Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Letters from Stalingrad - Numbers, Censorship \u0026 Effects on the Homefront" video.
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Stalingrad was the last nail in the coffin for the Axis hope to win the war.
Midway, Guadacanal, El-Alamein, USAs entry into the war, the Allied victories at sea in the western theather, the bombing of German cities... and then came Stalingrad.
All that was won in 1942 had been lost. Germany had lost her best Army. The reputation of the invincible German military was from now on shattered. The Axis had lost momentum, and now the allies rolled forward in Asia, in Africa, over the skies, and on the Eastern front where the south was about to fall apart.
Everyone, including Hitler, now realized that the war on the eastern front was impossible to win rapidly.
And things didn't look good. The Axis was fighting against the largest country on earth (UK), and the country with the largest Army in the world (USSR) and at the same time they were also fighting against the largest economy on the planet (USA).
And on top of that had the Axis now had loss after loss.
The invincible Afrika Korps had been rolled back. The japanease had been stopped and lost unreplaceable amounts of skilled pilots, and the Navy had lost so many ships that Japan would never again have an upper hand in the pacific. And Germany had compensated lack of military and economic strenght, with having superior tactics and better troops. But much of that advantage had been lost when the 6th Army was destroyed. And the Russian airforce simply copied the German tactics and used it against them, and bit by bit did the Russians get better and better, while Germany lost more and more of their battlehardened troops.
It was no coincidence that Hitlers friends were starting to lose hope about the war after Stalingrad. His Axis partners started negotiations with the Allies to disengage from the war. And Spain started to take home their troops from the eastern front in 1943.
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73tons is food for lots of people when each person only eat 100g per day.
Paulus surrendered his army on the promise that his men would be feed if they surrendered - and the Russians agreed to those terms, but never cared to fullfill their promise so most of the 6th Army died.
So had the German planes delievered food instead of letters, then the German soliders probably would have been better off. Atleast they would enjoy a last meal before their end in Russian hands.
My priority would have been food first, ammo second and letters 3rd, winter cloth 4th, medical supplies and spareparts 5th, fuel 6th, and useless junk (old newspapers, barbed wire, pepper, pocketbooks, false collars, shoe laces) on 7th place on my priority list.
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