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Verdun was chosen quite deliberately to act as a theater-level slaughterhouse. But it is easy enough to find considerable towns or cities in history that were enlisted, so to speak, for a strategic or operational purpose, not because they had any intrinsic quality worth defending to the last soldier. Stalingrad was one such place. The […]

By the end of August, there were good reasons for the Russians to leave Stalingrad. Russia’s 62d Army counted only 20,000 soldiers at the time. The 62d had retreated into the city, herded eastward by the Sixth Army’s advance across the Don River. Just as it took refuge inside Stalingrad, the 62d would be assigned […]