Battle of Stalingrad - 17 July 1942 - 2 February 1943

The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in southwestern Russia. It took place between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943, and is often cited as one of the turning points of the war.The German offensive to take Stalingrad, the battle inside the city and the Soviet counter-offensive—which eventually trapped and destroyed the German 6th Army and other Axis forces around the city—was the first substantial German land defeat of the war. The battle involved more participants than any other, and was marked by brutality and disregard for military and civilian casualties. It was amongst the bloodiest in the history of warfare, with the upper estimates of combined casualties coming to nearly two million. The German offensive to capture Stalingrad proceeded rapidly in the late summer of 1942, supported by Luftwaffe bombing which reduced much of the city to rubble. However, the German offensive bogged down in house-to-house fighting; despite controlling over 90% of the city at times, the Wehrmacht was unable to dislodge the last Soviet defenders, who clung tenaciously to the west bank of the Volga River as the weather turned rainy and cold. In November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a two-pronged attack on the exposed flanks of the German 6th Army in Stalingrad. This operation dramatically turned the tables, as the weakly held German flanks collapsed and the German 6th Army was cut off and surrounded inside Stalingrad. As the Russian winter set in, the 6th Army weakened rapidly from cold, starvation and ongoing Soviet attacks, but command ambiguity coupled with Adolf Hitler's resolute belief in the "power of the will" and the value of standing fast prevented it from breaking out. During December, a German attempt to break the encirclement failed, and subsequently all attempts at supply collapsed. By early February 1943, German resistance in Stalingrad had ceased, and the surrounded 6th Army had been destroyed. On 22 June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), the invasion of the Soviet Union. The armed forces of Germany and its allies quickly advanced deep into Soviet territory. During December, after suffering multiple defeats in the summer and autumn, Soviet forces counter-attacked during the Battle of Moscow and successfully drove the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) from the environs of Moscow. By spring 1942, the Germans had stabilized their new front in a line running roughly from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. There were a number of salients in the line where Soviet offensives had pushed the Germans back, notably to the northwest of Moscow and south of Kharkov, but neither was particularly threatening. In the far south, the Germans were in control of most of Ukraine and much of the Crimea, although Sevastopol remained in Soviet hands along with a small portion of the Kerch Peninsula. The Germans were confident they could master the Red Army when winter weather no longer impeded their mobility. There was some substance to this belief: while the German Army Group Centre (Heeresgruppe Mitte) had suffered heavy punishment, 65% of its infantry had not been engaged during the winter fighting, and had been rested and reequipped; and Army Groups North and South had not been particularly hard pressed over the winter. The capture of Stalingrad was important to Hitler, and Mussolini, for two primary reasons. First, it was a major industrial city on the Volga River – a vital transport route between the Caspian Sea and northern Russia. As a result, the German capture of the city would effectively sever the transportation of resources and goods to the north. Second, its capture would secure the East flank of the German armies as they advanced into the oil-rich Caucasus region – with the strategic goal of cutting off fuel to Stalin's war machine.The fact that the city bore the name of the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, would make its capture an ideological and propaganda coup. The Soviets realized that they were under tremendous constraints of time and resources and ordered that anyone strong enough to hold a rifle be sent to defend the city.At this stage of the war, the Red Army was less capable of highly mobile operations than the German Army; however, combat inside a large urban area, which would be dominated by hand-held small arms rather than armored and mechanized tactics, minimized the Red Army's disadvantages. Army Group South was selected for a sprint forward through the southern Russian steppes into the Caucasus to capture the vital Soviet oil fields there. The planned summer offensive was code-named Fall Blau ("Case Blue"). It was to include the German 6th, 17th, 4th Panzer and 1st Panzer Armies. Army Group South had overrun the Ukrainian SSR in 1941. Poised in Eastern Ukraine, it was to spearhead the offensive. Hitler intervened, however, ordering the Army Group to be split in two. Army Group South (A), under the command of Wilhelm List, was to continue advancing south towards the Caucasus as planned with the 17th Army and First Panzer Army. Army Group South (B), including Friedrich Paulus’ 6th Army and Hermann Hoth's 4th Panzer Army, was to move east towards the Volga and Stalingrad. Army Group B was commanded initially by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock and later by General Maximilian von Weichs. The start of Case Blau had been planned for late May 1942. However, a number of German and Romanian units that were involved in Blau were then in the process of besieging Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. Delays in ending the siege pushed back the start date for Blau several times, and the city did not fall until the end of June. A smaller action was taken in the meantime, pinching off a Soviet salient in the Second Battle of Kharkov, which resulted in the pocketing of a large Soviet force on 22 May. Blau finally opened as Army Group South began its attack into