The Eastern Front, Part Two: The Decisive Battle

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Italian Alpine soldier on the Don. Photo courtesy ww2incolor.com

Hitler refused to order a breakout for his surrounded troops, so condemning hundreds of thousands of men to death.  He instructed his men to fight to the last.  The Russians would close the circle tighter and tighter, their attack almost unstoppable.

German soldiers were cut off from their supplies, and many starved or froze to death during this bitter encounter.  By the end of January of 1943 the Soviets had retaken almost the entire city.  The German 6^th officially surrendered on February 2^nd, ending perhaps the most brutal fight ever known.  The Russian victory was complete and decisive, and the momentum of the war was now theirs.  The Soviet march to victory, and conquest, was about to begin.

The Italian 8^th Army had its role in this hellish epic as well.  Operation Little Saturn was launched against the Italian lines by the Russians on December 16^th.  The results were devastating; entire Italian divisions were wiped from the earth as if they were never there.  Those who survived and managed to escape the initial attacks were about to endure a nightmare of an unimaginable scale.  Freedom laid hundreds of miles away from these men, through a bleak waste land of snow guarded by thousands of enemy troops in the dead of a Russian winter.  These men were about to engage in their greatest battle ever.  The battle to live. 

End Part 2 of 3

TJ Nicoletti

References.

Few Returned:  28 days on the Russian front:   Eugenio Corti, Peter Edward Levy
Italian Army, 1940-1945:   Philip Jowett
War without Garlands: Barbarossa 1941/42:  Robert Kershaw
Stalingrad:  Anthony Beevor
World War II Magazine article with Albano Castelletto
Wikipedia Articles
Tucker, Spencer Encyclopedia of World War II

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Strong interest in WW2. My Father served in the Pacific with 710 Tank BTL at Anguar, Peleliu, and Philippines. Grandfather was in Italian Army shortly after WW1.

Peleliu81

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