What if hitler took stalingrad

Hitler wanted to capture Stalingrad not only because it was an important strategic point and ideological lever of pressure. It is possible to talk about the course of the battle for a very long time, but we will briefly review everything.

The first stage of the battle was successful for the Germans, they easily broke through the defenses of the city and by August 23, the Wehrmacht armies broke into the city. Before entering the city, German aviation launched horrific airstrikes, which killed thousand civilians, and turned Stalingrad into ruins. Already in September, the Germans captured half the city along the Volga River. Now the whole river was shot through, and forcing became a real test for the Soviet troops.

The fighting in Stalingrad went for every house, for every street. Tank factories produced tanks from the conveyor belt directly into battle, sometimes even without ammunition, and those who assembled the tank became the crew. When winter came, the Germans faced a crushing cold and Soviet snipers. The legend was Vasily Zaitsev, who killed enemy soldiers in Stalingrad, including officers, and 11 professional snipers.

In November, the Red Army launched a counterattack, which was accompanied by huge losses, but nevertheless, Soviet soldiers gradually pressed the Germans further and further into the city. In January , the 6th Army was defeated in more than two parts and the Soviet army began to destroy these formations, Paulus surrendered on January On February 2, the remnants of the German army surrendered.

If before that the German army was invincible, now it was forced to retreat with huge losses of both manpower and equipment. The USSR lost during the battle more than 1 million thousand people who were killed, about 4 thousand tanks, 16 thousand guns.

The Germans lost about 1 million people, less than 2 thousand tanks, aircraft, a huge amount of other equipment. As a result of the battle, the 6th army of the Wehrmacht was completely defeated, which radically changed all the plans of the German command. Meanwhile, the authority of the USSR in the political arena has greatly increased, and the Allies realized that the Germans could be defeated.

The Germans' ruthless requisitioning of fuel, industrial facilities and labour from France and other countries reduced the economies of the subjugated parts of Europe to such a state that they were unable — and, with their workers becoming ever more refractory, unwilling — to contribute significantly to German war production. Above all, the Reich was short of fuel. Romania and Hungary supplied a large proportion of Germany's needs. But this was not enough to satisfy the appetite of the Wehrmacht's gas-guzzling tanks and fighter planes.

Rommel's eastward push across northern Africa was designed not just to cut off Britain's supply route through the Suez canal but above all to break through to the Middle East and gain control over the region's vast reserves of oil. In mid he captured the key seaport of Tobruk. But when he resumed his advance, he was met with massive defensive positions prepared by the meticulous British general Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein.

Over 12 days he failed to break through the British lines and was forced into a headlong retreat across the desert. To complete the rout, the allies landed an expeditionary force further west, in Morocco and Algeria. A quarter of a million German and Italian troops surrendered in May Rommel had already returned to Germany on sick leave.

But it was not to be. By the time of Montgomery's victory, it had become clear that the Germans' attempt to compensate for their lower levels of arms production by stopping American supplies and munitions from reaching Britain across the Atlantic had also failed. In the course of , a determined construction campaign increased the number of U-boats active in the Atlantic and the Arctic from just over 20 to more than ; in November alone they sank , tonnes of allied shipping, aided by the Germans' ability to decipher British radio traffic while keeping their own secret.

But from December , the British could decode German ciphers once more and steer their convoys away from the waiting wolf-packs of U-boats. Small aircraft carriers began to accompany allied convoys, using spotter planes to locate the German submarines, which had to spend most of their time on the surface in order to move with any reasonable speed and locate the enemy's ships.

By May the allies were building more ship tonnage than the Germans were sinking, while one U-boat was being sunk by allied warships and planes on average every day. The battle of the Atlantic was over. The most dramatic and most significant reversal of German fortunes came, however, on the eastern front. The sheer scale of the conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army dwarfed anything seen anywhere else during the second world war.

From 22 June , the day of the German invasion, there was never a point at which less than two-thirds of the German armed forces were engaged on the eastern front. Deaths on the eastern front numbered more than in all the other theatres of war put together, including the Pacific.

Hitler had expected the Soviet Union, which he regarded as an unstable state, ruled by a clique of "Jewish Bolsheviks" a bizarre idea, given the fact that Stalin himself was an antisemite , exploiting a vast mass of racially inferior and disorganised peasants, to crumble as soon as it was attacked. But it did not. On the contrary, Stalin's patriotic appeals to his people helped rally them to fight in the "great patriotic war", spurred on by horror at the murderous brutality of the German occupation.

More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately left to die of starvation and disease in makeshift camps. Civilians were drafted into forced labour, villages were burned to the ground, towns reduced to rubble.

More than one million people died in the siege of Leningrad; but it did not fall. Soviet reserves of manpower and resources were seemingly inexhaustible. In a vast effort, major arms and munitions factories had been dismantled and transported to safety east of the Urals. Here they began to pour out increasing quantities of military hardware, including the terrifying "Stalin organ", the Katyusha rocket-launcher. In the longer run, the Germans were unable to match any of this; even if some of their hardware, notably the Tiger and Panther tanks, was better than anything the Russians could produce, they simply could not get them off the production lines in sufficient quantities to make a decisive difference.

Already in December , Japan's entry into the war, and its consequent preoccupation with campaigns in the Pacific, allowed Stalin to move large quantities of men and equipment to the west, where they brought the German advance to a halt before Moscow. Unprepared for a winter war, poorly clad, and exhausted from months of rapid advance and bitter fighting, the German forces had to abandon the idea of taking the Russian capital. A whole string of generals succumbed to heart attacks or nervous exhaustion, and were replaced; Hitler himself took over as commander-in-chief of the army.

Hitler had already weakened the thrust towards Moscow by diverting forces to take the grainfields of the Ukraine and push on to the Crimea. For much of , this tactic seemed to be succeeding. German forces took the Crimea and advanced towards the oilfields of the Caucasus.

Here again, acquiring new supplies of fuel to replenish Germany's dwindling stocks was the imperative. But Soviet generals had begun to learn how to co-ordinate tanks, infantry and air power and to avoid encirclement by tactical withdrawals.

German losses mounted. Some historians have pointed to the German decision to advance along three axes: in the north toward Leningrad , in the south toward Ukraine, and in the center against Moscow.

But the Wehrmacht had force enough to support three offensives, and its quick destruction of so many Soviet armies suggests that this was a reasonable decision. The elimination of the Kiev pocket on September 26 bagged , men, more than 3, artillery pieces, and almost tanks.

But it delayed the resumption of major operations against Moscow until early autumn. This, many historians argue, was a fatal blunder. Yet, as historian David M. Glantz points out, such a scenario ignores what the Soviet armies around Kiev might have done had they not been trapped, and introduces too many variables to make for a good counterfactual.

When the operation begins, Army Group Center enjoys a substantial advantage over the Soviet forces assigned to defend Moscow. It has at its disposal 1. In contrast, the Soviets have only 1. The seeming parity in the number of tanks is misleading, however, since the overwhelming majority of Soviet tanks are obsolescent models.