerviewed survivors and discovered completely new material in a wide range of German and Soviet archives, including prisoner interrogations and reports of desertions and executions. As a story of cruelty, courage, and human suffering, Stalingrad is unprecedented and unforgettable. Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle.