Born to a peasant family near Tula, Chuikov earned his living as a factory worker from the age of 12.

In December 1940, he was again appointed military attaché to China in support of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in the war against Japan.

Tasked with holding the city at all costs, Chuikov adopted keeping the Soviet front-line positions as close to the Germans as physically possible.

This served as an effective countermeasure against the Wehrmacht's combined-arms tactics, but by mid-November 1942 the Germans had captured most of the city after months of slow advance.

Following his death in 1982, Chuikov was interred at the Stalingrad memorial at Mamayev Kurgan, which had been the site of heavy fighting.

Born into a peasant family in the village of Serebryanye Prudy in the Tula region south of Moscow, Chuikov was the eighth of 12 children and the fifth of eight sons.

At the age of 12, he left school and his family home to earn his living in a factory in Saint Petersburg, turning out spurs for cavalry officers.

[1] In October 1918, Chuikov saw active service when he was sent to the Southern Front as a deputy company commander to fight against the White Army.

Chuikov carried this war wound for the rest of his life, and it eventually led to septicaemia breaking out in 1981, causing a nine-month illness and finally his death.

[5] In the fall of 1926, Chuikov joined a Soviet diplomatic delegation that toured Harbin, Changchun, Port Arthur, Dalian, Tianjin and Beijing, cities in northeastern and northern China.

In December 1940, Chuikov was appointed the chief Soviet military representative to the Republic of China and adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, in Chongqing.

Prior to his departure for China, he was summoned to meet Joseph Stalin and Semyon Timoshenko, who instructed him to ensure that China remain engaged in the war with Japan so Japan could not challenge the Soviet Union in the Far East and allow the Soviet Union to focus on the German threat from the West.

[7] Chuikov arrived in China with a large supply of Soviet armaments for the Nationalist Army, including tanks, artillery, fighter and bomber aircraft, and trucks.

[9] Chuikov insisted that the Nationalists could not use Soviet weaponry against the Communists, met with Communist leaders Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying, but in keeping with Stalin's directives, continued to support the Nationalist war effort against Japan, even after the signing of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941.

[8] On 11 September 1942, General Chuikov was summoned to South Western Front Headquarters to discuss the defense of Stalingrad.

In a meeting with South Western Front Commander Lieutenant General Andrey Yeryomenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, Chuikov was appointed as commander of 62nd Army and charged with the defense of the city of Stalingrad itself, directly on the western bank of the Volga River.

Along the front from Kuporosnoye and Orlovka to Rynok, General Chuikov defended against a German main thrust advancing from the northwest and directed at both Gumrak Airfield as well also the train station in the center of the town, and a second additional German strike-force advancing from the southwest directed against Olshanka and the grain elevator.

"[14] It was at Stalingrad that Chuikov developed the important tactic of "hugging the enemy", by which Soviet soldiers kept the German army so close to them as to minimize the airpower enjoyed by the Wehrmacht.

Chuikov had witnessed firsthand the blitzkrieg tactics the Wehrmacht had used to sweep across the Russian steppe, so he used the Germans' carpet-bombing of the city to draw panzer units into the rubble and chaos, where their progress was impeded.

Here they could be destroyed with Molotov cocktails, antitank rifles, and Soviet artillery operating at close range.

This tactic also rendered the Luftwaffe ineffective, since Stuka dive-bombers could not attack Red Army positions without endangering their own forces.

By mid-November, German forces had taken most of the city and pinned Chuikov and the remaining defenders in several small pockets against the Volga River.

On 22 November, Chuikov's 62nd Army switched to an offensive posture, counter-attacking to recapture neighborhoods and preventing German forces from leaving the city to fight elsewhere in the pocket.

During the Vistula–Oder offensive, the troops of the 8th Guards under Chuikov participated in breaking the enemy's defense in depth, and liberated Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of the Polish city of Lublin.

The 8th Guards liberated the city of Łódź, seized the fortress city of Poznań by storm, seized a bridgehead on the left bank of the Oder River and fought for two months to maintain and expand the bridgehead in the Kustrin area, before finally heading the Soviet offensive which conquered Berlin while the Western Allied forces were wiping out what was left in Southern and Western Germany in April/May 1945.

Krebs, under orders from Goebbels, sought conditions for surrender more favorable to the Germans, which Chuikov had no authority to grant and so rejected any terms.

On 2 May, he accepted the unconditional surrender of Berlin's forces from General Helmuth Weidling who had taken command, with the suicide that morning by Gen.

[19] He was a major consultant for the design of The Motherland Calls memorial commemorating Stalingrad battle on Mamayev Kurgan, and was buried there after his death on 18 March 1982, at the age of 82.

[citation needed] After Chuikov's death a piece of paper with handwritten prayer was found among his belongings: "Oh, the One who can turn night into day and earth into a flower garden.