Finished reading STALINGRAD: The Fateful Siege 1942-43 by British military historian Antony Beevor.
The Battle of Stalingrad marked a crucial turning point in Adolf Hitler’s military campaign in the former Soviet Union during the Second World War.
The Nazis had captured a big part of the country in the west and planned to grab oil fields in the Caspian Sea basin but Stalingrad was an obstacle which had to be removed first. The city bearing Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s name put up one of the most outstanding defences in military history and successfully routed the Germans and their allies. The Soviet Union paid a heavy toll for that victory. It lost 478,741 men, 2,769 aircraft, 4,341 tanks, 15,728 guns and other casualties. After Stalingrad, the Nazis were pushed back mile by mile all the way to Germany.
In his book, Antony Beevor presents situation reports from both sides in the battle with information from official documents as well as combatants’ personal diaries, letters and testimonies. Since its publication in 1998, “STALINGRAD” has been translated into 18 languages and won two awards.
On a personal note, I visited Stalingrad, now renamed Volgograd, in 1984 and saw some locations where intense fighting had occured: Mamayev Hill, Pavlov’s House, and the former Gerhardt Flour Mill which has been preserved as it was in 1943.
