I have to ask, where did You get that number ? As far as I know, the 6th Army had something like 200k soldiers and not all of them died. The city itself is actualy also rather small compared to say Berlin.
My unit didn’t normal participate in parades. We did have a Commanding General inspection that we all spent a month getting ready for. The unit was split up into different groups that got graded. My short straw was wall locker uniform inspection or something similarly named, basically all your issued uniforms was to be checked. Not my photo.
We couldn’t have plastic hangers because they didn’t look nice enough so all 20 or so of us had to go by wood hangers so we all look nice and the same. We couldn’t use are existing uniforms as was intended, because they also didn’t look nice enough 
so we purchased all new uniforms for the inspection. I think in total over a months pay or more at one time. As I recall I got dinged for two items, one was a IP (Irish Pennant - ie a loose thread or thread that was not trimmed close to the fabric, we spent at least a week trimming and burning fabric, little bast*rd grew over night) inside the camouflage trousers deep in the inseam area and I don’t recall the second. I do recall in one inspection a beer bottle cap fell out of one of my dress shoes. 
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There would have been a general mutiny if we had been forced to pay for our own uniforms …
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Casualty chapter in English Wikipedia:
Includes quotes from various studies.
Sure, Stalingrad was much smaller than Berlin, but the Battle for Berlin lasted 2 weeks and is far from the “meat grinder” Stalingrad evolved into.
Cheers,
Angel
After boot camp we knew all uniform purchases were on us. We didn’t like it cutting into any bills we had or beer money, mostly beer money was the issue.
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Professional military?
We were conscripts … bed, food, clothes, tickets to travel home over weekends, daily allowance to purchase small things (candies, tobacco, et.c).
Buy my own uniform? Army wants me to wear it, army pays for it. They gifted us the work knives when we left, I managed to “acquire” a spare winter cap and a spare summer cap.
Yes. The Army as I recall gave you money or issued the uniforms as they ran out, Marines were on our own after boot camp. They might have given us the first item free if new item was added but we don’t change that much or at least when I was in.
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Thats not the Battle of Stalingrad, thats more like the cummulated cassulties for the whole southern front since sommer 42. Also I dont see a lot of original sources there.
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In the US Army soldiers recieve a clothing allowance every month. Officers do not. If a soldier is frugal and knows how to take care of his boots and uniform that clothing allowance simply becomes beer money.
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Is that the famine that resulted from Mao attempting to kickstart communist China out of the stone age by declaring everybody had to make steel, with furnaces popping up in backyards, and nobody was growing rice because everybody was working to make, at best, what became pig iron, and little more than slag most the time?
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Jacob,
I really appreciate reading your insights. I hope you keep telling us what it was like. If you said which army you were in, I’ve already forgot. I hope you keep posting your experiences.
Fred
Yep, that was one of many contributing factors.
It’s all in the article I linked to.
Kill all sparrows in the belief that they eat grains … the sparrows consumed a lot of insects who could now have a population explosion thanks to the extremely reduced predation from sparrows … insects had a party eating most of the grain … who could have imagined …
Worked a treat to reduce the human population though …
A prime example of when dogmatic thinking gets in the way of rational thought.
It is also a prime example of why dictatorships and/or authoritarian systems usually fail.
Fun facts from a totally different area:
Japan is sitting on huge volumes of cooling water from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
They have filtered it in any number of ways BUT it is still slightly radioactive since it contains
tritium which is a hydrogen isotope.
Environmentalists are upset, Korea makes a fuss (for historic-politic reasons) as well as China.
Ideological thinking yet again replaces rational thought.
The stored cooling water has a lower concentration of tritium than the open ocean, releasing it would actually reduce the average radioactivity of the oceans.
As if that wasn’t enough, bananas (the bent yellow fruit) are more radioactive than the Japanese cooling water (trust the Japanese to be thorough). If you see an environmentalist eating a banana, please make sure to tell them that it is radioactive 
Worried about x-rays at the dentist?
