Topic: Stalingrad
Without offending one's sensibilities nor trying to demean and invalidate the war of the Western allies, I would cast my votes on any single Eastern Front battle before even considering the western front. World War two was fought in Eastern Europe. Every details points to that. Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kursk, Kiev, Debrecen, and even the Warsaw rising. These were clashes of titans -wars of annihilation. Hitler and Stalin were fighting total and ideological wars, which by definition leave no ambiguities nor misunderstanding in the way of the fighting. The Geneva Conention rules were a "nicety," massacres happened by the divisions and corps. Only in the battle of Debrecen in Hungary in Hungary in October 1944 the German 6th Army annihilated three Soviet tank Corps. The equivalent of the Western Battle of the Bulge in the East was not dreaded, it was expected and welcomed, since there was no other way. The Germans and the Soviets did not rout each other on brigade and divisional level, rather on corps and army level. It was simply a war of giants. Checking all statiscs will back this up. The trauma of the war in the West was not experienced the same way, or at the same level and intensity as in the East. I am inclined to think that there was NO GREAT BATTLE in WWII, since I view every confrontation as a part of a lobng process which has a beginning and an end. Every battle no matter small or big contributed to the same end result. However, If I am to point my finger at one of them, I have to choose Stalingrad, not because on the numbers that died there, nor because of the horrors of war, or the scale of destruction. Simply because the was the culmination of Nazi power which from then on started to decline. The only battle of the west which I consider worthy of being called as a true operation is the fight for Monetcasino and Anzio. I dont think the Normandy landing, nor the Battle fo the Bulge qualify since, despite the numbers involved their end result was never in doubt. Even if the landing would have marred by disaster, they would have landed at one point in time; whereas the Battle of the Bulge was a result of the thined Ally supplies and bad weather. After recuperating from the inital surprise the ALlies would have gone eventually on the assault - as in fact it did happen.
Also, I am inclined to believe that no battle of the Pacific qualifies simply because a technological superior US would definitely have defeated Japan; island hoping restricts clashes into well defined spaces, and if not one island would have fallen, the next would have (blitkrieg at its best; divide and conquer later); also, a war between two opponents rarely qualifes as defining into world affairs. Did the war between the US and Spain qualify? Germany v Danmark in the 18th century, Germany v. France and Austria, or Russia v Japan? Important as they were in gaining knowldge and drawing lessons, they did not change the course of reality much: just how to perceive it [/u]
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