Hitler, believing the conquest of Stalingrad to be within his grasp, said, more truthfully than Bush, "I wanted to get to the Volga, namely to a specific place, a specific city. It just so happens to be named after Stalin himself. But don't think at all that I marched there because of that — it could have had an entirely different name — it was because it's a very important place. It's there that you can cut off 30 million tons of shipping, including 9 million tons of oil transport. All of the wheat from the great regions of the Ukraine, the Kuban region, converged here to be transported northward. Manganese ore was transported there; it was a gigantic transfer point. That I wanted to take and — you know — we're modest, we've got it!" Excerpt from a radio address to the German people, November 8, 1942.