Battle of Stalingrad (1942–1943): Turning Point of the East

The Battle of Stalingrad was fought from August 1942 to February 1943 for the Soviet city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) on the Volga River. After months of savage street fighting, a Soviet counter-offensive encircled the German Sixth Army, which surrendered at the start of February 1943. With combined casualties commonly estimated at close to 2 million, it was one of the largest and deadliest battles in history and marked the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front.

Background

Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, failed to win the war before winter. Stopped before Moscow and besieging Leningrad, Hitler turned south in 1942. His summer offensive, Case Blue, began on 28 June 1942 with the aim of seizing the oil fields of the Caucasus and cutting the Volga, a vital route for supplies.

On 23 July 1942 Hitler’s Directive No. 45 split Army Group South in two. Army Group A was to drive into the Caucasus, while Army Group B, including General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army, was to take Stalingrad. Dividing the effort stretched German forces across hundreds of miles of steppe, with long flanks held largely by Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies.

For Stalin, the retreats of summer 1942 were a crisis. His Order No. 227 of 28 July 1942, known by its phrase “Not a step back”, forbade unauthorised withdrawal and set up penal units and blocking detachments behind the lines.

The battle for the city

On 23 August 1942 the Sixth Army’s spearhead reached the Volga just north of the city, and the Luftwaffe launched a massive bombing raid that set much of Stalingrad on fire and killed thousands of civilians. Many residents had not been evacuated, partly because the authorities feared that leaving would signal surrender.

From mid-September the battle became a struggle for every street, building and factory. General Vasily Chuikov, who took command of the Soviet 62nd Army on 12 September, kept his troops as close as possible to the Germans, so that German aircraft and artillery could not strike without hitting their own men. Soldiers called this “hugging the enemy”.

The fighting centred on the Mamayev Kurgan hill, the central railway station, the grain elevator and the great factories in the north: the Tractor Factory, the Barrikady gun works and the Red October steelworks. Reinforcements, including the 13th Guards Rifle Division, were ferried across the Volga under fire at night. A building held by a small group under Sergeant Yakov Pavlov became famous as Pavlov’s House after it was defended for about two months.

By November the Germans held perhaps 90 percent of the city, but the defenders still clung to narrow strips along the river bank. Both armies were exhausted, and the Sixth Army’s best units had been ground down in the ruins.

Life and death in the ruins

German soldiers called the fighting Rattenkrieg, “rats’ war”, as small groups battled through cellars, sewers and staircases, sometimes with each side holding different floors of the same building. Snipers played a prominent part; the most famous, Vasily Zaitsev, was credited with more than 200 kills and became a hero of Soviet propaganda.

The civilian population suffered terribly. Tens of thousands remained in the city throughout the fighting, sheltering in cellars and ravines with little food or water. Many were killed by bombing and shelling, and others were deported by the Germans for forced labour. Soviet women served in large numbers as anti-aircraft gunners, signallers, medics and nurses, and several anti-aircraft batteries manned by young women fought German tanks during the advance to the Volga in August.

Supplies and reinforcements for the defenders had to cross the Volga, more than a kilometre wide, under constant fire. Soviet artillery and rocket launchers were massed on the eastern bank, out of reach of German ground forces, and pounded German positions in the city.

Operation Uranus

While Chuikov held the city, Soviet commanders prepared a massive counter-stroke. Planned under Georgy Zhukov and the chief of the general staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Operation Uranus aimed not at the city but at the weak flanks to the north-west and south.

On 19 November 1942 the Southwestern and Don Fronts attacked the Romanian Third Army north-west of Stalingrad, and the next day the Stalingrad Front struck the Romanian Fourth Army to the south. Both Romanian armies collapsed. On 23 November the two Soviet pincers met near Kalach on the Don, trapping the Sixth Army and part of the Fourth Panzer Army, an estimated 250,000–300,000 German and allied troops.

The pocket

Paulus asked permission to break out, but Hitler refused. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring promised that the Luftwaffe would supply the pocket by air. The army needed several hundred tonnes of supplies a day; the airlift averaged only around 100 tonnes, and many transport aircraft were lost. Soldiers in the pocket suffered from hunger, frost and disease as the winter deepened.

