World: They Won Together

This week the battle of Stalingrad—perhaps the most decisive in the Russo-German war, if not in all of World War II—approached its end. The Red Army had killed or captured most of the German and Rumanian troops that had been hammering the city since last August. In the final stages even the Nazi Commander, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered along with 16 other generals.

The victory meant much more than the destruction of a great army. It meant the complete failure of Hitler's 1942 strategy in Russia: to outflank Moscow from...