Battle of Stalingrad

Battle of Stalingrad (1942-1943), World War II battle that halted the German advance into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Battle of Stalingrad lasted from August 1942 to February 1943. It involved the German Sixth Army and the Fourth Panzer Army, totaling about 290,000 troops, against the Soviet Red Army led by General Georgy Zhukov and General Aleksandr M. Vasilyevsky. Historians disagree about whether the Battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II (1939-1945), but there is common agreement that after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd), the German army, known as the Wehrmacht, was in retreat until it was driven from Soviet territory.

II

THE GERMAN ASSAULT

On July 23, 1942, German dictator Adolf Hitler ordered General Friedrich Paulus, the commander of the German Sixth Army, to capture Stalingrad, an important industrial and communications center straddling the Volga River. Hitler wanted Stalingrad to serve as a base for a German invasion of the Caucasus region where rich oil reserves could be tapped for the German war effort and denied to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, ordered his forces to defend Stalingrad at all costs, demanding that the soldiers of the Red Army take “not a step back.” In late August he called on his two best military professionals—General Zhukov, who had organized a counteroffensive to defend Moscow, the Soviet capital, in December 1941, and the army chief of the General Staff, General Vasilyevsky—to deal with the situation at Stalingrad. They proposed to wear the enemy down by locking German troops into a bloody fight for the city while the Red Army assembled the means for a counterattack.

By September 3 the German forces had pushed the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad back to the west bank of the Volga. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, pounded the city into rubble, but the shattered buildings provided cover for the Soviet defenders. The German panzer tanks were unsuited to this kind of urban warfare and what became a long battle of attrition where progress, as one German general remarked, was measured not by the mile but by the yard.

A series of German assaults on the Soviet forces occupying the west bank resulted in grueling and bitter hand-to-hand fighting in the ruins. By the end of October the Germans were exhausted and short of ammunition, while the Soviet defenders, who had just managed to cling to their positions, were replenished across the Volga with troops, food, ammunition, tanks, and guns.

III

THE SOVIET COUNTEROFFENSIVE

The Soviets raised fresh armies for a counteroffensive—known as Operation Uranus—which was launched on November 19, taking the Germans completely by surprise. The German advance to Stalingrad had added about 1,100 km (about 680 mi) to their line. No German troops were available to hold that extra distance, so Hitler had to use troops contributed by his allies, including Hungary, Italy, and Romania. Germany and its allies were known as the Axis powers.

While the Sixth and Fourth Panzer armies were tied down at Stalingrad in September and October 1942, they were flanked on the left and right by Romanian armies. An Italian and a Hungarian army were deployed farther upstream on the Don River. Trial maneuvers by the Red Army had exposed serious weaknesses in some of the Axis’s armies. The ill-equipped and ill-trained Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian armies guarding the German supply route to Stalingrad collapsed in chaos in the face of the Soviet counteroffensive.

On the morning of November 19, in snow and fog, Soviet armored spearheads hit the Romanians west and south of Stalingrad. Their points met three days later at Kalach on the Don. The Soviet forces had encircled the entire Sixth Army, about half of the Fourth Panzer Army, and a number of Romanian units, creating a pocket in which the Axis forces were trapped. Hitler ordered Paulus to hold the pocket, promised to supply his troops with food and ammunition by aircraft, and sent Field Marshal Erich von Manstein to organize a relief.

The airlift failed to provide the 300 tons of supplies that Paulus needed each day, despite assurances from Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring that the German air force could keep the Sixth Army adequately supplied by air. Soviet forces halted Manstein’s relief operation 55 km (34 mi) short of the pocket in late December. The Sixth Army began to run out of ammunition, fuel, and food.

IV

THE SURRENDER

A German panzer offensive from the south sought to break through to relieve the Sixth Army, but the Red Army repulsed this offensive on December 23. By January 26, 1943, further Soviet assaults split Paulus’s forces in two. The shattered German army fought on until January 31, when Paulus finally bowed to the inevitable and surrendered. By February 2 the remnants of his starving, diseased, and frostbitten army had given up. About 200,000 Axis forces were killed or wounded in the battle. The Red Army suffered about 1.1 million casualties, including about 485,000 killed.

V

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BATTLE

Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for the German invasion of the Soviet Union, but many historians believe it did not mark a major turning point in World War II. Germany still possessed massive military resources and fought on until 1945. Nevertheless, the loss of an entire army group was a significant blow to Germany. Owing in part to the collapse of the Italian and Hungarian armies, the Germans were forced to retreat from the Caucasus approximately to the line from which they had started their 1942 summer offensive.

The defeat also demoralized the German army and the German civilian population while demonstrating to the Red Army that the Wehrmacht was not invincible. Some historians regard the Battle of Stalingrad as one of the most decisive engagements in world history.

In November 1943, at the Tehrān Conference in Iran, British prime minister Winston Churchill presented the British-made Sword of Stalingrad to Stalin. The blade was engraved with the words “To the steelhearted citizens of Stalingrad, a gift from King George VI as a token of the homage of the British people.” The memory of the Battle of Stalingrad lives on in Russia.