The Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact, a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany was signed just prior to the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the invasion that started the Second World War in Europe. The pact came as a great surprise to the world at large due to the obviously conflicting ideologies of the two, and their essential hostility towards each other. For awhile anyway, they maintained diplomatic and trade relations and the Germans received oil, wheat and other raw materials from the Soviets in exchange for military and industrial equipment. Behind the scenes, however, both were deeply suspicious of the other.
Into the late 1930s, Germany’s appetite for raw materials was increasing dramatically and her territorial interest in the Balkans seemed to indicate an ever greater likelihood of a German invasion of the Soviet Union in the offing. In the summer of 1940, Hitler is said to have told one of his generals that the recent victories in western Europe had “finally freed his hands for his important real task—the showdown with Bolshevism.” He was anticipating a number of benefits that would accrue from the German occupation of western Russia. They would include, but not be limited to the Ukraine becoming a reliable source of agricultural products, the Soviet Union a source of forced labour under German rule, reduction of the labour shortage in Germany through the demobilization of many German soldiers, further isolation of the Allies—especially Britain, through the defeat of the Soviet Union, and access to additional oil through German control of the Baku oilfields.
Hitler received and approved the military plans for Operation Barbarossa on 5 December 1940. The plan called for launching the assault in May 1941 and he signed his War Directive No. 21 on 18 December saying: “The German Wehrmacht must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign.”
At that time, according to German historian Andreas Hillgruber, the majority of Germany’s leading generals believed that the German Army was ill-informed about the Soviet Union, especially about the military and the economy; due to the limited information available to it then, German Army thinking about the Soviet Union was based on traditional German stereotypes of Russia as a primitive, backward country that lacked the strength to stand up to a superior opponent; the leadership of the German Army saw the prospect of war with the Soviets from an extremely narrow military viewpoint with little consideration given to politics, the economy or culture, and the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union was not considered at all as a factor that might influence the outcome of a German-Soviet war; the average Red Army soldier was thought of as brave and tough, but the Red Army officer corps were held in contempt; The German Army leadership after the victory over France in 1940 was in a state of hubris with the Army being seen as more or less invincible; it was assumed that the Soviet Union was destined to be defeated, that it would likely take Germany between six and eight weeks to defeat the Soviets.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was telling his key generals of Hitler’s references to the Soviet Union in Mein Kampf, and that they must always be prepared to repulse a German attack. He told them that Hitler thought the Red Army would need at least four years to ready itself for such a confrontation, so they must be prepared for such an attack much earlier.
“We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” —Adolf Hitler
The main intent of Barbarossa was the combining of a northern assault on Leningrad, a symbolic capture of Moscow, and the seizure of the oilfields in the south beyond the Ukraine. Hitler held many planning sessions with his generals on the offensive in which considerable disagreement was aired as to which of the aims should take priority. He was impatient to get on with the invasion, believing that Britain would sue for peace when the Germans had won victory in the Soviet Union, and Generaloberst Franz Halder wrote a diary notation that, by destroying the Soviet Union, Germany would destroy Britain’s hope of victory.
Now Hitler was captivated by the hubris of his lightning victories in France and western Europe and spurred on by the seeming ineptitude of the Red Army’s recent efforts. He appeared to genuinely believe that the campaign he was so eager to begin against the Soviets would be yet another example of the quick and the dead—quick and relatively easy success for him, and dead for the Russians. This perspective and his overconfidence would cause him to send his massive armies off into a hellish struggle, disgracefully underequipped and improperly prepared for the protracted, punishing winter campaign that awaited them, against a greatly underrated enemy force. He assumed that the Russians would face up to their hopeless odds and quickly throw in the towel. “When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment.”—Adolf Hitler
The German Army was still involved in a Balkans campaign when it was ordered to start massing huge numbers of troops, weaponry, vehicles and equipment along the Soviet-Romanian border and by February 1941, there were more than 480,000 Wehrmacht troops waiting there. In the months leading up to the June invasion, he had positioned 3.2 million German and 500,000 Axis soldiers on the Soviet border, had Goering’s Luftwaffe fly dozens of aerial reconnaissance sorties over the area, and stockpiled a record supply of war materiél to be ready for his big moment.