southern Russia on 28 June 1942. The German offensive started well. Soviet forces offered little resistance in the vast empty steppes and started streaming eastward. Several attempts to re-establish a defensive line failed when German units outflanked them. Two major pockets were formed and destroyed: the first, northeast of Kharkov, on 2 July, and a second, around Millerovo, Rostov Oblast, a week later. Meanwhile, the Hungarian 2nd Army and the German 4th Panzer Army had launched an assault on Voronezh, capturing the city on 5 July. The initial advance of the 6th Army was so successful that Hitler intervened and ordered the 4th Panzer Army to join Army Group South (A) to the south. A massive traffic jam resulted when the 4th Panzer and the 6th both required the few roads in the area. Both armies were stopped dead while they attempted to clear the resulting mess of thousands of vehicles. The delay was long, and it is thought that it cost the advance at least one week. With the advance now slowed, Hitler changed his mind and re-assigned the 4th Panzer Army back to the attack on Stalingrad. By the end of July, the Germans had pushed the Soviets across the Don River. At this point, the Don and Volga Rivers were only 40 miles apart, and the Germans left their main supply depots west of the Don, which was to have important implications later in the course of the battle. The Germans began using the armies of their Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian allies to guard their left (northern) flank. The Italians are not often credited with bravery in the fighting, but they won several accolades in official German communiques.They were held in little regard by the Germans, and were often accused of cowardice and low morale: in reality, their ineffectiveness in combat was due to their very scarce equipment, obsolete weaponry, and primitive tactics of Italian officers, thus often being obliged to retreat or flee. They distinguished themselves in numerous battles, as in the battle of Nikolayevka. The German 6th Army was only a few dozen kilometers from Stalingrad, and 4th Panzer Army, now to their south, turned northwards to help take the city. To the south, Army Group A was pushing far into the Caucasus, but their advance slowed as supply lines grew overextended. The two German army groups were not positioned to support one another due to the great distances involved. After German intentions became clear in July, Stalin appointed Marshall Andrey Yeryomenko as commander of the Southeastern Front on 1 August 1942. Yeryomenko and Commissar Nikita Krushchev were tasked with planning the defense of Stalingrad.The eastern border of Stalingrad was the wide River Volga, and over the river, additional Soviet units were deployed. These units became the newly formed 62nd Army, which Yeryomenko placed under the command of Lt. Gen. Vasiliy Chuikov on 11 September 1942. The situation was extremely dire. When asked how he interpreted his task, he responded "We will defend the city or die in the attempt."The 62nd Army's mission was to defend Stalingrad at all costs. Chuikov's generalship during the battle earned him one of his two Hero of the Soviet Union awards. Beginning of the battle The Soviets had enough warning of the Germans' advance to ship virtually all the city's grain, cattle, and railroad rolling stock across the Volga and out of harm's way. This "harvest victory" left the city short of food even before the German attack began. Production continued in some factories, particularly the one producing T-34 tanks. Before the Wehrmacht reached the city itself, the Luftwaffe had rendered the River Volga, vital for bringing supplies into the city, unusable to Soviet shipping. Between 25 and 31 July, 32 Soviet ships were sunk, with another nine crippled. The battle began with the heavy bombing of the city by Generaloberst Wolfram von Richthofen's Luftflotte 4, which in the summer and autumn of 1942 was the most powerful single air formation in the world. Some 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped.The city was quickly turned to rubble, although some factories continued production whilst workers joined in the fighting. The Croatian 369th Reinforced Infantry Regiment was the only non-German unit selected by the Wehrmacht to enter Stalingrad city during assault operations. It fought as part of the 100th jager division. Stalin rushed all available troops to the east bank of the Volga, some from as far away as Siberia. All the regular ferries were quickly destroyed by the Luftwaffe, which then targeted troop barges being towed slowly across the river by tugs. Many civilians were evacuated across the Volga.It has been said that Stalin prevented civilians from leaving the city in the belief that their presence would encourage greater resistance from the city's defenders.Civilians, including women and children, were put to work building trenchworks and protective fortifications. A massive German air bombardment on 23 August caused a firestorm, killing thousands and turning Stalingrad into a vast landscape of rubble and burnt ruins.Ninety percent of the living space in the Voroshilovskiy area was destroyed. Between 23 and 26 August, Soviet reports indicate 955 people were killed and another 1,181 wounded as a result of the bombing.Casualties of 40,000 were exaggerated,[23] and after 25 August, the Soviets did not record civilian and military casualties as a result of air raids. The Soviet Air Force, the Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily (VVS), was swept aside by the Luftwaffe. The VVS assembly in the immediate area lost 201 aircraft between 23–31 August, and despite meager reinforcements of some 100 aircraft in August, it was left with just 192 serviceable aircraft, 57 of which were fighters.The Soviets continued to pour aerial reinforcements into the Stalingrad area in late September, but continued to suffer appalling losses; the Luftwaffe had complete control of the skies. However, due to the relocation of Soviet industry in 1941, Soviet aircraft production