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Essay on Hitler's Decision to Crush Russia
Hitler declared a massive war against Russia on June 22, 1941. The German Army, largest army the world had yet known was assembled for this large enterprise. About 3 million German troops moved across the spatial immensity of Russia by operating on a two thousand-mile-long front. Soviet forces consisted of 1.3 million men, 3,444 tanks, 2,900 aircraft, and 19,000 guns. The Wehrmacht concentrated 900,000 troops, 2,700 tanks, 2,000 aircraft, and 10,000 guns. (Richard, 1997) However the Wehrmacht met with preliminary success. In the autumn of 1942, General Friedrich Paulus, commander of the German Sixth Army that was moving against Stalingrad in the East, informed Hitler that the city would fall by the tenth of November.
A few months later this same German army was being ground down, a distance of feet from its objective. The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point in the war in Europe. It reached its horrible conclusion on February 2, 1943, when Paulus, who had been promoted to Field Marshal, only a few days before, was taken prisoner along with his army. The extended Nazi supply lines, the ancient Russian ally, "General Winter," and the determination of the Russian people held the Nazis at bay and then pushed them back.
Never again was the Wehrmacht able to recover the offensive in any enduring manner.
The war had turned against Germany. For the remaining two years, the expansive erstwhile Third Reich was being converted into Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), which Hitler could only defend. As the Russians persistently pushed westward against the German armies, the Allied forces, mainly made up of British and American troops, invaded Italy on July 10, 1943. (French North Africa had been previously invaded by an Anglo- American force in November 1942.) And then, in the most extensive naval landing in history, the Allies attacked Western Europe in Normandy, France, on D-Day, June 6, 1944.....
