Battle of Stalingrad
Paulus's army is encircled as the war turns
From July 1942 to February 1943 the armies fought for Stalingrad on the Volga. The Soviet counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, encircled Paulus's Sixth Army, which surrendered on 2 February 1943. The battle was a decisive turning point of World War II.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 24 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 3 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 5 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 6 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 7 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 14 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 9 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 6 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 1 year earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 11 years later
Middle East
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 10 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 6 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 20 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 7 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 14 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 16 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 18 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 3 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 3 years later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 5 years later
- 1949 Founding of the People's Republic of China — 7 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 11 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 13 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 12 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 3 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 5 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 13 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 6 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 1 year earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — same year
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 12 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 17 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 86)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 73)
- Winston Churchill (aged 68)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 64)
- Albert Einstein (aged 63)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 61)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 53)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 53)
- Mao Zedong (aged 49)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 24)