reached 15,800 in the second half of 1942. The VVS was able to preserve significant strength and build up a strategic reserve that would eventually overpower the Luftwaffe. The burden of the initial defense of the city fell on the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment,a unit made up mainly of young female volunteers who had no training for engaging ground targets. Despite this, and with no support available from other units, the AA gunners stayed at their posts and took on the advancing panzers. The German 16th Panzer Division reportedly had to fight the 1077th’s gunners "shot for shot" until all 37 AA batteries were destroyed or overrun. The German 16th Panzer Division was shocked to find that, due to Soviet manpower shortages, it had been fighting female soldiers.In the beginning, the Soviets relied extensively on "Workers' militias" composed of workers not directly involved in war production. For a short time tanks continued to be produced and then manned by volunteer crews of factory workers. They were driven directly from the factory floor to the front line, often without paint or even gunsights. By the end of August, Army Group South (B) had finally reached the Volga, north of Stalingrad. Another advance to the river south of the city followed. By 1 September the Soviets could only reinforce and supply their forces in Stalingrad by perilous crossings of the Volga under constant bombardment by artillery and aircraft. On 5 September, the Soviet 24th and 66th Armies organised a massive attack against XIV Panzerkorps. The Luftwaffe helped repulse the offensive by heavily attacking Soviet artillery positions and defensive lines. The Soviets were forced to withdraw at midday after only a few hours. Of the 120 tanks the Soviets had committed, 30 were lost to air attack.[3]:75 Soviet operations were constantly hampered by the Luftwaffe. On 18 September, the Soviet 1st Guards and 24th Army launched an offensive against VIII. Armeekorps at Kotluban. VIII. Fliegerkorps dispatched wave after wave of Stuka dive-bombers to prevent a breakthrough. The offensive was repulsed. The Stukas claimed 41 of the 106 Soviet tanks knocked out that morning, while escorting Bf 109s destroyed 77 Soviet aircraft.Amid the debris of the wrecked city, the Soviet 62nd and 64th Armies, which included the Soviet 13th Guards Rifle Division, anchored their defense lines with strongpoints in houses and factories. Fighting within the ruined city was fierce and desperate. Lieutenant General Alexander Rodimtsev was in charge of the 13th Guards Rifle Division, and received one of two Heroes of the Soviet Union awarded during the battle for his actions. Stalin's Order No. 227 of 27 July 1942 decreed that all commanders who ordered unauthorized retreat would be subject to a military tribunal. “Not a step back!” and "There is no land behind the Volga!" were the slogans. The Germans pushing forward into Stalingrad suffered heavy casualties. German military doctrine was based on the principle of combined-arms teams and close cooperation between tanks, infantry, engineers, artillery and ground-attack aircraft. To counter this, Soviet commanders adopted the tactic of always keeping the front lines as close to the Germans as physically possible; Chuikov called this "hugging" the Germans. This forced the German infantry to either fight on their own or risk taking casualties from their own supporting fire; it neutralized German close air support and weakened artillery support. The Soviets understood that, in Stalingrad, the best defense would depend on anchoring their defense lines in numerous buildings overseeing strategically important streets and squares. Such a strategy would hold for as long as possible all the ground the Soviets could take in the city. Thus, they converted multi-floored apartment blocks, factories, warehouses, street corner residences and office buildings into strongholds bristling with machine guns, anti-tank rifles, mortars, mines, barbed wire, snipers and small 5 to 10 man units of submachine gunners and grenadiers prepared for house-to-house combat. Bitter fighting raged for every ruin, street, factory, house, basement and staircase. The sewers were the sites of labyrinthine firefights. The Germans, calling this unseen urban warfare Rattenkrieg ("Rat War"), bitterly joked about capturing the kitchen but still fighting for the living room. In such desperate chaos, all battle lines vanished, and the major, armor-supported mobility to which the German soldiers were accustomed degenerated into vicious, fast-paced skirmishes ranging through bombed-out debris of residential neighborhoods, office blocks, basements and apartment high-rises. Some of the taller buildings, blasted into roofless shells by earlier German aerial bombardment, saw floor-by-floor, close-quarters combat, with the Germans on one level, Soviets on the next, Germans on the next and so on, firing at each other through holes in the floors. Fighting on Mamayev Kurgan, a prominent hill above the city, was particularly merciless, and the position changed hands many times.By 12 September, the Soviet 62nd Army had been reduced to 90 tanks, 700 mortars and just 20,000 men. The 13th Guards Rifle Division, assigned to retake Mamayev Kurgan and Railway Station No. 1 on 13 September suffered particularly heavy losses. Over 30 percent of its soldiers were killed in the first 24 hours, and just 320 out of the original 10,000 survived the entire battle.Both objectives were retaken, but only temporarily. The railway station changed hands 14 times in six hours. By the following evening, the 13th Guards Rifle Division had ceased to exist, but its men had killed approximately an equal number of Germans. Combat raged there for weeks near the giant grain silo. When German soldiers finally took the position, only forty dead Soviet fighters were found, though the Germans had thought there were many more due to the ferocious resistance. The Soviets burned heaps of grain during their retreat. In another part of the city, a Soviet platoon under the