Battle of Stalingrad: Encyclopedia II - Battle of Stalingrad - The Soviet Counter-attack: Operation Uranus

Battle of Stalingrad - The Soviet Counter-attack: Operation Uranus

         German front, 19 November

         German front, 12 December

         German front, 24 December

██ Russian advance, 19-28 November

During the siege the German, Hungarian, and Romanian armies protecting Army Group South (B)'s flanks had pressed their headquarters for support. The 2nd Hungarian Army (consisting of mainly ill-equipped and ill-trained units) were given the task of defending a 200 km section of the front north of Stalingrad. This resulted in a very thin line of defense with some parts where 1-2km stretches were being guarded by a single platoon. Soviet forces held several points on the south bank of the river and presented a potentially serious threat to Army Group South (B). However, Hitler was so focused on the city itself that requests from the flanks for support were refused. The chief of the German army general staff OKW, Franz Halder, expressed concerns about Hitler's preoccupation with the city, pointing at the Germans' weak flanks. Hitler replaced Halder in mid-October with General Kurt Zeitzler.

In Autumn the Soviet general Georgy Zhukov, responsible for strategic planning in the Stalingrad area, concentrated massive Soviet forces in the steppes to the north and south of the city. The German northern flank was particularly vulnerable, since it was defended by Hungarian and Romanian units which suffered from inferior equipment and low morale. Zhukov's plan was to keep pinning the Germans down in the city, and then to punch through the overstretched and weakly defended German flanks and to surround the Germans inside Stalingrad. The operation was code-named "Uranus" and launched in conjunction with Operation Mars, which was directed at Army Group Center.

On November 19, 1942 the Red Army unleashed Uranus. The attacking Soviet units under the command of General Nikolai Vatutin consisted of three complete armies, the 1st Guard, 5th Tank 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 3rd Romanian Army, which held the northern flank of the German 6th Army, was shattered after an almost miraculous one-day defense.

On November 20, a second Soviet offensive (two armies) was launched to the south of Stalingrad, against points held by the Romanian 4th Army Corps. The Romanian forces, made up primarily of cavalry, 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. About 250,000 German and Romanian soldiers, as well as some Croatian units and volunteer subsidiary troops found themselves trapped inside the resulting pocket, along with the surviving Soviet civilians and several thousands of Soviet soldiers whom the Germans had taken captive during the battle. Not all German soldiers from the 6th Army were trapped: 50,000 were brushed aside outside the pocket.

Hitler had already declared in a public speech on September 30th that the German army would never leave the city. At a meeting shortly after the encirclement, German army chiefs pushed for an immediate breakout to a new line on the west of the Don. Hermann Göring instead claimed 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 could be assembled, a plan that had been used successfully a year earlier at the Demyansk Pocket on a much smaller scale (an army corps versus an entire army). The German Sixth Army was the largest unit of this type in the world, almost twice as large as a regular German army. Also trapped in the "pocket" was a corps of the Fourth Panzer Army. It should have been clear that supplying the pocket by air was impossible: the Luftwaffe's carrying capacity after the Battle of Crete had not been reinforced, and the maximum 300 tonnes they could deliver a day would be less than the 500 needed by the pocket. However, Hitler backed Göring's plan and re-iterated his order of "no surrender" to his trapped armies.

The air supply mission failed almost immediately. Harsh winter weather and heavy Soviet anti-aircraft fire made maintaining the air bridge almost impossible. In general only 10 percent of the needed supplies could be delivered. Those transport planes which made it would evacuate the sick and wounded when taking off from the besieged enclave. The 6th Army slowly starved. Pilots were shocked to find the troops assigned to offloading the planes too exhausted and hungry to unload food.

Soviet forces consolidated their positions around Stalingrad, and fierce fighting to shrink the pocket began. An attack by a German battlegroup formed to relieve the trapped armies from the South, Operation Wintergewitter ("Winter Storm") 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 in the city more easily. The trapped Germans rapidly ran out of heating fuel and medical supplies, and thousands started dying of frostbite, malnutrition and disease.

In January the Soviets launched a second offensive, Operation Saturn, which attempted to punch through the Axis army on the Don and take Rostov. If successful, this offensive would trap the remainder of Army Group South in the Caucasus. The Germans set up a "mobile defense" in which small units would hold towns until supporting armor could arrive. The Soviets never got close to Rostov, but the fighting forced von Manstein to extract Group A from the Caucasus and restabilize the frontline some 250 km away from the city. The 6th Army was now 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Soviet Counter-attack: Operation Uranus", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki