The Battle of Stalingrad is widely regarded as the bloodiest single battle World War II. It was fought between the Red Army and the Axis forces - especially the Wehrmacht - on the Eastern Front from August 1942 to February 1943. It happened as a result of the implementation by the Wehrmacht of a plan code-named Fall Blau, which was aimed at taking over the southern areas of the USSR, reaching the Caucasus and seizing oil fields in Maykop and Baku. However, in the course of the implementation of this plan, as a result of, inter alia, the intervention of Adolf Hitler, the seizure of the city of Stalingrad became one of the main objectives of the operation. For Nazi Germany, this decision turned out to be one of the worst in the history of World War II. The Stalingrad battle turned into horribly bloody and very heavy city fights, during which every house or street was fought, and the front line often ran through rooms or staircases in apartment blocks! Ultimately, as a result of it, the Wehrmacht suffered a great defeat, and the entire 6th Army was taken prisoner by the Soviets, including Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. It is estimated that during the entire Battle of Stalingrad, the Axis forces lost about 850,000 soldiers - killed, wounded and captured. The Battle of Stalingrad also marked a turn in the war on the Eastern Front, which from then on began to take a favorable turn for the USSR.
In the 1920s and - especially - in the 1930s, the Red Army underwent a rapid development in terms of increasing its posts, as well as increasing saturation with technical weapons, primarily armored weapons. Still, the infantry was the primary and numerically largest element of the Red Army. The intensive quantitative development of this type of weapon began at the turn of 1929/1930. In 1939, even before the aggression against Poland, the Soviet infantry was formed into 173 divisions (so-called rifle divisions), most of which were grouped in 43 corps. It is worth adding that after the September campaign in 1939, this number increased even more. The Soviet rifle division in 1941 consisted of three rifle regiments (three battalions each), an artillery regiment, after an anti-tank and anti-aircraft artillery division, as well as reconnaissance and communication battalions. In total, it numbered about 14,500 people. However, by 1945 this position underwent significant changes, leading to a division of approximately 11,500-12,000 people, consisting of three infantry regiments, an artillery brigade consisting of three regiments, a self-propelled artillery squadron and many support units, including anti-tank, anti-aircraft weapons or communications. The saturation of infantry units with machine weapons has also increased significantly - for example with the submachine guns APsZ 41, and later APsZ 43.