command of Yakov Pavlov turned an apartment building that oversaw a square in the city center into an impenetrable fortress, later called "Pavlov's House". The soldiers surrounded it with minefields, set up machine-gun positions at the windows and breached the walls in the basement for better communications.The soldiers found about ten Soviet civilians hiding in the basement. They were not relieved, and not significantly reinforced, for two months. Well after the battle, Chuikov liked to joke that more Germans died trying to capture Pavlov's House than died capturing Paris. According to Beevor, throughout the second month, after each wave of German assault against the building, the Soviets had to run out and kick down the piles of German corpses in order for the machine and anti-tank gunners in the building to have clear firing lines across the square. The building was labeled Festung ("Fortress") on German maps. Sgt. Pavlov was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union for his actions. With no end in sight, the Germans started transferring heavy artillery to the city, including the gigantic 800 mm railroad gun nicknamed Dora, but made no attempt to send a force across the Volga, allowing the Soviets to build up a large number of artillery batteries on the east side. This artillery continued to bombard the German positions. German tanks became useless amid heaps of rubble up to eight meters high. Snipers on both sides used the ruins to inflict heavy casualties. The most successful, and most famous, sniper was Vasily Zaytsev with 242 to 400confirmed kills during the battle. Zaytsev was one of a whole corps of snipers and had over 30 students, who were credited with killing over 3,000 German soldiers. He was also said to have killed the specially-sent German sniper Erwin König, though this is most likely fictional. Zaytsev was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union, primarily for his actions in this battle. For both Stalin and Hitler, Stalingrad became a matter of prestige over and above its actual strategic significance. The Soviet command moved the Red Army's strategic reserves from the Moscow area to the lower Volga, and transferred aircraft from the entire country to the Stalingrad region. The strain on both military commanders was immense: Paulus developed an uncontrollable tic in his eye, which eventually afflicted the left side of his face, while Chuikov experienced an outbreak of eczema that required him to have his hands completely bandaged. Troops on both sides faced the constant strain of close-range combat. Determined to crush Soviet resistance, Luftflotte 4's Stukawaffe flew 900 individual sorties against Soviet positions at the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Factory on 5 October. Several Soviet regiments were wiped out; the entire staff of the Soviet 339th Infantry Regiment were killed the following morning during an air raid. In mid-October, the Luftwaffe intensified its efforts against remaining Red Army positions holding the west bank. By now, Soviet aerial resistance had ceased to be effective. Luftflotte 4 flew 2,000 sorties on 14 October and 600 tons of bombs were dropped while German infantry surrounded the three factories. Stukageschwader 1, 2, and 77 had largely silenced Soviet artillery on the eastern bank of the Volga before turning their attention to the shipping that was once again trying to reinforce the narrowing Soviet pockets of resistance. The 62nd Army had been cut in two, and, due to intensive air attack on its supply ferries, was now being paralyzed. With the Soviets forced into a 1,000-yard (910 m) strip of land on the western bank of the Volga, over 1,208 Stuka missions were flown in an effort to eliminate them.Despite the heavy air bombardment (Stalingrad suffered heavier bombardment than Sedan or Sevastopol), the Soviet 62nd Army, with 47,000 men and 19 tanks, prevented the VI Armee and IV Panzerarmee from taking the west bank. The Luftwaffe retained air superiority into early November and Soviet daytime aerial resistance was nonexistent, but after flying 20,000 individual sorties, its original strength of 1,600 serviceable aircraft had fallen to 950. The Kampfwaffe (bomber force) had been hardest hit, having only 232 out of a force of 480 left.Despite enjoying qualitative superiority against the VVS and possessing eighty percent of the Luftwaffe's resources on the Eastern Front, Luftflotte 4 could not prevent Soviet aerial power from growing. By the time of the counter-offensive, the Soviets outnumbered it. The Soviet bomber force, the Aviatsiya Dal'nego Deystviya (ADD), having taken crippling losses over the past 18 months, was restricted to flying at night. The Soviets flew 11,317 night sorties over Stalingrad and the Don-bend sector between 17 July and 19 November. These raids caused little damage and were of nuisance value only. The situation for the Luftwaffe was now becoming increasingly difficult. On 8 November, substantial units from Luftflotte 4 were withdrawn to combat the Allied landings in North Africa. The German air arm found itself spread thinly across Europe, and struggling to maintain its strength in the other southern sectors of the Soviet-German front. Meanwhile, the Soviet Army was being supplied by the American government under the Lend-Lease program. During the last quarter of 1942, the United States sent the Soviet Union 60,000 trucks, 11,000 jeeps, 2 million pairs of boots, 50,000 tons of explosives, 450,000 tons of steel and 250,000 tons of aviation gas.The majority of the American boots, which Stalin requested first,reached the troops. However, a part of the military equipment and food supplied by the USA was destroyed by German attacks,as that of Convoy PQ-17. After three months of slow advance, the Germans finally reached the river banks, capturing 90% of the ruined city and splitting the remaining Soviet forces into two narrow pockets. Ice floes on the Volga now prevented boats and tugs from supplying the Soviet defenders. Nevertheless, the fighting, especially on