February 2, 1943: The Battle of Stalingrad

February 2, 1943: The Battle of Stalingrad ends when the Nazis surrender, having exhausted their supplies after 5 months.

It was the largest battle in terms of manpower in human history. The Soviet Union claimed 478,000 military deaths from this single battle, and another 650,000 wounded. On the Axis side, Nazi Germany lost 300,000, Italy 114,000, Romania 109,000, and Hungary 105,000. But the Soviets won.

Why did the Nazis want Stalingrad? Part of it was sheer pettiness on the part of their Chancellor, Adolf Hitler: To claim a city named for the Soviet Premier, Joseph Stalin, whom he considered his ultimate arch-enemy. A strategic reason is that it was an industrial and transport hub.

But the more strategic reason is that Stalingrad was the gateway to the oil fields of the Caucasus Mountains, and the Nazis needed oil. What they got instead was Russian Winter, and death.

A legend is told of a commander who kept reporting back that he was losing no men, even though he had lost hundreds. Why did he do this? So he would continue to get his unit's full supply of vodka, and his men that survived could have more than usual. When Stalin found out about this... he gave the man a promotion for his ingenuity.

Time magazine had named Stalin its Man of the Year for 1939, and did so again for 1942.

Until 1925, the city was known as Tsaritsyn, named for the Tsars (or Czars) of Russia in general. In 1961, 8 years after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev had the city renamed Volgograd, for the river it was on, the Volga.

Today, it is home to a little over 1 million people, and, in commemoration of the key battle of what Russia calls "The Great Patriotic War" (the Eastern Front of the European Theater of World War II), what was once the world's tallest statue: The Motherland Calls.

At 279 feet tall from foot to the tip of her sword, she remains the tallest statue outside Asia, and the tallest statue of a woman anywhere. For comparison's sake, the figure of the Statue of Liberty is 151 feet high from foot to torch, although the entire structure is 305 feet from ground to torch.

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February 2, 1943 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. But there was 1 NHL game played that day: The Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-3 at the Boston Garden. Hall-of-Famer Bill Cowley scored a hat trick for the Bruins.