The German Wehrmacht (ground army) and Luftwaffe (air force) attackers v. Stalin’s Russian defenders.
July 17: German bombardment of Stalingrad commences… eventually over 90 percent of the city turned into rubble… the Russians “hang on by their fingernails” as the Germans capture over 95 percent of the city, with the defenders relegated to two tiny pockets.
It is at this tender historical moment, with the Germans within a hairsbreadth of the conquest of Stalingrad, the ultimate psychological and symbolic prize, only to be held at bay by a ragtag tiny group of surviving defenders, that one must pause to wonder “what if?”
What if the Nazis had, instead of diverting many thousands of crucial SS Troops to the “Final Solution,” including deploying crucial manpower and material to building and maintaining the massive infrastructure of murder across Europe, had instead deployed those assets towards the siege of Stalingrad? Might that parlay not have “tipped the slender balance?”
Quite possibly. Might not recorded history have taken a very different turn? Quite possibly. Might the capture of Stalingrad under that scenario have led to an eventual total Soviet collapse? Very possibly. And, in turn, German conquest of Russia? Quite possibly. And with Russia then turned into a vassal slave–state of the Nazis, might not Britain and the Near East as well as the (oil–rich) Middle East not have fallen next? Probably.
With the remaining Free World, including its Jewish denizens, then–to–face possibly the greatest evil empire of all–time?
The actual six and a half month battle, one of the bloodiest in human history, will leave over 1.5 million dead.
On November 19, Soviet General Zhukov’s counter–offensive “Operation Uranus” against the Germans commences. Zhukov traps the primary German army, the 6th Army, in “pincer envelopment,” cutting–off its supply lines…and trapping 230,000 German and Romanian (allies of Germany) soldiers inside the “envelopment.”
As the German 6th Army withers, the German pressure on the remaining isolated ‘pockets’ of Russian defenders of Stalingrad, weakens.
The Battle of Stalingrad will last through February 2, 1943, when the German 6th Army collapses completely, and its leadership surrenders, ending, of course, their siege of Stalingrad, as well.
A very, very, very close–call.