the slopes of Mamayev Kurgan and inside the factory area in the northern part of the city, continued as fiercely as ever. The battles for the Red October Steel Factory, the Dzerzhinsky tractor factory and the Barrikady gun factory became world-famous. The German offensive to take Stalingrad had been halted by a combination of stubborn Red Army resistance inside the city and local weather conditions. The Soviet counter-offensive planning used deceptive measures that eventually trapped and destroyed the 6th Army and other Axis forces around the city, becoming the second large scale defeat of the German Army during the Second World War.During the siege, the German and allied Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian armies protecting Army Group B's flanks had pressed their headquarters for support.The Hungarian 2nd Army, consisting of mainly ill-equipped and ill-trained units, was given the task of defending a 200-kilometre (120 mi) section of the front north of Stalingrad between the Italian Army and Voronezh. This resulted in a very thin line, with some sectors where 1–2-kilometre (0.6–1.2 mi) stretches were being defended by a single platoon. Soviet forces held several bridgeheads on the western bank of the river and presented a potentially serious threat to Army Group B. Similarly, on the southern flank of the Stalingrad sector the front south-west of Kotelnikovo was held only by the Romanian VII Corps, and beyond it, a single German division, the 16th Motorized Infantry. However, Hitler was so focused on the city itself that requests from the flanks for support were refused. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, expressed concerns about Hitler's preoccupation with the city, pointing out that if the situation on the weak German flanks was not rectified, "there would be a disaster". Hitler told Halder that Stalingrad would be captured and the weakened flanks would be held with "national socialist ardour, clearly I cannot expect this of you (Halder)", and replaced him with General Kurt Zeitzler in mid-October. In autumn, the Soviet generals Aleksandr Vasilyevskiy and Georgy Zhukov, responsible for strategic planning in the Stalingrad area, concentrated massive forces in the steppes to the north and south of the city. The German northern flank was particularly vulnerable, since it was defended by Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian units that suffered from inferior equipment, morale, and leadership when compared with their German counterparts. This weakness was known and exploited by the Soviets, who preferred to face off against non-German troops whenever possible, just as the British preferred attacking Italian troops instead of German ones in North Africa. The plan was to keep pinning the Germans down in the city, then punch through the overstretched and weakly defended German flanks and surround the Germans inside Stalingrad. The flanks were to be attacked far enough away from Stalingrad so that the bulk of the 6th Army in Stalingrad could not redeploy to defend against the attack.During the preparations for the attack, Marshal Zhukov personally visited the front, which was rare for such a high-ranking general.The operation was code-named “Uranus” and launched in conjunction with Operation Mars, which was directed at Army Group Center. The plan was similar to the one Zhukov had used to achieve victory at Khalkin Gol three years before, where he had sprung a double envelopment and destroyed the 23rd Division of the Japanese army.Zhukov and Vasilyevskiy were awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union" for their generalship. On 19 November 1942, the Red Army unleashed Operation Uranus. The attacking Soviet units under the command of Gen. Nikolay Vatutin consisted of three complete armies, the 1st Guards Army, 5th Tank Army, and 21st Army, including a total of 18 infantry divisions, eight tank brigades, two motorized brigades, six cavalry divisions and one anti-tank brigade. The preparations for the attack could be heard by the Romanians, who continued to push for reinforcements, only to be refused again. Thinly spread, outnumbered and poorly equipped, the Romanian 3rd Army, which held the northern flank of the German 6th Army, was shattered. On 20 November a second Soviet offensive (two armies) was launched to the south of Stalingrad, against points held by the Romanian IV Corps. The Romanian forces, made up primarily of infantry, collapsed almost immediately. Soviet forces raced west in a pincer movement, and met two days later near the town of Kalach, sealing the ring around Stalingrad.This was not filmed at the time; the Soviets re-enacted the link-up for a propaganda film, which achieved worldwide fame. About 290,000 German and Romanian soldiers,the Croatian 369th Reinforced Infantry Regiment,and other volunteer subsidiary troops were surrounded. Inside the pocket (German: Kessel, literally "cauldron"), there were also around 10,000 Soviet civilians and several thousand Soviet soldiers the Germans had taken captive during the battle. Not all of the 6th Army was trapped; 50,000 soldiers were brushed aside outside the pocket. The Red Army units immediately formed two defensive fronts: a circumvallation facing inward and a contravallation facing outward. Adolf Hitler had declared in a public speech (in the Berlin Sportpalast) on 30 September 1942 that the German army would never leave the city. At a meeting shortly after the Soviet encirclement, German army chiefs pushed for an immediate breakout to a new line on the west of the Don, but Hitler was at his Bavarian retreat of Obersalzberg in Berchtesgaden with the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring. When asked by Hitler, Göring replied, after being convinced by Hans Jeschonnek,that the Luftwaffe could supply the 6th Army with an "air bridge". This would allow the Germans in the city to fight on while a relief force was assembled. A similar plan had been used successfully a year earlier at the Demyansk Pocket, albeit on a much smaller scale: a