AFTERWARD
The battle of Stalingrad was a prolonged siege that wreaked terror upon Russian city from the 23rd of August, 1942, to the 2nd of February the next year. The defeat of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad crippled the Führer Hitler's campaigns in the East and marked a turning point in the war. Over the years, the brutal fighting in Stalingrad became known as one of the bloodiest battles in modern history and has become a symbol of what some may call a Pyrrhic victory. Despite having quickly been beaten back through the city during the opening moves of the battle, in a matter of two months, from late November to the end of January in 1943, the Russians managed kill a quarter of a million German troops, destroy a thousand German tanks, eighteen hundred pieces of artillery, an entire fleet of transport planes, and untold numbers of military supplies.
Though taken off the line for months to come, the battle of Stalingrad lasted until February and the 13th Guards Rifle Division, of the Soviet Red Army, continued to fight in Ukraine, where they sustained heavy casualties during their assault on a small island situated in the center of the Rhine River. What was left of the division then aided the drive into Germany until they were relieved and put in reserve during the Battle of Berlin.
Approximately 5 out 6 of the 13th's enlisted men were killed during the war.
Approximately 3 out of 5 officers were killed.
Colonel Lev Voronin; commanding officer of the 13th, of Moscow, Russia, received the Gold Star for his actions during the Liberation Ukraine in the autumn of 1943. After the war, he remained in the army, supporting the Soviet Union on battlefields such as Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1959-1975), the latter where he received the Order of the Red Star for his actions in Cambodia.
He retired in 1976 as a Lieutenant General. He then became an ice hockey coach in the 1980s, but died of natural causes in 1999.
Private Durasov; rifleman of the 13th Guards Rifle Division, of St. Petersburg, Russia, was crippled during the push on Berlin in 1945, after being hit by a mortar fire. He recuperated in Moscow, but was transferred to a medical base on the Ukrainian border. After the war, he was discharged from the Red Army and fled to France from the un-fortified borders of Ukraine. He married a German woman and they had two children. He became a carpenter in 1956. He died in 2002.
Lieutenant Andrei Toufexis; platoon leader of the 13th Guards Rifle Division, of Stalingrad, Russia, fled to America with his family in 1945. He married in 1947 and had 3 children; 2 of which would fight in Vietnam; one would die in the Battle of La Drang and the other earned a Bronze Star for his actions in Hue.
He became an employee at the Tamarack Mine near Lake Superior. After much hard work, he earned his proprietor's trust and was promoted to supervisor, before being given management over a smaller mine just south of Tamarack. He moved from Minnesota to North Carolina in 1975. In late 1980, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and, fortunately, he never remembered what he had been made to suffer during the Second Great War.
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