Two days ago marks 80 years since the Battle of Stalingrad, probably the biggest and hardest battle in history began. So heavy was Stalingrad that today, the bones of soldiers who perished in that war as still found all over the suburbs of the city after just a little digging. In the height of the fierce fights, the average lifespan of a Soviet soldiers was about 48 hours. A steady feed of human beings was maintained because replacements had to be maintained.
Stalingrad has at least two distinctions for the Soviets and for the world.
The first is, it shaped the war doctrine of the USSR. The nation initially had no answer to Hitler's killing machine and it's men died like flies while the generals planned. In the end, the Soviets came out with a massive counteroffensive which is still the largest in military history. They attacked with artillery across a 1000-km front. (This remained the longest front in any war until the present war in East and South Ukraine that is 2,400-km long, which is more than twice the distance between Lagos and Maiduguri) The firepower was so intense that it carried everything before it and caught the Nazis staggering. German General Paulus was encircled and captured along with his 300,000 troops of his 6th Army. Till this day, Russia, the successor to the Soviet state has maintained that same tactics of mass and heavily destructive artillery attack that lays waste to everything before it. It worked in Aleppo, Syria, Grozny and has also recently levelled cities in Ukraine, particularly the coastal city of Mauripol. There was definitely solution to this attacking formation until the Americans came out with Precision Strike Missiles that kills artillery pieces with pinpoint accuracy.
No. 2. The Soviet victory in Stalingrad set the stage for their eventual defeat of Adolf Hitler and the end of the war in Europe. That battle was in fact the birthplace of the Soviet spirit and it makes the point at which that country began to believe in itself. The capture of Paulus in particular was the turning point of WWII. The Soviets could not believe their own achievement and they were just as stunned as the first Eastern Europeans to have logged casualties from the Mongolian army were in AD 1230s. (Up till the time the first Mongols fell in Europe, the Europeans were so terrified they believed the Mongols were spirits!)
It should ne noted that the American government backed up the Soviets with a huge amount of materiel to help them fight the Nazis. Here's the list:
400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food.
159.701 SRY