corps at Demyansk rather than an entire army. Also, Soviet fighter forces had improved considerably in both quality and quantity in the intervening year. But the mention of the successful Demyansk air supply operation reinforced Hitler's own views, and was endorsed by Göring several days later. The head of the 4th Air Fleet (Luftflotte 4), Wolfram von Richthofen, tried unsuccessfully to get this decision overturned. The 6th Army was the largest unit of this type in the world and almost twice as large as a regular German army unit, plus there was also a corps of the 4th Panzer Army trapped in the pocket. It should have been clear that supplying them by air was impossible – the maximum 117.5 tons they could deliver a day—based on the number of available aircraft and with only the airfield at Pitomnik to land at—was far less than the minimum 800 tons needed.To supplement the limited number of Junkers Ju 52 transports, the Germans used aircraft wholly inadequate for the role, such as the Heinkel He 177 bomber (some bombers performed adequately – the Heinkel He 111 proved to be quite capable and was much faster than the Ju 52). But Hitler backed Göring's plan and reiterated his order of "no surrender" to his trapped armies. The air supply mission failed. Appalling weather conditions, technical failures, heavy Soviet anti-aircraft fire and fighter interceptions led to the loss of 488 German aircraft. The Luftwaffe failed to achieve even the daily supply of 117 tons that it had aircraft for. An average of 94 tons of supplies per day was delivered. The most successful day, 19 December, delivered only 289 tons of supplies in 154 flights. The supplies that did get through were often useless: one aircraft arrived with 20 tonnes of vodka and summer uniforms, another with supplies of black pepper and marjoram.Hitler's indecision on the purpose of Operation Winter Storm (either to allow a breakout or to open a corridor) meant that large quantities of fuel that would have helped with a breakout were shipped when food and ammunition would have been more useful.The transport aircraft that did land safely were used to evacuate technical specialists and sick or wounded men from the besieged enclave (some 42,000 in all). Initially, supply flights came in from the field at Tatsinskaya, called 'Tazi' by the German pilots. On 23 December 1942, the Soviet 24th Tank Corps, commanded by Major-General Vasily Mikhaylovich Badanov, reached nearby Skassirskaya and in the early morning of 24 December, the tanks reached Tatsinskaya. Without any soldiers to defend the airfield it was abandoned under heavy fire; in a little under an hour, 108 Ju 52s and 16 Ju 86s took off for Novocherkassk--leaving 72 Ju 52s and many other aircraft burning on the ground. A new base was established some 200 miles from Stalingrad at Salsk, the additional distance another obstacle to the resupply efforts. Salsk was abandoned in turn by mid-January for a rough facility at Zverevo, near Shakhty. The field at Zverevo was attacked repeatedly on 18 January and a further 50 Ju 52s were destroyed. The 6th Army slowly starved. Pilots were shocked to find the troops too exhausted and hungry to unload. Germans fought over the slightest scraps of bread. General Zeitzler, moved by their plight, began to limit himself to their slim rations at meal times. After a few weeks on such a diet, he had lost 26 pounds and had become so emaciated that Hitler, annoyed, personally ordered him to start eating regular meals again. The toll on the Transportgruppen was heavy. Some 266 Junkers Ju 52s were destroyed, one-third of the fleet's strength on the Eastern Front. The He 111 gruppen lost 165 aircraft in transport operations. Other losses included 42 Ju 86s, nine Fw 200 "Condors", five He 177 bombers and a Ju 290. The Luftwaffe also lost close to 1,000 highly experienced bomber crew personnel.So heavy were the Luftwaffe's losses that four of Luftflotte 4s transport units (KGrzbV 700, KGrzbV 900, I./KGrzbV 1 and II./KGzbV 1) were "formally dissolved". Opertaion little Saturn Soviet forces consolidated their positions around Stalingrad, and fierce fighting to shrink the pocket began. Operation Winter Storm (Operation Wintergewitter), a German attempt to relieve the trapped army from the south, was successfully fended off by the Soviets in December. The full impact of the harsh Russian winter set in. The Volga froze solid, allowing the Soviets to supply their forces more easily. The trapped Germans rapidly ran out of heating fuel and medical supplies, and thousands started to die of frostbite, malnutrition, and disease. On 16 December, the Soviets launched a second offensive, Operation Little Saturn, which attempted to punch through the Axis army on the Don and take Rostov. If successful, this offensive would have trapped the remainder of Army Group South, one third of the entire German army in Russia, in the Caucasus. The Germans set up a "mobile defense" in which small units were to hold towns until supporting armor could arrive. From the Soviet bridgehead at Mamon, fifteen divisions supported by at least 100 tanks attacked the Italian Cosseria and Ravenna Divisions, and although outnumbered 9 to 1, the Italians resisted until 19 December when ARMIR headquarters finally ordered the battered divisions to withdraw.The Soviets never got close to Rostov, but the fighting forced von Manstein to extract Army Group A from the Caucasus and re-establish the frontline some 250 km away from the city. The Tatsinskaya Raid also caused significant losses to Luftwaffe’s transport fleet. The 6th Army now was beyond all hope of German reinforcement. The German troops in Stalingrad were not told this, however, and continued to believe that reinforcements were on their way. Some German officers requested that Paulus defy Hitler’s orders to stand fast and instead attempt to break out of the Stalingrad pocket. Paulus refused, as he abhorred the thought of disobeying orders. Also, while a motorised breakout might have been possible in the first few weeks, the 6th Army now had insufficient