Stalingrad: Germany’s error, not Soviet victory
On November 19, 1942, the Soviet Union launched Operation Uranus. Its goal was to envelop and destroy the German army fighting in the city of Stalingrad. Uranus closed the noose on the Germans a few days later
I have been writing about the four great battles of 1942 that extinguished the Axis powers’ chances of winning World War II. So far, I’ve written about Midway, Guadalcanal and El Alamein. Now, it is time to write about the most massive, brutal and crucial of those four battles: Stalingrad. It was a battle that stretched over five months, from late August 1942 to early February 1943, but Operation Uranus was its decisive moment. As with the other battles I’ve discussed, Stalingrad did not win the war for Russia. What it did was make a German victory impossible.
The Battle of Stalingrad had its origins in a pivotal German miscalculation at the start of the war. Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Germany’s invasion of the east, was designed to destroy the Soviet Union, securing Germany’s eastern flank and thereby guaranteeing German control of continental Europe. The invasion began on June 22, 1941.
But the Germans made a critical error even before the invasion began. Barbarossa was a three-pronged attack. One was into the Baltic states and then toward Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg), the second was toward Moscow, and the third was into the south, designed to capture Ukraine and then the Caucasus. Formulating the plan in this way violated one of the principles of warfare, one sacred to the German high command: the concentration of forces. By dividing their forces, none of the Germans’ goals were achieved. Leningrad held out in spite of Germany’s blockade, the Germans were stopped just outside of Moscow, and the southern thrust wasn’t set up to succeed.
The Germans’ blunder was rooted in an intelligence failure. The Abwher, Germany’s military intelligence, severely underestimated the size of Soviet reserves. Based on those estimates, German high command mistakenly believed it didn’t need to concentrate its forces. The Germans envisioned an initial battle of encirclement to capture Soviet armies, followed by an advance against feeble reserves, ending in victory well before the end of winter 1941.
The German plan also didn’t account for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour that December. Germany had hoped the Japanese would attack Siberia, pinning down the Soviet army stationed there. After Pearl Harbour, however, the Soviets knew that Siberia was secure. Japan could fight on only one front at a time, and the United States would keep it busy. This freed up the Soviets to shift
Modern wars and economies run on oil, and the Soviets’ major source of oil was Baku, in Azerbaijan. The city in the South Caucasus had been developed by the Nobel Brothers (the family for whom the prize is named) in the mid-to-late 19th century and had been Europe’s first major source of oil. Had the Germans focused their entire invasion on the south and captured the land bridge between the Volga and the Don rivers, Baku’s oil wouldn’t have been able to flow to Soviet factories, and no amount of lend-lease could have made up for it. But because of their faulty intelligence, the Germans felt as though they could have all three goals in 1941. They were wrong.
By the next spring, the Germans had realised their mistake. It was now Stalin who fell victim to bad intelligence. Stalin believed (and the Germans led him to believe) that the main German assault in 1942 would be toward Moscow. Instead, Germany concentrated its forces in a thrust toward the Volga, the Don and the city of Astrakhan, intent on cutting off Baku. Stalin was stunned when the Germans launched Case Blue in the south.
By August 1942, the Germans had reached Stalingrad. It was a way station for them that they expected to take easily before crossing the Volga and advancing toward Astrakhan. The Soviets immediately understood the threat that Case Blue posed, but their forces were concentrated in the wrong place.
Without a massed army to throw into the fight, the Soviets implemented a meat grinder strategy. They shipped poorly trained, poorly armed troops across the Volga to be annihilated by the Germans. The Soviets’ hope was that this would buy them time to shift their forces south for a counterattack. The Germans misunderstood the threat. They thought Stalin was sending tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths simply to keep the Germans off-balance, and they decided that the Soviets were on their last legs. Instead of withdrawing from Stalingrad and engaging in a battle maneuver – the sort of thing the Germans were best at – they accepted the worst kind of warfare for themselves: a static urban battle that put the attackers at a massive disadvantage.
Some have said that Hitler and Stalin saw Stalingrad first and foremost as a potential propaganda victory; that they were less concerned with its strategic value and more concerned with capturing or defending a city named after the Soviet leader. That just wasn’t the case. Stalin had to keep Hitler from crossing the Volga. Hitler was sure that the Soviets were down to a suicide strategy and that if Germany could hold on a little longer, the Soviets would fall and the road to Astrakhan would be clear. Their mistakes were understandable, and German generals saw things the same way, despite what they said in their postwar memoirs.
While the static battle raged, in September and October, the Soviets were stealthily massing forces north and south of the city. On November 19, 1942, they launched their counterattack, Operation Uranus. Soviet forces struck to the north and south of Stalingrad, encircling it and trapping the German Sixth Army, which had been fully committed to the battle. The Soviets targeted troops allied with Germany – Italian, Romanian and Hungarian – knowing they were the least motivated and least resilient. The Germany knew this too, but they didn’t have enough troops to hold the line so they had no other choice but to use their allies.
Once they had the city surrounded, the Soviets held firm. Rather than suffer more casualties entering Stalingrad, they opted to try to starve the Germans out. Hitler told the Sixth Army to hold and did not try to relieve it until the end of December. Withdrawal would mean that the war was lost. In the meantime, the Germans launched a weak offensive into the Caucasus in a last-ditch bid to take Baku directly. Crossing the Caucasus in early winter, however, was impossible.