Stalin was convinced that, while he didn’t trust the Germans, he could, for the time being, rely on the Molotov-Ribbontrop agreement which had been signed only two years earlier, and the fact that the Germans were still involved in war with Britain, to keep the peace between the two powers for awhile at least. He gave no credence to reports from his own intelligence service about the massive Nazi troop build-up along his border, considering much of what he heard along those lines to stem from British misinformation intended to set off a war between the USSR and the Germans. For several months prior to the 22 June German invasion of the Soviet Union, the British intelligence resources processing Ultra intercepts at Bletchley Park, as well as American intelligence reports, had been warning the Russians about an impending invasion by the Germans. Seeming substance to the notion that the Germans were, in fact, preparing to invade Britain, rather than the Soviet Union, was indicated through the apparent evidence of German training exercises, reconnaissance flights and ship concentrations in areas that might confirm such an intention. By 5 May, however, Stalin had accepted the reality of Hitler’s intentions. In an address to military academy graduates in Moscow he said: “War with Germany is inevitable. If comrade Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two or three months that will be our good fortune, but you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our forces.”
After a number of brainstorming sessions with his generals, agreement was reached on the specific goals and assignments of the three German army groups that would be making the assault on the Soviets. Army Group South was assigned to hit the heavily populated agricultural area of the Ukraine with the intention of capturing Kiev before moving east across the Steppes of the southern USSR to the River Volga where it was to take and control the oilfields of the Caucasus region. Army Group North was ordered to march through the Baltic states to northern Russia and either capture of destroy Leningrad. And the job of Army Group Centre was to roll on to Smolensk and then Moscow and take the capital. There was, however, still disagreement among Hitler and the generals about exact priority of these goals. The German High Command wanted to lead with a direct thrust at Moscow. Hitler much preferred to give priority to seizing the resource-rich Ukraine and the Baltics before going for the Soviet capital. The argument took time and brought a substantial delay to the launch of the offensive.
In the run-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler and German High Command persisted with the view that, in general terms, the Soviets were relatively weak and poorly prepared for the conflict coming their way. Their intelligence appears to have failed in that they didn’t seem to have realized how quickly the industrialization and industrial output of the Soviets had grown during the 1930s, placing them equal to that of Germany and second only to the United States. Throughout that decade, the continuous growth of the Soviet economy leant towards production of military equipment.
Troop availability for the Soviets amounted to 2.6 million in the west, 1.8 million in the far east, and about 600,000 in training or deployed elsewhere. The total of German and Axis forces available for the offensive against the Soviet Union came to about 3.9 million. In terms of organized units available for combat operations on 22 June 1941, the Germans were prepared to field ninety-eight divisions, of which twenty-nine were armoured and motorized divisions, for an allocation of approximately ninety percent of the German Army’s total mobile forces. They were to be deployed along a 750-mile front from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains. From the start of the campaign, the German and Axis forces had a slight numerical advantage in manpower, but that ratio changed throughout the course of the war. In weapon systems, the Soviets had a significant numerical advantage. The Red Army possessed more than 23,000 tanks, of which more than 12,700 were positioned in the five Western Military Districts, three of which faced the German invasion front. It is also true that, in June 1941, Red Army maintenance standards for this equipment were poor, ammunition and radio equipment were in short supply, as were the trucks needed to bring in supplies. Following their observation of the German offensive against France in 1940, though, the Soviets soon began to reorganize their armoured equipment along the lines of Germany’s large armoured divisions and corps. That reorganization, however, was only partially implemented by the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.
Germany’s armies were equipped with approximately 5,200 tanks and of these, about 3,350 were prepared and committed to the offensive against the Soviets in June 1941. The ratio of armour then was to be 4:1 in the Soviet’s favour, numerically. In terms of quality, only slightly more than seven percent of the Soviet tank force on that date was made up of the superior T-34 and KV-1 tanks. The numerical advantage of the Soviets, it must be said, was offset at that moment by the superior training and the readiness of the Germans. In the period 1936-38, Stalin had purged his officer corps and, of ninety generals who were arrested, only six survived the purge; just thirty-six of the 180 divisional commanders survived it, as did only seven of the fifty-seven army corps commanders. In that nightmarish time, some 30,000 personnel of the Red Army were executed, largely for being “politically unreliable.” By the summer of 1941, seventy-five percent of the Red Army officers had been in their posts for less than a year, and the average Soviet corps commander was twelve years younger than the average German division commander. The majority of these Soviet officers lacked the proper training for their jobs and were, in many cases, reluctant to use initiative.