Read this: Banana equivalent dose - Wikipedia
but don’t go bananas, there are worse things in life (radiationwise):
What to know before you go bananas about radiation | University of California
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Definitely not!
Same Wikipedia article gives Soviet casualties at “478,741 personnel killed or missing”.
These were incured as follows:
Stalingrad Defensive Operation(July 17- Nov.18 1942)- 323,856 personnel killed or missing
Stalingrad Offensive Operation(Nov. 19 1942- Feb 2 1943)- 154,885 personnel killed or missing.
While the Battle for Stalingrad raged, the Soviets lost- on the southern front again- another 192,791 personnel (killed or missing) during the North-Caucasus Defensive Operation(July 25-Dec. 31 1942)
The Soviet losses in Caucasus are not calculated in the total for Stalingrad, thus the numbers given in the article are not for the southern front in the second half of 1942.
And I don’t believe Axis data is like you think, but Soviet data is Stalingrad only.It is either Like For Like, or it’s Apples and Pears in a fruit jelly(and apples and pears in a fruit jelly don’t live long enough on Wikipedia to tell their stories)
All data given above taken from:
Россия и СССР в войнах XX века — Потери вооружённых сил. Статистическое исследование. / Под общ. ред. Г. Ф. Кривошеева
(Russia and USSR in the Wars of the XX century- Losses of Armed Forces.A Statistycal Study. Written by collective under general editor G.F.Krivosheev)
I mentioned studies, not sources.
The Wikipedia article mentions some studies, that come to the figure, I mentioned earlier(close to 1 mio. killed and missing).These are:
Craig, William (1973). Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad
Wagner, Margaret; Osborne, Linda; Reyburn, Susan; Kennedy, David (2007). The Library of Congress World War II Companion
Hellbeck, Jochen (2015). Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich
Regarding sources, where are they, how easily one can find and access them, I think the best would be if one reads Sir Anthony Beaver’s lecture at Cambridge:
Or his book on the subject.
Cheers,
Angel
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That whole era is known as ‘The Great Leap Forward’ which was, as you said, an attempt to kickstart the country. The resulting famine was one of the consequences of the programme.
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Robin, radioactive bananas, what an incredible article. I love bananas. Maybe that’s why I have such a positive glow to my complexion?
When it comes to radiation, I have four friends that I listen to:
-
Aerospace engineer, literally a rocket scientist, who worked on satellites and launch vehicles and then launched said satellites with said launch vehicles for the Navy
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A professor of plasma physics
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Friend who ran the nuclear reactor on a submarine
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Friend who works for a hazmat cleanup company who cleans up radioactive sites.
Once discussing a radioactive Super Fund site near where I grew up, all four of them gave me different answers on just how bad certain radioactive compounds are.
So many times on so many subjects, I would love to have gotten all four of them in the same room together and listen to them discuss some scientific topics.
A couple of them I have not talked to in decades, but from what I remember, all of them would say that if we really want it green energy, nuclear is a the greenest energy we could have. Now whether or not some of them trust certain entities to manage nuclear energy correctly is a whole other story.
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Er, I’m all for a bit of thread drift but this is getting surreal(!)
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Boots, yeah maybe you’re right. As the original poster, I’ll try to rain it in now. So the (somewhat reworded) original question is:
With what we now know about Soviet command and control, the performance of their weapons, our Doctrine versus their Doctrine and tactics, what do you guys think? You guys that were serving way back then. Would NATO have held the Re Red Army/WP, if the Soviets had attacked west in the 1970s or even early 80s, could NATO have stopped them without going nuclear?
Fred, I’m not really complaining just commenting; “radioactive bananas” has got to be a first for this site!
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I have not been a real soldier (dragging my knuckles around for a year of conscript service does not really count).
I think it would have gone nuclear.
If NATO had not been able to resist then NATO would probably have chosen the nuclear option.
If NATO had been able to resist the WP the probability that the WP would go nuclear can’t be ignored.
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Jeez, that’s bleak.
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