They Won Together

This week the battle of Stalingrad--perhaps the most decisive in the Russo-German war, if not in all of World War II--approached its end. The Red Army had killed or captured most of the German and Rumanian troops that had been hammering the city since last August. In the final stages even the Nazi Commander, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered along with 16 other generals.

The victory meant much more than the destruction of a great army. It meant the complete failure of Hitler's 1942 strategy in Russia: to outflank Moscow from the south, render the Volga lifeline useless to the Russians and secure the German flank driving through the Caucasus toward Baku and the Middle East. It also meant that the Red Armies defending Stalingrad and the Volga were free to push west and join the armies smashing at Rostov and Kharkov.

The only compensation for the Germans was that by holding out for three weeks after their ultimate doom was sealed they prevented all the Red Armies in the south from striking in unison. Said Berlin: "The conclusion of this military venture supplies the epilogue to a military undertaking whose history will be written with the blood of heroic fighters."

Not until last week did the Russians reveal how nearly the German Sixth Army had come to capturing Stalingrad. In September the Germans actually occupied the central part of the city. Concentrating their power in the industrial districts, they then stormed into the Stalingrad tank factory, but failed to drive on to the Volga. Often the opposing lines were only 15 yards apart. Most of the fighting was done with hand grenades, one Russian division using more than 100,000 in a single month's fighting.

Red Army headquarters was moved five times. At one stage the Russian position seemed so hopeless that Lieut. General Vassili Chuikov, who commanded the Sixty-Second Army under Colonel General Konstantin Rokossovsky, ordered his chief of staff to cross to the east bank of the Volga. His chief refused and said: "We will win or die together."

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