In the beginning of Barbarossa, the Soviet Army was dispersed rather than properly concentrated, largely unprepared for the action to come, and lacking the transport capability to become appropriately concentrated before the start of combat operations. While their artillery units were equipped with good guns, many had little or no ammunition, and lacked the transport capability to move their guns as needed. With inadequate maintenance standards, the Soviet tank units were mostly ill-equipped and their training and logistical support was also sub-standard. When combat began, these units were frequently sent into battle with no fixed provision for the resupply of ammunition, refueling, or even the replacement of dead, wounded, or captured personnel. Thus, one combat engagement could and often did mean the elimination of the Soviet unit. The Red Army then, was frequently at a significant disadvantage in the early days of the Barbarossa campaign. Before the beginning of the campaign, the Soviet border troops were not put on full alert and were clearly not prepared for the on-rushing Germans when the attack came.
With the fall of France in the German blitzkrieg offensive of 1940, the Soviets began the reorganization of their armoured and infantry divisions, concentrating the bulk of their forces into large formations and the majority of their tanks into twenty-nine mechanized corps, with more than 1,000 tanks in each. The Soviet plan, should the Germans attack, was to have their mechanized corps eliminate the German armoured spearheads. The Soviet mechanized corps would then work with their infantry armies to halt the advancing German infantry and shove them back. The left side of the Soviet force in the Ukraine was to be greatly reinforced in order to execute a giant envelopment. After destroying the German Army Group South, that huge Soviet force would then move north through Poland, behind the German Army Groups North and Centre, to completely encircle and annihilate them. All this would be followed by a major Red Army offensive into western Europe.
Operation Barbarossa started at 03:15 Sunday morning, 22 June 1941, when the German Air Force began dropping bombs on the cities of Soviet-occupied Poland. This precipitated the advance of nearly three million troops of the Wehrmacht toward nearly that many of their opposite number on the other side of the Soviet border. At a few minutes after midnight, a small number of Russian border troops were warned that a German attack was imminent. Relatively few of the Soviet border units were alerted before the attack began. As the offensive began, some 500,000 Hungarian, Croatian, Slovakian, Romanian, and Italian troops joined with the Germans in the assault, along with members of the Army of Finland and a division of volunteers and Nazi sympathizers from Spain.
Even though it managed to destroy more than 2,000 planes of the Soviet Air Force on the first day of the campaign, the Luftwaffe failed to achieve the total destruction of the SAF, its objective for the early part of the offensive. It did achieve air superiority over the three main sectors of the front, destroying 3,922 aircraft in the first three days of the conflict—eliminating enough of enemy air power for the German pilots and air crews to devote much of their efforts to the support of German ground forces.
The German 4th Panzer Group with its 600 tanks found itself between two Soviet armies. The objective of the 4th was Leningrad and to get there it would have to cross two major obstacles, the Neman and Daugava rivers. The Germans were able to get across the Neman on the first day of the offensive, and rolling fifty miles into the interior to a point near Raseinai. There they ran into a counterattack by 300 tanks of the 3rd and 12th Soviet Mechanized Corps. In the ensuing four day battle, the German armour surrounded and destroyed most of the Soviet tanks, which by then were out of fuel and ammunition. More than ninety percent of the entire Soviet Mechanized Corps equipment and personnel had been lost by the end of the first week of the campaign. Soon the Germans had crossed the Daugava and were closing in on Leningrad, but they had outrun their supply line and the GermanHigh Command ordered them to halt and hold their position until their infantry caught up with them. The wait lasted more than a week, giving the Soviets ample time to establish an effective defence around Leningrad and the nearby Luga river.
To the detriment of the Soviets, though, a huge anti-Soviet uprising was getting started in Lithuania. Within one day an independent Lithuania was proclaimed and more than 30,000 Lithuanian rebels clashed with Soviet soldiers and were quickly joined in the action by ethnic Lithuanians from the Red Army. The resistance soon spread to neighbouring Estonia, adding considerably to the problems of the Soviets, as the German advance proceeded northward.
There were four Soviet armies on the salient opposite German Army Group Centre. The salient thrust into German-occupied Polish territory; its centre was Bialystok and just beyond that was the city of Minsk, a primary railway junction and the capital of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The mission of the two panzer groups of Army Group Centre was to join up at Minsk to prevent the Red Army units escaping from the salient. In the ensuing action, the infantry of AG Centre stormed the salient and encircled the enemy troops at Bialystok, while the 2nd Panzergruppe crossed the Bug river to the south to attack the Soviets; the 3rd Panzergruppe crossed the Neman and hit the balance of the enemy forces.
