Stalingrad

Germany (German Army)

**Stalingrad** is a map in *Hell Let Loose*.

Set during the Battle of Stalingrad, the series of fierce battles which fought from 23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943, between Soviet and German forces in the city of Stalingrad, in Southern Russia.

This map is set in the industrial city of Stalingrad. The city is a complete ruin and this makes the map very flat and wide-open with only a few destroyed wooden buildings for cover. For this reason, it is a favorite map of tank players, but infantry has a harder time as you must run across the open territory with no cover often.

This map is fairly balanced until someone is defending House of the Workers, Pavlov's House, or Grudinin's Mill. In these cases, the defenders almost always win because they are incredibly easy to defend. I will describe some strategies for taking these objectives.

House of the Workers: (I will not be using North, East, South, West because the compass is skewed and broken on this map) Since the House has many windows facing on the left and right side (when looking at the map), it is suicidal to attack from those positions as infantry. Therefore, you must attack from the top or bottom. The top is generally hard to get to as there is not a lot of space, but it is a good place to go if most of your team is already at the bottom part. However, the main show should always be to attack from the bottom because there are many places to make garrisons. To take the house, you have to get inside the house. To get inside the house, you usually will need to satchel defenses with Engineer, Anti-Tank, or Assault (level 9) classes.

Pavlov's House: Named after the Soviet platoon leader Yakov Pavlov whose platoon defended this house for 60 days against a vastly superior German presence. They used machine guns to repel all infantry attacks and Anti-tank rifles to disable tank turrets in their defense. Eventually, they ran out of ammo, food, and men, but Pavlov was able to escape with a few other men. ANYWAY, to take this house you must occupy the house just to the bottom of Pavlov's house, and then make your way into Pavlov's house through the smoke. Just like with House of the Workers, attacking from the bottom is your best bet. The right side is also a weak spot where you can run into the basement of Pavlov's house coming from Grudinin's Mill, however, you cannot easily have a spawn spot on that side if you are Germany. Germany really needs a superior tank presence to take Pavlov's House. If you are Germany attacking Pavlov's House and your team has 0-2 tanks, you better get in one if you want to take it. Tanks rolling into Pavlov's House after all other enemy tanks are destroyed sometimes can take the point alone as many infantry may not be in the "cap zone".

Grudinin's Mill: To take this point, you need smoke and to storm the building. The weak spot is Top and Left of the Mill. You basically want to pop a lot of smoke and just run into the building and clear it. If you kill enough people, then more of your team will follow you and it will not be possible for the enemies to take the mill back in time because they have to spawn outside the Mill. If the defensive team knows what they are doing, it will be nearly impossible to take this point. It is not too hard to clear the building because when you enter the building, all the enemies think everyone in the building is friendly and you know everyone in it is not, so you almost always get the first shot, don't miss.