19 November 1942, Battle of Stalingrad: Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR’s favor.

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  1. The [Battle of Stalingrad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad), (17 July, 1942 – 2 February, 1943) was the successful Soviet defense of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), Russia, U.S.S.R., during World War II.

    Russians consider it to be one of the greatest battles of their Great Patriotic War, and most historians consider it to be the greatest battle of the entire conflict. It stopped the German advance into the Soviet Union and marked the turning of the tide of war in favour of the Allies.

    The turning point of the battle came with a huge Soviet counteroffensive, code-named Operation Uranus (19-23 November), which had been planned by Generals Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, and Nikolay Nikolayevich Voronov.

    It was launched in two spearheads, some 80 km north and south of the German salient whose tip was at Stalingrad. The counteroffensive utterly surprised the Germans, who thought the Soviets incapable of mounting such an attack.

    The operation was a “deep penetration” maneuver, attacking not the main German force at the forefront of the battle for Stalingrad—the 250,000 remaining men of the Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army, both formidable foes—but instead hitting the weaker flanks.

    Those flanks were vulnerably exposed on the open steppes surrounding the city and were weakly defended by undermanned, undersupplied, overstretched, and undermotivated Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian troops. The attacks quickly penetrated deep into the flanks, and by 23 November the two prongs of the attack had linked up at Kalach, about 100 km west of Stalingrad; the encirclement of the two German armies in Stalingrad was complete.

    The German high command urged Hitler to allow Paulus and his forces to break out of the encirclement and rejoin the main German forces west of the city, but Hitler would not contemplate a retreat from the Volga River and ordered Paulus to “stand and fight.” With winter setting in and food and medical supplies dwindling, Paulus’s forces grew weaker. Hitler declared that the Sixth Army would be supplied by the Luftwaffe, but the air convoys could deliver only a fraction of the necessary supplies.

    In mid-December Hitler ordered one of the most-talented German commanders, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to form a special army corps to rescue Paulus’s forces by fighting its way eastward (Operation Winter Tempest), but Hitler refused to let Paulus fight his way westward at the same time in order to link up with Manstein. That fatal decision doomed Paulus’s forces, since Manstein’s forces then simply lacked the reserves needed to break through the Soviet encirclement single-handedly.

    The Soviets then resumed the offensive (Operation Saturn, begun on December 16) to shrink the pocket of encircled Germans, to head off any further relief efforts, and to set the stage for the final capitulation of the Germans in Stalingrad. The Volga River was now frozen over solid, and Soviet forces and equipment were sent over the ice at various points within the city.

    Hitler exhorted the trapped German forces to fight to the death, going so far as to promote Paulus to field marshal (and reminding Paulus that no German officer of that rank had ever surrendered).

    With Soviet armies closing in as part of Operation Ring (begun January 10, 1943), the situation was hopeless. The Sixth Army was surrounded by seven Soviet armies. On January 31 Paulus disobeyed Hitler and agreed to give himself up. Twenty-two generals surrendered with him, and on February 2 the last of 91,000 frozen starving men (all that was left of the Sixth and Fourth armies) surrendered to the Soviets.

    Of the 91,000 men who surrendered, only some 5,000–6,000 ever returned to their homelands (the last of them a full decade after the end of the war in 1945); the rest died in Soviet prison and labour camps.

    On the Soviet side, official Russian military historians estimate that there were 1,100,000 Red Army dead, wounded, missing, or captured in the campaign to defend the city. An estimated 40,000 civilians died as well.

  3. One of the documentaries I watched said that the whole idea behind this was that the ‘edges’ of the German forces were mostly allied nations like Italy/Hungary/Romania and therefore were not as brutal as the Nazis (who were heavily focused on the city).

    So they went round the edges and encircled the Nazi’s. It was quite interesting and pretty strategic imo.

  4. You can say whatever you want about the soviet union, but damn does this battle always impress me. Against all odds, 62nd army held for long enough to go from prey, to predator.

    Nothing but respect for those men, whose staunch defense proved (in a sense ) to be the Axis downfall.

  8. What I find fascinating is how Operation Uranus hit at just the right time.

    Between May and November Germans had redeployed two of their elite motorized divisions away from Stalingrad to Western Europe in anticipation of an allied landing and they had become vaguely aware of the precariousness of the Italian and Romanian positions- stretched out along extremely long lines with outdated equipment and extremely vulnerable to Soviet mechanized forces- and had put plans in place to create a reserve force behind them to help them resist a Soviet offensive. This reserve was scheduled to be in place by some time in December.

    At the same time, Soviet General Aleksandr Vasilevsky (who was in charge of Operation Uranus) wanted to delay the operation or call it off entirely- Soviet troops were lacking in winter clothing, there was limited information about the enemy forces, and the disastrous Kharkov offensive (where Vasilevsky capitulated to Stalin’s demands for an attack against his own judgement and lost 250,000 men as casualties) loomed in his mind- pending a redesign. It was only after a meeting with Stalin and Soviet high command that the operation went ahead, after a delay waiting for Soviet air support to arrive.

    If the Soviets had launched the operation earlier or later, the Germans might have had motorized units available to try to save the day for their allies.

  9. The whole month of November ’42 seemed like the definite turning point of the war for the Allies:

    – The Soviets masterfully executed Operation Uranus, cutting off the German 6th Army in Stalingrad and annihiliating the Hungarian and Romanian armies, ending the Axis satellites’ offensive capabilities on the Eastern Front. The Soviet breakthrough also compromised the entire position of the German Army in southern Russia, forcing them to eventually abort the Caucasus campaign (which was already getting bogged down), permanently depriving them of both the Azeri oil and the strategic initiative.

    – Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein and the British breakthrough ended the Axis threat against Egypt.

    – Operation Torch secured French Algeria and Morocco.

    – Imperial Japanese Navy got bitchslapped in the decisive naval battle at Guadalcanal, ending their attempts to secure the island and marking the beginning of the Allied offensive operations in the Pacific.

    – German Navy was losing the war of shipping against the Allies in the Atlantic.

  14. Fuck communism but these people were absolute heroes. Who knows what would’ve happened if Stalingrad fell

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