September 28, 1942 – NBC News Of The World – Morning and Evening Editions – Gordon Skene Sound Collection
September 28, 1942 – news for this day 80 years ago focused partly on Stalingrad, where some 36,000 German troops were actively engaged in house-to-house and street-to-street fighting. Reports indicated the German Army was now concentrating on taking the city piece by piece, as the sheer size of Stalingrad was impossible to do in one sweeping move. An industrial center, extending some 20 miles along the Volga, Stalingrad was an imposing obstacle for the Germans who were losing on average of some 2,000 troops per day.
Not according to von Ribbentrop who, during a speech, painted a different picture, with German victories and Russian casualties reaching staggering numbers. He went on to predict the battle of Stalingrad would end in a German victory. Von Ribbentrop went on to talk about the relative ineffectiveness of British air raids over Germany and of the impossibility of an Allied invasion of the European continent. He ended his speech by saying time was working in favor of the Axis. Von Ribbentrop gave an interview to Foreign Correspondents where he explained the wild differences in numbers between the Allies and the Axis. “Four Hundred and Twenty Million people are working for the Axis”, von Ribbentrop went on to say, “whereas the Allies can count on 250 million at the most”. From the standpoint of production, he scoffed at the figures released in Washington and New York. He went on to say the United States had nothing to fight for. The Axis, von Ribbentrop explained, was fighting a life or death struggle for living space. He neglected to mention the Axis failure in Russia so far, that their objectives were way behind schedule and were going to be fatal once Winter appeared. But that was weeks away and the Stalingrad battle had no end in sight.
There was a lot more happening in war zones around the world, reported during these two newscasts from NBC Red and Blue Networks on September 28, 1942.
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