On 12 December Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched a relief attack, Operation Winter Storm, from the south-west. It reached the Myshkova River, about 30 miles (around 50 km) from the pocket, but no breakout was attempted, and on 16 December a new Soviet offensive, Operation Little Saturn, shattered the Italian Eighth Army on the Don. The relief force had to withdraw.

Surrender

On 10 January 1943 the Don Front under Konstantin Rokossovsky began Operation Ring to destroy the pocket. The Germans lost their last airfields, and the pocket was split in two. On 30 January Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal, an implied hint that he should not surrender, since no German field marshal had ever been captured. The next day, 31 January, Paulus was taken prisoner in the basement of a department store in the city centre. The northern pocket under General Karl Strecker surrendered on 2 February 1943.

Key people

Friedrich Paulus was a capable staff officer who obeyed Hitler’s orders not to break out. In captivity he joined an anti-Nazi organisation of German officers and later testified at Nuremberg. Released in 1953, he settled in Dresden in East Germany, where he died in 1957. Vasily Chuikov led the defence of the city and later commanded the army that captured Berlin. Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky planned the encirclement, and Erich von Manstein failed to relieve the pocket but stabilised the southern front in early 1943.

By the numbers

Figures for this battle vary considerably between sources, and civilian deaths, though in the tens of thousands, have never been firmly established.

Consequences

Stalingrad was the first time an entire German field army was destroyed. Germany declared three days of national mourning. Army Group A had to retreat hastily from the Caucasus to avoid being cut off, and the Axis allies lost much of their fighting strength, weakening their commitment to the war.

The disaster spread along the Don. In January 1943 further Soviet offensives shattered the Hungarian Second Army and what remained of the Italian Eighth Army, and the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies had already been largely destroyed. Romania, Italy and Hungary each lost a large part of the forces they had sent east, and political leaders in all three countries began to look for ways out of the war. In Germany, Joseph Goebbels responded with his “total war” speech in Berlin on 18 February 1943, calling for the full mobilisation of the economy and society.

The initiative on the Eastern Front passed to the Red Army, though Germany recovered enough to recapture Kharkiv in March 1943. After the failure of the last major German offensive at the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, the Soviets advanced almost continuously towards Germany. Together with the Second Battle of El Alamein in North Africa, Stalingrad convinced many people around the world that the tide of the war had turned.

Legacy

The city was rebuilt after the war and renamed Volgograd in 1961. On Mamayev Kurgan a memorial complex was completed in 1967, crowned by The Motherland Calls, then the tallest statue in the world. The Stalingrad Panorama Museum and the ruins of the Gerhardt mill, left unrestored, stand near the Volga.

In Russia the victory on 2 February is commemorated each year, and Stalingrad remains central to national memory of the war. In Germany the battle came to symbolise the futility and suffering of Hitler’s war, and many cities across Europe have named streets and squares after it.

Timeline

• 1942, 28 June: Germany launches Case Blue in southern Russia.
• 1942, 28 July: Stalin issues Order No. 227, “Not a step back”.
• 1942, 23 August: German forces reach the Volga; massive air raid on Stalingrad.
• 1942, 12–14 September: Chuikov takes command; the main assault on the city begins.
• 1942, 19 November: Operation Uranus begins.
• 1942, 23 November: Soviet pincers meet at Kalach, encircling the Sixth Army.
• 1942, 12–23 December: Manstein’s relief attempt, Operation Winter Storm, fails.
• 1943, 10 January: Operation Ring begins to destroy the pocket.
• 1943, 31 January: Paulus surrenders in the southern pocket.
• 1943, 2 February: Last German troops in the northern pocket surrender.

Why it matters

Stalingrad broke the myth of German invincibility on land and destroyed one of the Wehrmacht’s strongest armies. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives and shattered a great city, but it gave the Soviet Union the strategic initiative it would keep until the fall of Berlin in 1945.