25. German Disaster on the Volga
Stalin did not have a monopoly on catastrophic mistakes: Hitler was seemingly determined to match his Soviet counterpart screwup for screwup. Nothing highlights that better than the Fuhrer‘s disastrous decisions in 1942, which transformed what had started off as a promising campaign into an utter disaster.
The 1942 German summer offensive sought to capture the Soviets’ oil fields in the Caucasus. The city of Stalingrad on the Volga River was intended as the easternmost anchor for a line stretching between the rivers Don and Volga. That line would be manned in order to protect the German advance into the Caucasus from attack in the rear by Soviets advancing from the north. However, the symbolism of the city being named after Stalin grabbed the attention of the egomaniacal German and Soviet warlords. Thus, what began as a relatively mundane contest for Stalingrad morphed into a major showdown.