fuel and the German soldiers would have faced great difficulty breaking through the Soviet lines on foot in harsh winter conditions. Soviet victory The Germans inside the pocket retreated from the suburbs of Stalingrad to the city itself. The loss of the two airfields, at Pitomnik on 16 January 1943 and Gumrak on either 25 January or the night of 21/22 January,meant an end to air supplies and to the evacuation of the wounded.The third and last serviceable runway was at the Stalingradskaja flight school, which reportedly had the last landings and takeoffs on the night of 22–23 January.After daybreak on 23 January, there were no more reported landings except for continuous air drops of ammunition and food until the end. The Germans were now not only starving, but running out of ammunition. Nevertheless, they continued to resist stubbornly, in part because they believed the Soviets would execute any who surrendered. In particular, the so-called "HiWis", Soviet citizens fighting for the Germans, had no illusions about their fate if captured. The Soviets were initially surprised by the number of Germans they had trapped, and had to reinforce their encircling troops. Bloody urban warfare began again in Stalingrad, but this time it was the Germans who were pushed back to the banks of the Volga. They fortified their positions in the factory districts and the Soviets encountered almost the same tooth-and-nail ferocity that they themselves displayed a month earlier. The Germans adopted a simple defense of fixing wire nets over all windows to protect themselves from grenades. The Soviets responded by fixing fish hooks to the grenades so they stuck to the nets when thrown. The Germans now had no usable tanks in the city. Those tanks which still functioned could at best be used as stationary cannons. The Soviets did not bother employing tanks in areas where the urban destruction restricted their mobility. A Soviet envoy party (comprising Major Aleksandr Smyslov, Captain Nikolay Dyatlenko and a trumpeter) carried a generous offer to Paulus on honourable terms: if he surrendered within 24 hours, he would receive a guarantee of safety for all prisoners, medical care for the sick and wounded, prisoners allowed to keep their personal belongings, "normal" food rations, and repatriation to whatever country they wished to go to after the war — but Paulus, ordered not to surrender by Adolf Hitler, did not respond. On 30 January 1943, the 10th anniversary of his coming to power, Hitler promoted Paulus to Generalfeldmarschall. Since no German Field Marshal had ever been taken prisoner, Hitler assumed that Paulus would fight on or take his own life. However, when Soviet forces closed in on his headquarters in the ruined GUM department store the next day, Paulus surrendered. The remnants of the Axis forces in Stalingrad surrendered on 2 February; 91,000 tired, ill, and starving prisoners were taken, including 3,000 Romanians, the survivors of the 20th Infantry Division, 1st Cavalry Division and “Col. Voicu” Detachment.To the delight of the Soviet forces and the dismay of the Third Reich, the prisoners included 22 generals. Hitler was furious and confided that Paulus "could have freed himself from all sorrow and ascended into eternity and national immortality, but he prefers to go to Moscow." The German public was not officially told of the disaster until the end of January 1943, though positive media reports had stopped in the weeks before the announcement.Stalingrad marked the first time that the Nazi government publicly acknowledged a failure in its war effort; it was not the first major setback of the German military, but the crushing defeat where German losses were almost equal to those of the Soviets was unprecedented. Prior losses of the Soviet Union were generally three times as high as the German ones.On 31 January, regular programming on German state radio was replaced by a broadcast of the somber Adagio movement from Anton Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, followed by the announcement of the defeat at Stalingrad.On 18 February, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels gave his famous Sportpalast speech in Berlin, encouraging the Germans to accept a total war which would claim all resources and efforts from the entire population. According to the German documentary film Stalingrad, over 11,000 soldiers refused to lay down their arms at the official surrender, presumably believing that fighting to the death was better than a slow end in Soviet camps. They continued to resist, hiding in cellars and sewers, but by early March 1943, the remaining small and isolated pockets of resistance had surrendered. According to Soviet intelligence documents shown in the documentary, 2,418 of the men were killed and 8,646 captured. Of the 91,000 German prisoners captured in Stalingrad, only about 5,000 ever returned. Already weakened by disease, starvation and lack of medical care during the encirclement, they were sent to labour camps all over the Soviet Union, where most of them died of disease (particularly typhus), cold, overwork, mistreatment and malnutrition. Some were kept in the city to help with rebuilding. In March 1943, 40,000 Germans were buried in a mass grave, victims of a typhus epidemic.A handful of senior officers were taken to Moscow and used for propaganda purposes, and some of them joined the National Committee for a Free Germany. Some, including Paulus, signed anti-Hitler statements which were broadcast to German troops. Paulus lived in the Soviet Union until 1952, then moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he spent the remainder of his days defending his actions at Stalingrad and was quoted as saying that Communism was the best hope for postwar Europe.General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach offered to raise an anti-Hitler army from the Stalingrad survivors, but the Soviets did not accept. It was not until 1955 that the last of the handful of survivors were repatriated after a plea to the Politburo by Konrad Adenauer.

