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Unlock This CourseBy early December 1941 German troops were close to Moscow. Then the war changed. On 5 December General Zhukov launched a counter-attack. He used fresh divisions brought by rail from Siberia and the Far East. They could be spared because the spy Richard Sorge had reported that Japan did not plan to attack the USSR. By January 1942 the Germans had been pushed back more than 100 kilometres.
Blitzkrieg had failed for the first time. Hitler's plan for a quick victory was dead, and Germany now faced a long war. A long war suited the USSR, which had more people and more resources, as long as it could keep its factories working and its people fighting.
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Two days after the invasion, the government set up an Evacuation Council. Between July and November 1941 about 1,500 factories were taken apart, loaded onto about 1.5 million railway wagons and rebuilt in the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, out of reach of German bombers. Millions of workers went with them. Some factories were making weapons again within weeks, before their roofs were finished. The city of Chelyabinsk built so many tanks that it was nicknamed 'Tankograd' (Tank City).
Stalin stayed in Moscow in October 1941. On 7 November he held the yearly parade in Red Square, and the soldiers marched from it straight to the front. This steadied the city. He could be brutal: Order 227 treated retreat as a crime, and special units behind the lines stopped soldiers who ran. But he also learned from his mistakes. From 1942 he listened to able generals such as Zhukov and Vasilevsky and let them plan the big battles.
Stalin asked people to fight for their motherland, not for communism. In his radio speech of 3 July 1941 he called them 'brothers and sisters'. He praised heroes from Russia's past, such as Kutuzov, who had fought Napoleon in 1812. Churches were allowed to reopen. German cruelty did the rest. Villages were burned and civilians were killed, so people saw the war as a fight to survive. About 800,000 women served in the Red Army, and partisans (fighters hiding behind the German lines) attacked German supplies.
Autumn rain turned the roads to deep mud and slowed the German tanks. Then came the winter of 1941-42, with temperatures below minus 30 degrees Celsius. Hitler had expected to win before winter, so his soldiers had no winter clothing. Thousands suffered frostbite, and engines and guns froze. Soviet troops had padded jackets and felt boots. But winter alone did not win anything. It weakened the Germans, and the Red Army still had to drive them back.
Britain sent supplies by ship to the Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel from August 1941. The USA added Lend-Lease aid from late 1941. In total the Allies sent more than 400,000 lorries and jeeps, as well as railway engines, fuel, tinned food and boots. Most of it arrived from 1943 onwards. So Allied help did little to save the USSR in 1941, but it helped the Red Army to move fast when it was driving the Germans back.
War production deserves a closer look, because the spec names it. The central planning built up under the Five-Year Plans meant the state could turn the whole economy to war. Tractor factories switched to tanks. The slogan was 'Everything for the front!', shifts were long, and by 1943 more than half of all factory workers were women. In 1942, even after losing so much land, the USSR built about 24,000 tanks and about 25,000 aircraft, far more than Germany. Its T-34 tank was simple, tough and quick to build in huge numbers.
Stalingrad stood on the River Volga, the route by which oil from the Caucasus reached the rest of the USSR. It also carried Stalin's name, so neither leader would give it up. From September 1942 the German Sixth Army under General Paulus fought its way in street by street. By November it held about nine-tenths of the city. General Chuikov's 62nd Army clung to the river bank, fighting for every building. Supplies and fresh troops crossed the Volga by boat at night.
Meanwhile Zhukov and Vasilevsky prepared a trap. On 19 November 1942 they launched Operation Uranus. Soviet armies struck north and south of the city, where weaker Romanian armies guarded the sides of the German army. Four days later the two attacks met. Remember, an encirclement cuts an army off from supplies: this time more than 250,000 German and allied soldiers were inside it. Hitler refused to let Paulus break out and promised supplies by air, but far too little arrived. Starving and frozen, Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943. The last fighting ended on 2 February. About 91,000 men were taken prisoner.
The Red Army now moved west. By the end of 1944 almost all Soviet land had been freed, and in May 1945 Soviet troops captured Berlin.
Don't say that 'General Winter' beat the Germans by itself. The cold hurt them, but it took factories, soldiers and good generals to win. Don't say Lend-Lease saved Moscow: most of it came later. Don't call Stalingrad the end of the war: it was the turning point, and there were more than two years of fighting still to come. And don't mix up Stalingrad with Leningrad, the city under siege in the north.
(b) Explain two effects of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad (1942-43) on the war between Germany and the USSR. [8 marks]
One effect was that Germany was badly weakened in the east and lost the upper hand. The Sixth Army under Paulus was surrounded by Operation Uranus in November 1942, and when he surrendered on 31 January 1943 about 91,000 men became prisoners. Germany could not replace an entire army with its tanks and guns. German forces also had to pull out of the Caucasus, so they never won the oil they needed. This meant that Germany managed only one more big attack, at Kursk in July 1943, and when that failed it could only retreat.
A second effect was a change in morale on both sides. In Germany the defeat was such a shock that three days of national mourning were held, because the idea that the German army could not be beaten had been destroyed. In the USSR the opposite happened. Soldiers and civilians had seen the Red Army plan and win a huge battle, so they now believed in victory. This confidence helped the Red Army to keep attacking and to drive the Germans out of almost all Soviet land by the end of 1944.
What lifts this to the top level: there are two separate effects, each with exact facts (names, dates, numbers), and each paragraph shows how the victory led to the effect by using linking words such as 'because', 'so' and 'this meant that'.
Read the last words of the question. Here the effects must be on the war between Germany and the USSR, so write about what changed in the fighting and in morale, not about the story of the street battles. And always give two effects: one effect alone, however good, cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks.