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By Vladislav Kozyakov
In the heat World War Two, on November 19th, 1942, the Russian army troops
launched a counter-offensive outside the city Stalingrad, now Volgograd.
The Battle of Staligrad, in which Russians stroke a smashing blow on the
Nazis, was the turning point in World War Two. The Soviet Union, the United
States and Britain were allies then.
By the fall of 1942, the Hitler’s forces had occupied a considerable part
of the European part of Russia. Hitler expected to capture Stalingrad fast
and bring an early end to the military operation.
But the selected troops of the Nazis were surrounded by the Soviet Red
Army and suffered fatal losses in the counter-offensive. 11 divisions were
crashed and 16 eliminated in the battles. From November 19th, 1942 to February
2nd, 1943, the enemy lost over 800 thousand in manpower, about 20-hundred
tanks, over 12 thousand guns and 3 thousand planes. On November 23rd, 1942,
the 330-thousand-strong Nazi group headed by Field-Marshall Paulus was
taken captive.
The battle was won at a time when the Soviet Union was fighting the Hitler
army alone. There was still a long way to go before the landing of American
and Britain troops in Normandy and the opening of the second front in Europe.
The two allies postponed the operation promised, and, instead, deployed
their forces in North Africa in a bid, as they said, to help the Soviet
Union. But that proved to be of help to Hitler, enabling him to move some
of his divisions from Tunisia to the eastern front in Russia. Furthermore,
the allies reduced lend-lease aid.
Meanwhile, the Soviet army was fighting to save the world from Nazi plague.
Leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition, the then American President Franklin
Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill praised the
Red Army and the Russian people, who paid such a dear price to stop the
aggression and smash the backbone of Hitler’s military machine. There is
President Roosevelt’s scroll in the Volgograd museum, which says: “In the
name of the people of the United States of America, I present this scroll
to the city of Stalingrad to commemorate our admiration for its gallant
defenders whose courage, fortitude and devotion during the siege of September,
13th, 1942 to January 31, 1943, will inspire forever the hearts of all
free people. Their glorious victory stemmed the tide of invasion and marked
the turning point in the war of the allied nations against the forces of
aggression”. Also in February, 1943 President Roosevelt congratulated the
Red Army, praising its victories near Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow, Voronezh
and in the Caucasus. He said that the Red Army and the Russian people had
surely started the Hitler forces on the road to ultimate defeat and earned
the lasting admiration of the people of the United States.
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