And, in a seemingly hopeless gesture from Moscow, Marshall Semyon Timoshenko directed that all Soviet forces were to launch a general counteroffensive against the invading Germans. It appeared to be a futile response as his communications system was all but inoperative, his supply capability marginalized and his ammunition dumps destroyed. Without properly functioning communications, these uncoordinated attacks were bound to fail. Marshall Georgy Zhukov had been required by Stalin to sign the Directive of People’s Commissariat of Defence No. 3, ordering the Red Army to begin the major offensive with the seizure of the Suwalki region by 26 June, encircling and destroying the enemy grouping there. The effort collapsed and much of the Red Army that was involved in the action was destroyed by the Wehrmacht forces.
By 27 June the 2nd and 3rd Panzergruppes had joined up and advanced nearly 200 miles into Soviet territory on their way towards Moscow. To the south, the advancing German Army Group South, under the command of Gerd von Rundstedt, encountered three Soviet armies which put up fierce resistance, but the 600-tank spearhead of the 1st Panzergruppe slashed through one the enemy armies. This was followed by one of the most intense and violent battles of the entire offensive, a four-day action involving more than 1,000 Soviet tanks in a major counter-attack against the tanks of 1st Panzergruppe, which suffered very heavy losses, but prevailed in the final outcome.
The counter-offensive of the Soviets collapsed and commitment of the only remaining Russian tank forces in Ukraine soon forced the Soviets onto the defensive amd into a strategic withdrawal. Though a major victory for the Germans, it also resulted in a significant delay to the offensive against Moscow, hampering German progress toward the capital by eleven weeks. German General Kurt von Tippelskirch, Staff Intelligence: “The Russians had indeed lost a battle, but they won the campaign.” When the campaign was a week old, each of the three German army groups had hit their prime objectives, but the Soviets were still actively and effectively resisting, especially in the areas around Minsk and Bialystok, and the Germans were suffering heavy casualties.
It was not until 3 July that Hitler finally ordered the German armoured units to roll east again, as their infantry forces caught up with them. Once again, however, a delay brought on this time by a torrential rainstorm reduced the progress rate of the panzers. The delay allowed the Russians time to reorganize and mount a massive counter-attack against Army Group Centre, whose objective was then Smolensk on the way to Moscow. Heading there, the German AGC encountered no less than six Soviet armies in a defensive line. It required the great air superiority of the Luftwaffe for the Germans to overwhelm and defeat a huge Soviet counter-attack with 700 tanks, after which the 2nd and 3rd Panzergruppes closed on Smolensk from the north and south, trapping three Soviet armies between them. Finally, on 26 July, the German armoured and infantry units prevailed, capturing some 300,000 soldiers of the Red Army, of which roughly 100,000 managed to escape and take up in the defense of Moscow.
The harsh reality of their situation was starting to become meaningful to the Germans as Barbarossa entered a second month. They now knew they had greatly underestimated the strength, resourcefulness, and determination of their enemy. The German armies had rapidly gone through the supplies they had brought with them and had not achieved the swift rate of progress they had anticipated. They now had to slow their pace and await resupply which would bring yet another substantial delay. The German High Command, spurred by Hitler, shifted to a new approach to defeating the Soviet enemy; taking away their industrial capacity for making war, through the capture of facilities such as the oilfields of the Caucasus, the Donets Basin, and the industrial complex of Kharkov, as well as Leningrad which was a centre of war production in the north. Hitler’s generals in the field, however, strongly favoured maintaining a top-priority drive against Moscow which they saw as the main prize. Moscow was not only a primary arms production centre and a principal hub of communications and transportation; it was important psychologically as the capital, and the largest part of the Red Army was positioned there for the defence of the city.
Still, Hitler was insistent and ordered Generaloberst Guderian to drive the tanks of Army Group Centre towards the industrial targets and, for the time being, stop the drive on the capital.
The Germans approached to within a few kilometres of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine on the Dnieper river in mid-July. One element then turned east, encountering and trapping three Soviet armies. German tanks went north across the Dnieper and the panzers and infantry soon trapped four additional Soviet army groups.
