Stalingrad, Battle of

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STALINGRAD, BATTLE OF.

A series of defensive and offensive operations from 7 July 1942 to 2 February 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad produced a hard-won Soviet victory and marked a turning point in World War II on the eastern front. Fought in and around the city (present-day Volgograd) on the Volga that bore Joseph Stalin's name, the confrontation at Stalingrad evoked memories both of the savagery at Verdun in 1916 and of the Prussian encirclement of the French at Sedan in 1870.

The circumstances that produced Stalingrad flowed from imperfect execution of Operation Blau, a German strategic offensive that was intended to win for Adolf Hitler the oil-rich Caucasus by the fall of 1942. However, the offensive suffered from delay, inadequate forces and resources, overextended logistics, and clumsy command arrangements. Although the Soviets were initially uncertain over the location of the Wehrmacht's main blow, by the summer of 1942 they had learned to give ground while punishing the Germans and mobilizing a steady procession of new formations. Meanwhile, as the Germans revealed their design for 1942 by doggedly advancing south, they exposed a long and vulnerable left flank, the security of which rested on control of the Don River bend near Stalingrad. As the Soviet high command rushed reinforcements to the city, Hitler, grasping its industrial and namesake significance, directed General Friedrich Paulus's reinforced German Sixth Army to secure this new objective, thereby perhaps fatally dividing the entire German strategic effort.

Beginning in July with hard fighting across the land bridge between the Don and Volga, Paulus reached the outskirts of Stalingrad by early September. However, the Soviets had by now strengthened the city's defenses, with the tenacious General V. I. Chuikov commanding its main force, the Soviet Sixty-second Army. Almost simultaneously, the Soviet high command began planning for a counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, the objective of which was to encircle and destroy the German Sixth Army even as it bled itself dry inside the city.

Meanwhile, as both sides threw additional assets directly into the urban fray, the battle for the city soon assumed a particularly vicious form of close-quarters combat. Intense fighting swirled everywhere above and below ground, producing heavy losses among attackers and defenders. At one point, it was even remarked that the city's dogs swam across the Volga to escape the torment. Although Paulus had originally assumed that Stalingrad might fall in late September, by mid-November his Sixth Army was running short of manpower, ammunition, and supplies. Two months of incessant urban combat had left it exhausted and several hundred meters short of the Volga. Soviet commanders, meanwhile, continued to press often raw troops off Volga ferryboats into battle, only to watch them virtually evaporate in the maelstrom.

It was at this point, on 19 November 1942, with Soviet defenders barely clinging to the industrial sprawl along the Volga, that General A. M. Vasilevsky, representative of Stavka (headquarters of the supreme high command) launched Operation Uranus. With pincers from the north (the southwest and Don fronts) and south (the Stalingrad front) of Stalingrad, Soviet armored and mechanized formations easily broke through Romanian forces on the Sixth Army's soft flanks to link up near Kalach on the Don, encircling Paulus. Subsequent and complementary Soviet offensives (Mars south of Leningrad and Saturn and Little Saturn in the middle and upper Don) proved overly ambitious, but did exact losses and divert German attention and reserves from the encirclement at Stalingrad. However, the situation there remained in doubt until late December, because Paulus arguably retained sufficient combat power to fight his way out, especially in the event of timely assistance from Field Marshal Erich von Manstein's newly formed Army Group Don. However, Hitler ordered Paulus to hold at all costs, while Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering unrealistically vowed that his Luftwaffe might resupply Paulus from the air. Meanwhile, Manstein's effort to open a corridor to Stalingrad failed on 24 December, fifty kilometers short of the objective. Until the complete surrender of now Field Marshal Paulus's forces on 2 February 1943, the Soviets continued to conduct two sets of subsidiary offensive operations, one to reduce the cauldron at Stalingrad itself, the other to reinforce the outer ring of the encirclement, with an eye to exploitation that Manstein's skill largely foiled.

Losses on both sides were substantial. Paulus surrendered some 91,000 troops, while losing another 150,000 in combat for Stalingrad. Later Soviet and Russian estimates would place Hitler's total casualties for the entire campaign at 1.5 million, or approximately one-fourth of Germany's combat manpower on the eastern front. Post-1991 Russian figures place Soviet casualties at slightly more than a million, including 480,000 dead or missing.

The historiography on Stalingrad is voluminous, ranging from the reminiscences of survivors to various official histories in search of either explanation, lessons learned, or national military justification. Some blame the dictators for all the mistakes and bloodletting, while others emphasize the impact of the battle on national psyches, while still others focus on the purely military aspects that revealed a Wehrmacht and its blitzkrieg clearly on the wane and a Red Army and its deep battle operations just coming into its own. Within larger strategic content, Stalingrad ended any prospect that Hitler might consider the eastern front as an economy-of-force effort. In Soviet perspective, the battle indicated that Stalin might place growing confidence in his seasoned commanders and their increasingly resilient and capable military formations. Although the Nazi propaganda machine attempted to put the best sacrificial face on the battle's outcome, the German advance to Stalingrad gradually came to represent the high water mark of an increasingly futile effort to subjugate Stalin's Soviet Union. For the Soviets, meanwhile, Stalingrad won its own place alongside two other prominent "hero cities," Moscow and Leningrad, to symbolize tenacious defense of the motherland.

See alsoSoviet Union; World War II.