The Finest Half Hour, Episode 17: Stalingrad

Commanders!

By the autumn of 1942, German fortunes are at high tide. Rommel is driving on El Alamein in Egypt, and von Paulus has reached the banks of the Volga river deep in southern Russia. It is here, in the city that bears Stalin’s name, that the fate of the war will be decided in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II: Stalingrad.

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We’ve now featured all the major German and Soviet tanks of 1941-42 in the The Tank Museum, Bovington's collection, so this week we’ll showcase a different kind of vehicle that helped turn the tide at Stalingrad: the Katyusha!

The Katyusha multiple rocket launcher is a rocket artillery system (mounted on a truck) that can deliver a salvo of rockets packed with high explosives. Each truck had 14 to 48 launchers, which were racks of parallel rails on which the rockets were mounted.

Like the T-34 tank, the Katyusha soon came to be feared by German troops. The Katyusha could fire a salvo of rockets, bombard a large area, and move before the Germans could fire counter-attacking artillery.

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