Okay, we're going to skip most of the big battles of 1942, like the Battle of Midway, which effectively ended Japan's chance of winning the war, and focus on the Battle of Stalingrad. The German attack on Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd because Stalin sucks, was one of the bloodiest battles in the history of war, with more than 2 million dead. The Germans began by dropping more than a thousand tons of bombs on Stalingrad, and then the Russians responded by hugging the Germans, staying as close to their front lines as possible so that German air support would kill Germans and Russians alike. This kind of worked, although the Germans still took most of the city, but then a Soviet counterattack left the 6th Army of the Nazis completely cut off. And after that, due partly to Hitler's overreaching megalomania and partly to lots of people being scared of him, the 6th Army slowly froze and starved to death before finally surrendering. And of the 91,000 Axis POWs from Stalingrad, only about 6,000 ever returned home. Stalingrad turned the war in Europe, and by 1944 the American strategy of island hopping in the Pacific was taking GIs closer and closer to Japan.