It's a heart warming story that feels good to all non-fascists. So, I am hoping this cheers you up!
Haha - "Stalin didn't want the Nazis to take STALINgrad" sounds like a vaguely plausible accusation, but Stalingrad was supremely important, even beyond the fact that it was a good place to beat and encircle the Germans:
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the top war goal for Germany was to take the oil fields of the Caucasus - securing the highly defensible Stalingrad would mean crossing the Caucasus next and taking the all-important oil; having failed that, Germany slowly starved of fuel for its tanks, trucks, and planes
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Stalingrad straddles the great Volga river (hence why it's called Volgograd today), which is both an important defensive barrier AND a shipping route; all that Caucasus oil was shipped from Baku via the Caspian Sea to the Volga and further to the rest of the country, fueling Soviet tanks, trucks, and planes; no Stalingrad, no oil for the USSR, even if Germany couldn't take the Caucasus
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Japan promised Germany it would attack the USSR once Stalingrad fell - which the spy extraordinaire Richard Sorge had communicated back to Moscow; the Japanese land army had limited capability, but there were something like 1 million troops just sitting in Manchuria - if they had forced the USSR to wage a two-front war who knows what would have happened
whoa all three of those are totally new to me, thanks for sharing this
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Actually, it was like very mcguyvered. The Nazis had cut off all the lines. So, it wasn't like he could actually communicate with anyone over there. So everyone kind of did whatever they thought was best.. and it worked out!
damn this is one of the best articles on this that ive seen, i gotta get that order on a poster or tattoo or something
RE: The anti-tank rifle
Old timey tanks where primarily designed to protect against fire coming in from the sides. The heaviest armor was generally on the front and sides of the tank. By contrast the top of the tank was lightly armored, as it was only expected to resist incidental damage.
Anti-Tank rifles were large caliber rifles developed in WWII to destroy the then lightly armored tanks. WWI tanks had barely enough armor to stop rifle rounds, so a big enough rifle could punch holes in them and damage machinery or kill the crew.
But by WWII tanks had much, much heavier armor, designed to resist the powerful cannons on other tanks.
Using an out-dated anti-tank rifle against a modern Panzer was futile. The best you could hope for was to destroy a vision port or a radio.
But...
but...
If you were on the roof of a four story apartment building.
And you had an anti-tank rifle.
And the enemy tanks were forced by rubble to come right up to your building...
You could fire down on the relatively thin top-hatches from a sharp angle, potentially piercing the hatch and killing the gunner, commander, or loader of the tank.
Which is what the troops at Pavlov's house did, dealing out massively out-sized damage to tanks that in any other circumstance would have destroyed them.
The original CoD was pretty dope, it had 3 switching perspectives split pretty evenly between a US grunt a british SAS commando and a Russian trooper, each campaign was a pastiche of basically all the war movies the developers had seen. The Soviet storyline was basically Enemy at the Gates with somewhat more historical parity, with that unfortunate stereotype of 'one man gets a rifle and one man gets a magazine' level, but it was otherwise really sympathetic to the reds, and didn't shy away from their contribution to the war effort. The first game had this really fascinating feature of having these named nobody NPC's running around helping you fight, and it really made you feel like you were part of a collaborative effort.
Edit: This is definitely why I wanted to be a Communist when I was like 13
Unfortunately from what I understand it happened a few times when Stalin first ordered 'no steps back!' but stopped soon after when they noticed it was just making morale worse and killing their own men on the retreat was an ass-backwards idea. Early war Soviet Union was not super good, critical support and all that, but they definitely mistimed their purging of the brass
Yes, and it's actually a riveting experience. Going from Stalingrad to Berlin, I got goosebumps taking the Reichstag at the end when you see your side's tank reinforcements come into the square, a huge relief that the struggle is finally over
Just a quick correction here so people don't absorb bad info from this article.
In the summer of 1942, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarosa [sic], which involved the most brutal invasion of the city of Stalingrad.
Operation Barbarossa was the initial invasion of the Soviet Union from June 22, 1941 - December 5, 1941, which is when the Nazi's stalled infront of Moscow and the Soviet counter-offensive began. What the author is referring to here is actually called Case Blue, or Fall Blau, which is the German Summer offensive of 1942. This may seem nitpicky but I believe it's important to make the distinction as Barbarossa had wildly unrealistic goals and failed horribly, almost immediately falling behind and running into problems, and everything that came after was the Nazi's attempt to salvage the disaster they were left with.
I swear there was a level in Sniper Elite V2 based on this building
it was my favorite building to camp in on endless mode
Yes. Vasily something. Jude law played him in that movie. I can't remember his last name.