Between 30 August and 8 September, the Germans suffered a major tactical loss, their first since the start of Barbarossa, the Yelnya Offensive, in a major retreat and the worst reversal for the Germans in the Soviet war to date. The setback refocused Hitler on the German Army Group Centre and the drive on Moscow. Shortly, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies were ordered to support Army Group Centre in its assault on Moscow.
In the beginning of a final push on Leningrad, an armada of tanks from Army Group Centre linked up with the 4th Panzer Army and, on 18 August, smashed their way through Soviet defences while the German 16th Army struck from the northeast. Shortly after this, an order came through from Hitler calling for the total destruction of Leningrad with no prisoners taken. The Soviets mounted a fierce defence of the city and, after a nine-day struggle, the Germans were stopped within seven miles of their objective, with mounting casualties. At that point, the impatient German leader demanded that Leningrad should be starved into submission rather than stormed. Capturing the city was simply going to be too costly to the Germans, so heavy was Soviet resistance there. The ensuing German blockade then started the Siege of Leningrad. The Soviet troops there were able to hold out against several attempts by the enemy to break through the defences using air power and artillery, and despite the desperate shortages of food and fuel. Finally, early in 1944 they drove the Germans back from the city which had suffered the loss of more than one million people in the long siege.
The new focus on Moscow was linked to repositioning the bulk of Army Group Centre and Army Group South, to encircle the Soviet force in Kiev, which occurred on 16 September. The German forces ended a ferocious tenday battle there with the loss to the Soviets of more than 450,000 men and nearly 600,000 captured.
In their focus on Moscow, capital city of the USSR and the largest Soviet city, the Germans launched Operation Typhoon, the Battle of Moscow, on 2 October 1941. In an attack that took the Soviets completely by surprise, the 2nd Panzer Army came up from the south to capture Oryol, a federal subject of Russia located on the Oka river, and roughly seventy-five miles to the south of the first main line of defence for the capital. The tanks then pushed on to take Bryansk, 235 miles southwest of Moscow as the German 2nd Army attacked from the west. In the north, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies assaulted Vyazma, in the Smolensk district, trapping four more Soviet armies. At this point in the Barbarossa campaign, the Germans had taken more than three million prisoners of war. For the final defence of Moscow, the Soviets were down to 90,000 men and 150 tanks.
By 13 October, the 3rd Panzer Army was within ninety miles of the capital and in Germany the government was predicting the imminent fall of Moscow, where Martial law had been declared. And, as the fortunes of the Soviets appeared to be in freefall, the weather in the Moscow region also took a severe turn for the worse. As the temperature dropped, heavy rains soon reduced the largely unpaved road network to mud, which slowed the German advance on the city to no more than two miles a day. The German Army supply situation in the Soviet Union had now deteriorated to the point that High Command in Berlin had to call a temporary halt to the activities of Operation Typhoon while the German armies were reorganized. The Soviets, whose own supply lines were functioning reasonably well, were able to use the German down-time to reorganize their own situation, calling up many new reservists and consolidating their positions in and around the capital. Incorporating thirty new divisions of Siberian troops, they organized eleven entirely new armies in less than a month, and with the Siberians came an additional 1,000 tanks and more than 1,000 aircraft.
The German advance on Moscow resumed on 15 November, but the weather was now becoming extreme and the ground rock-hard. Exhausted, cold and with little improvement to the resupply situation, the men of the German Army proceeded in an agonizing effort towards the capital. The plan of attack called for the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies to cross the Moscow Canal and circle the city from the northeast, while the 2nd Panzer Army would run an attack on Tula, an industrial city 120 miles south of Moscow on the Upa river, and move in on Moscow from the south, and the 4th Panzer Army would attack the centre of Moscow. But without the necessary fuel and ammunition resupply, the Germans were unable to maintain more than a crawling pace of advance over the next two weeks. And in the south, the 2nd Panzer Army was routed by the Soviet Siberian troops. The 4th Panzer Army, though, was successful in crossing the Moscow Canal and starting the planned encirclement.
The first horrendous blizzards of the coming winter began on 2 December as part of a German infantry division approached within fifteen miles of Moscow. A single German battalion on a reconnaissance mission was able to advance to the town of Khimki, just five miles from the Soviet capital. It was the closest the Germans would get to Moscow. In the preceding three weeks of warfare, the German toll in dead and wounded came to 155,000, with disease and frostbite accounting for more casualties than actual combat. The combat-ready strength of many German divisions had by now been reduced to fifty percent or less, and the severity of the cold was taking a massive toll of the guns, tanks, and equipment in the German ranks, as well as grounding the Luftwaffe with increasing frequency. The growing, rejuvenated Soviet forces in the Moscow area had reached more than half a million men and they came at the Germans in a huge counter-attack on 5 December, driving the enemy back some 200 miles. To date, the invasion of the Soviet Union had cost the Germans 210,000 killed and missing, and 620,000 wounded, more than a third of whom had become casualties since 1 October.