28 July 1942	The macabre resolution of "not one step backwards" is issued by Stalin to his generals and troops.
4 August 1942	Elements of the German Army cross the Aksay River towards Stalingrad.
6 August 1942	The German Army crosses the Kuban River near Armavir.
7 August 1942	Elements of the German Army attack Soviet forces near Kalach.
9 August 1942	The German Army captures the strategic port of Yeysk and Krasnador on the Sea of Azov.
14 August 1942	German forces cross the Kuban river near Krasnador.
19 August 1942	German General Paulus and his 6th Army is ordered to attack the Soviet city of Stalingrad.
22 August 1942	German land forces advancing into the Caucasus are stopped.
25 August 1942	Stalingard is officially under siege by the Germans Army.
1 September 1942	Germany Army elements, backed by Romanians cross the Kerch Straits. The Germans establish a bridgehead over the Terek River.
3 September 1942	The Germans enact an offensive aimed at the heart of Stalingrad.
6 September 1942	The strategic Black Sea port city Novorossiysk falls to the Germans.
15 September 1942	The Soviet Army is unleashed on Voronezh.
24 September 1942	The German Army makes headway toward Tuapse.
6 October 1942	Malgobek falls to the German Army.
9 October 1942	The Soviet government hands all military powers to the Soviet Army.
14 October 1942	Adolph Hitler stops all further offensives against Soviet targets in the region for the year and orders his commanders to hold their positions until 1943.
18 October 1942	The German drive against Tuapse is stopped by the Soviets.
25 October 1942	The Germans enact a new offensive in the Caucasus.
1 November 1942	The Caucasus town of Alagir is captured by the Germans.
2 November 1942	The Caucasus town of Ordzhonikidse is captured by the Germans.
19 November 1942	The Soviets push forward a new two-part offensive - Operation Uranus - north of Stalingrad and break through the Romanian-held defenses.
20 November 1942	Part 2 of Operation Uranus is enacted at the southern end of Stalingrad. German General Manstein is appointed the commander of Army Group Don.
22 November 1942	Two elements of the Soviet Army meets at Kalach, effectively encircling the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.
25 November 1942	In an effort to resupply their troops, the German Luftwaffe is called upon to exercise airdrops of vital supplies to the German 6th Army.
12 December 1942	While Hitler rejects any plea from the German 6th Army to retreat from their position, the 4th Panzer Army is used through Operation Winter Storm in an attempt to relieve the beleaguered German troops at Stalingrad.
16 December 1942	The Soviet Army puts Operation Little Saturn into effect and attacks Rostov. The Italian Army goes into full retreat from the Soviet advance. German Army forces are called off from further offensives at Tuapse.
21 December 1942	Soviet relief forces and supplies headed for Stalingrad are stopped at Myshkova.
23 December 1942	All further attempts to relieve Stalingrad are put on hold, indefinitely.
24 December 1942	The Soviet Army launches a fresh attack at Kotelnikovo, routing its Romanian defenders and putting them into full retreat.
28 December 1942	German Army Group A is given the official order to retreat from the Caucasus region.
1 January 1943	German forces at Terek retreat.
8 January 1943	Soviet generals send in the formal request for surrender of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad, a request which is formally rejected.
10 January 1943	Soviet General Rokossovsky unleashes hell on the German 6th Army through thousands of artillery cannons and Katyusha rockets.
12 January 1943	Soviet troops make headway against the defensive lines at the Don River held by Hungarian and Italian troops. German Caucasus elements make it to their bridgehead over the Kuban River.
13 January 1943	German Army elements at Terek retreat to the Nagutskoye-Alexsandrovskoye position.
14 January 1943	In an effort to replenish and build up their army ranks along the East Front, German Generals proposed conscription service of the Baltic people for service .
17 January 1943	The German Panzer Corps at the Don are officially surrounded.
25 January 1943	A Soviet offensive splits the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. German forces at Armavir retreat. German forces at Voronezh retreat.
31 January 1943	German General Paulus formally surrenders his southern Stalingrad army to the Soviets.
2 February 1943	The German Army north pocket at Stalingrad formally surrenders to the Soviet Army. The liberation of Stalingrad is officially over.