They blew holes in the walls of cellars for added manouvrability. The Soviets learned to attack tanks from above, on building floors higher than their turrets could aim. If possible, booby-trap tank routes to seal them off once enemy tanks are already committed to the battle, so they can't move or retreat. When defending against an attack by German armour, Chuikov ordered his troops, stay hidden behind rubble until the enemy tanks are right in front of you. Such tactics worked best in fields and on the open steppe of the western Soviet Union they were almost useless amid the collapsed walls and blocked roads inside Stalingrad. They could mount fast-moving, devastating attacks on less agile enemy units, breaking through the opposing lines and encircling the soldiers who manned them. Self-propelled artillery (big guns on treads) and, particularly, tanks were key to Nazi Germany's early successes in World War II. These were the essentials of the tactical lessons he and his troops learned in the battle. The stalemate was broken by a daring Soviet pincer attack in midwinter, west of the city, that cut off the German 6th Army in Stalingrad and its outskirts ultimately, the 6th Army was destroyed and the remaining Germans driven back in the first really successful Soviet counterattack of World War II.īut before that happened, Chuikov fought the Germans to a standstill. Attacking from the west, the German invaders came within a few hundred yards of the Volga River that marked Stalingrad's eastern border, but a combination of luck, Adolf Hitler's hubris, Chuikov's tactical skill, and the Soviet system's willingness to throw hundreds of thousands of their own of soldiers' lives at the German forces led the Wehrmacht and the Red Army to a stalemate in the ruined city. All told, Stalingrad cost an estimated 1.5 million lives.Ĭhuikov, the commander of the Soviet 62nd Army, had operational command of the defensive effort at the city named after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the fall of 1942 and winter of 1943. The Germans called the style of battle Rattenkrieg, or rat war. Graduates stood a chance of surviving one of the most brutal and grinding battles in history slow learners all died. General Vasily Chuikov came up with this name to describe a soldier's adaptation to the tactics that led to survival in the Battle of Stalingrad.
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