Originally, the planning for Barbarossa had called for the capture of Moscow within four months, but, despite substantial early gains, the Germans met with unexpected resistance from the Soviets. By September, when Moscow was relatively vulnerable to attack, Hitler ordered his forces to change course and head south and eliminate the Russian forces at Kiev and Leningrad. This diversion significantly delayed the push on Moscow and threatened any possibility of success in Barbarossa. In their slow-paced advance on the Soviet capital, the Germans were handicapped by the heavy, gluey mud that resulted from the incessant rains that had arrived, and by the thick forests around Moscow, in which only narrow trails existed which were easy enough for the Soviet defenders of the city to block. At the same time, the slow pace of the enemy enabled the Russian infantry to manoeuvre behind the German columns to lay mines and ambush the German supply vehicles.
An example of what befell the German forces in their approach to the Soviet capital occurred on 6 October as the 4th Panzer Division under command of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian ran into a Soviet ambush near Mtsensk. The Soviet 1st Guards Rifle Corps, commanded by Major-General D.D. Leliushenko, had appeared in order to block the advance of the 2nd Panzer Army. His force included two tank brigades and two airborne brigades. One of the tank brigades, under the command of Colonel M.E. Katukov, was equipped with new T-34 tanks and was hidden nearby in the forest as an advance guard of Germans passed. Suddenly, Leliushenko’s forces moved up to block the tanks and troops of the 4th Panzer Division as Katukov’s troops came around to ambush the German force from the sides. When the German Mark IV tanks then tried to break out of the trap by turning out from Katukov’s forces, they were stopped in brief counter-attacks. By day’s end, many of the 4th Panzer Division tanks had been destroyed.
When the chill of the Russian winter began to arrive in October, the Germans had not been provided with proper winter uniforms. More than 100,000 of them developed frostbite and other cold-weather health problems. Many of their vehicles were no match for the severe cold and developed cracks in their engine blocks. The tank crews were forced to light and maintain small fires under their vehicles to hold a minimum temperature in them. And the aircraft of the vaunted Luftwaffe were grounded for much of the time.
The Battle of Moscow was particularly significant in that it was the first occasion since the German Army began its programme of blitzkrieg victories in 1939 that it was forced into a retreat from which it would not recover the initiative.
Of all the major battles of the Second World War, Stalingrad is among the most important and decisive. By the summer of 1942, Hitler’s main goal for Barbarossa had become the Caucasus oilfields. He hoped to capture them, depriving the Russians of their primary fuel supply and securing an alternative oil source for Germany. To achieve this, the German 6th Army had been ordered to capture and occupy Stalingrad and, in so doing, isolate and neutralize this key enemy manufacturing and communications centre in southwestern Russia.
The battle for Stalingrad took place between 23 August 1942 and 2 February 1943. It was easily one of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, resulting in nearly two million casualties, both military and civilian, and nearly constant close-quarter combat.
The Soviet determination to defend Stalingrad was absolutely total and not to be questioned. Every Russian soldier was ordered “Not one step backwards” by Joseph Stalin. The battle was the major Soviet victory of the war and proved to be the turning point in the war with the Germans. Hitler himself sealed the fate of his Caucasus campaign in July when he diverted much of the army intended to occupy the oilfields, to the already futile struggle at Stalingrad. General Zhukov, meanwhile, had amassed a force of nearly a million men which attacked and encircled the German troops in a pincer movement on 19 November. The Germans ran out of food and ammunition and were freezing. In the battle, 70,000 German soldiers died and 91,000 became prisoners. Near the end of the fight, Hitler’s commander there, General Friedrich von Paulus, was asked by the Russians to surrender. He had been forbidden by Hitler to attempt to break out of the encirclement and now was urged by the Führer not to be taken alive. On 2 February, Paulus gave himself up to the Russians. The German advance in the south was halted and thereafter the Russians were virtually always on the offensive and on the move towards Berlin.
