stalingrad blues

By mid 1942, the German invasion had already cost Russia over six million soldiers, half killed and half captured by the Germans, and a large part of its vast territory and resources. With the help of its arctic winter, it stopped the exhausted Germans just before Moscow and pushed them back a bit. But in the summer of 1942, when Russia was still very weak from its tremendous losses, the German military was again ready to demonstrate its formidable fighting force.

Hitler's Generals wanted to attack in the direction of Moscow again, in order take Russia's capital city, its heart and nerve center, and to crush most of Russia's remaining military forces while doing so, but Hitler now personally commanded the German army, and he listened to his Generals much less than before.



In April 1942, Hitler issued "war directive 41", which detailed his plan for the Russian front for summer 1942, code named Operation Blue. The plan was to concentrate all available forces in the southern flank of the long front, destroy the front line Russian forces there, and then advance in two directions to the primary and secondary objectives, which were the two most important remaining industrial centers in South Russia. These  were the oil fields.But Germany's economic and manpower resources proved insufficient to defeat the Soviet Union, and the Battle of Stalingrad marked the turning of the tide. By the middle of 1943, Germans were beginning to realise they would lose the war. The Allied bombing of German towns and cities caused a further drop in morale. They knew the end was nigh