5 Battles in last century by Gonzalo Toledo Chérrez

The Battle of Verdun (1916)

gonzy_toledo_12 — 2018-09-13 16:48:47 UTC

A century later, Verdun continues to represent the spirit of resistance of France, harassed and invaded by German troops, during the First World War. More than 750,000 soldiers were wounded or killed for 300 days in the struggle for a city and its fortifications, Verdun, which Falkenhayn hoped to turn into such a failure for France to force him to negotiate a separate peace. The collapse never happened, but the cost in human lives for both armies, impotent before the rival artillery, was very high.

France won, a partial victory but not yet decisive that would cut the German plans. It was an icon: Petáin's rotation system forced almost all of the French troops to pass through Verdun at some point, which made the city the authentic bastion of France. For Germany, it was one of the highlights in which he was on the verge of winning the war and, fatefully, he did not succeed.

The Battle of Moscow (1941-1942)

gonzy_toledo_12 — 2018-09-13 16:53:23 UTC

After the late start of Operation Barbarossa, which as a whole is the most devastating military operation ever contemplated by the human being, German troops quickly took most of Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia, to stand at the gates of Leningrad , Moscow and Kiev at the beginning of autumn. Except for Kiev, in Moscow and Leningrad they would find a fierce resistance. In the case of Moscow, thousands and thousands of Russian soldiers poorly equipped but launched to defend their capital.

The battle of Moscow allowed Russia to reorder its army after the initial collapse, and to arrest Guderian and company only fifty miles from the Kremlin. The winter and the whimsical mistakes of Hitler, in addition to the duration of the stake, caused more than one million casualties (between October and January, approximately). In the first round, Germany came close to beating Russia. In Moscow, at a tremendous cost, they did not allow it.

The battle of the Somme (1916)

gonzy_toledo_12 — 2018-09-13 16:56:03 UTC

If Verdun was the symbol of France, the Somme was the symbol of the United Kingdom. The First World War was a static conflict with large-scale battles that, although they did not change the front panorama for years, took the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. In the Somme, a tremendous British offensive in the northern part of Belgium with the aim of breaking the well-equipped and protected German lines, more than 1,200,000 soldiers of either side were wounded or killed. A meat grinder

The images are terrifying, a hundred years later. The exaggeration of the count of victims had no correspondence with the decisive character of the battle: the Somme is the paradigmatic example of the stability of the front during the First World War, and after months of British offensive, the United Kingdom had barely won a handful of kilometers of muddy and devastated terrain. A wasteful effort that marked a whole generation of Britons.

The Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943)

gonzy_toledo_12 — 2018-09-13 16:58:13 UTC

The myth by antonomasia of the Great Patriotic War. Disgruntled by his setback in Moscow and the inability of his army to take Leningrad, Hitler ordered his troops to move south, successfully. Von Manstein came to take Kharkov and the eastern part of Ukraine, in addition to descending towards the Caucasus oil fields in Georgia. But in his way, Hitler ran into Stalingrad, current Volvograd, and turned it into the symbolic struggle against the communist dictator who had given name to the city.

The result was the worst and most tragic urban battle that is remembered. The German Sixth Army, supported by the cavalry and by other Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies, tried for months and without success, isolated and under the cold of the Russian winter, to reduce the stock market of Stalingrad. The Soviet troops, strongly motivated and unable to look back, even though their conditions were inferior to material level, did not yield at any time. They forced the destruction of all German troops and, as of 1943, they recovered for the first time the initiative in the front. It would be the beginning of the Nazi end.

The Battle of Berlin (1945)

gonzy_toledo_12 — 2018-09-13 17:00:02 UTC

The slogan among the allies was clear: the error of the First World War would not be repeated, when the German defeat ended with its sovereign territory virgin of rival military presence. After Stalingrad, Sicily and Normandy, the goal of the Soviets, the British and the Americans was to reach Berlin. It will cost what it costs. It was first the Soviets who surrounded the German capital, symbol of Nazism, future Germania, and those who faced the radical, ferocious and desperate resistance of Hitler.

It was short, but terrible: it is estimated at more than one million casualties between the months of April and May 1945. Berlin, reduced to artillery and aerial bombardment planes, the population terrorized by the Red Army, the captured Nazi dome was suicide in his bunker) and Germany and the city itself divided into four halves, configuring the subsequent scenario of Cold War and ideological division in the continent