The Battle of Stalingrad began with a brief campaign of intensive bombing by the Luftwaffe that turned much of the city to rubble. No matter how much of the city came under control of the German Army, they were never able to completely overrun and destroy the remaining defenders who resisted the Germans determinedly in building-to-building fighting.
With the horrors of the winter of 1941-42 behind them, Hitler’s armies in the Soviet Union prepared for the spring / summer offensive that he was determined would be completed before the Americans, who had recently entered the war, could become really active in it. Stalin, meanwhile, was expecting the Germans’ main effort of the new year to be against Moscow once more. If the nature of the coming combat was to be primarily in large urban areas, the emphasis would be on small arms weaponry rather than on armoured and mechanized units, which would favour the Soviets who, at that stage, were still less capable in heavily mobile operations than the Germans.
Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List commanded German Army Group South and was chosen to take his forces in a dash through the steppes into the Caucasus to grab the oilfields there in the new offensive code-named Fall Blau, or Case Blue. The new offensive was scheduled to open in May 1942, but various delays caused it to be deferred until 28 June when Army Group South headed into southern Russia. They encountered little resistance from Soviet forces as they rolled eastward across the broad steppes region. The Soviets tried several times to establish new defensive lins, but were readily outflanked by the Germans. In early July, an enormous armoured traffic jam occurred when Hitler, flushed with the initial success of Fall Blau, assigned the 4th Panzer Army to join with Army Group South. The small road network in the region could not support the thousands of vehicles coming through and a week-long delay resulted as the various commanders struggled to free up the mess.
At the end of the month, the Germans had advanced east across the Don river and had left their supply depots west of the river. The German 6th Army had come within ten miles of Stalingrad as the 4th turned north to join in the assault on the city. Down south the effort of Army Group South (A) slowed significantly in its push towards the Caucasus when it greatly overextended its supply lines.
Once the Russians realized that the main object of the new German offensive was Stalingrad rather than Moscow, Stalin put Marshal Andrey Yeryomenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev in charge of planning the defence of Stalingrad. The 62nd Soviet Army was to be a key force in the defence of the city. It was newly formed and deployed across the Volga river which formed the eastern border of Stalingrad. Marshal Yeryomenko had just appointed Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov in command of the 62nd from 11 September 1942 and, when told of the role for his forces in the coming assault on the city, Chuikov said, “We will defend the city or die in the attempt.” His leadership in the defence would ultimately earn him one of the two Hero of the Soviet Union awards he would receive in his career.
The Russians knew that the Germans were coming to Stalingrad. They had ample warning and were able to load and ship nearly all of the grain, cattle, and railroad rolling stock of the city across the river to safety. The action, of course, depleted the food supplies of Stalingrad, which left the citizenry in dire need even before the enemy attack began. Determined to prevent the Germans from having the use of any buildings, farmhouses, and grain storage facilities, the Soviets followed a scorched-earth policy in the outlying areas, burning such sites whenever they were forced to retreat.
The first German action against the city itself took place in the early morning of 23 August. The Soviet leadership knew the bombing was coming, but resisted evacuating the citizens of Stalingrad because of urgently needed production output of the city’s factories for the war effort. One effect of this raid was the creation of a firestorm, similar in nature to that which one year later would result from combined and sustained attacks on the city Hamburg, Germany, by British and American bombers. In the Stalingrad raid, thousands of residents were killed.
For five days the Heinkel He 111s of Generaloberst Wolfram von Richthofen’s Luftflotte 4 rained bombs on the city, starting numerous fires and killing many civilians. Additionally, the effect of this bombing reduced much of the city to rubble. Production of T-34 tanks, however, continued at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, some of whose workers were fighting the fires. Tanks built at STF were manned by volunteer factory worker crews when shortages of manpower required. Often they were driven right from the assembly line to the fighting front line, some of them without paint and lacking certain equipment.
Prior to these raids, the Luftwaffe had conducted a series of bombing attacks to sink thirty-two Soviet ships on the Volga river, making the river unusable to Soviet shipping. Also destroyed in the attacks were the ferries and barges that had been used to move troops and civilians across the river.
The Soviet Air Force lost a considerable number of aircraft in the period between 23 and 31 August; the Luftwaffe having secured and maintained air supremacy over the Stalingrad area. The massive relocation of Soviet war production industry in 1941 to areas that were unreachable by the planes of the Luftwaffe, enabled the production of Soviet military aircraft in the second half of 1942 to reach 15,800. That production, together with the military aircraft being provided to the Soviets by Britain and, through the Lend-Lease programme, by the United States, would soon overwhelm the inventory of the Luftwaffe.
Late in August, Army Group South (B) got to the Volga north of Stalingrad. The Germans maintained a nearly constant bombing by aircraft and shelling by artillery of the river to hamper or prevent vital resupply crossings by the Soviets. In a major attack by Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers against Soviet infantry and tank divisions trying for a breakthrough near factories, fortyone Soviet tanks were destroyed.
The fierce, savage fighting in the urban area gave rise to a clever new tactic by General Chuikov, called “hugging the Germans.” In a counter to the Germans own familiar tactics of combined-arms teams, close cooperation between the armoured units, infantry, engineers, artillery and ground-attack aircraft, the Soviet commanders tried to always keep the front lines as close to the German positions as possible. This forced the German infantry to either fight on their own or risk casualties from their own support fire. It also tended to neutralize the Luftwaffe’s close air support and weakened the supporting artillery fire.
The intense street-fighting combat in the city led to the establishment of Soviet strongpoints throughout the residential and business neighbourhoods, from office blocks to high-rise apartment buildings, basements, penthouses, corner offices and residences, factories, and warehouses. All such locations were furnished with mortars, machine-guns, anti-tank rifles, barbed wire and submachine guns. They served as hideouts for the hundreds of snipers holed up against the enemy and helped the locals to retain the bits of ground they took. The many ruined buildings were turned into ideal nests for snipers, some of whom were expert in the business of killing. One such was Vasily Zaytsev, who was credited with 225 confirmed kills in the battle. As the tutor and mentor of more than thirty “students”, Zaytsev groomed them to the extent that, by the end of the campaign for the city, they had accounted for more than 3,000 sniper kills of German soldiers.
One position of special note was the unusual hill known as Mamayev Kurgan, overlooking the city. The hill was taken and lost many times by both sides. As high ground, it provided an excellent vantage point and firing position, and was always a high-priority objective for both Soviet and German forces. And in an action to retake Mamayev Kurgan, nearly one-third of the Soviet 13th Guards Rifle Division soldiers were killed in the first twenty-four hours. Of the original 10,000 men in the division, only 320 survived the battle for Stalingrad.
Another site of great notoriety throughout the battle and since is a former apartment building that was turned into a virtually impenetrable fortress by the Soviet platoon leader Sergeant Yakov Pavlov. Located near an important square, the building, which became commonly known as Pavlov’s House, was surrounded with a minefield set up by the men of Pavlov’s platoon, who established key firing positions for their machine-guns at the windows. The members of the platoon had to hold out in the building for two months without relief or reinforcements. Through the course of the lengthy battle for the city, the bodies of German soldiers kept accumulating, forcing the men of the Pavlov platoon to run out and shove them out of the way in order to keep their firing lines across the square clear. For his amazing achievements in the battle, Sergeant Pavlov, too, was honoured with the award of Hero of the Soviet Union.
From the start of the battle for Stalingrad, some 75,000 local women and girls who had completed military or medical training would serve in various capacities. Some would staff the hundreds of anti-aircraft gun batteries which were used against the German tanks, as well as the planes of the Luftwaffe. Those with medical training were not only pressed into service treating the thousands of wounded troops; they were frequently required to come under fire when retrieving the wounded from the vivid scenes of the fighting. Those women with technical training, wireless and telephone operators and others, were exposed to combat fire in the command posts where they worked and suffered many casualties there. A great many Soviet women and girls, while not infantry-trained, served in infantry units as mortar operators, machine-gunners, and scouts, and many were snipers. The Soviet Air Force organized three entirely female air regiments that flew in the Stalingrad campaign, and a number of women drove or were a part of tank crews, three of them receiving the award of Hero of the Soviet Union as tank drivers.
As the battle ground on, with both sides giving and taking ground, fighting and fighting again for the same small gains, the Germans began moving up their heaviest artillery pieces, among them the huge 800mm railroad gun they called Dora. Still, they did not try to mount a force to cross the Volga, which let the Soviets establish many effective artillery battery positions along the east side of the river from which they could readily bombard the German positions. As the shells of both sides continued to rain down on the city, and enormous mounds of rubble accumulated everywhere to a height of eight to ten meters, much of the area became virtually impossible for the operation of the German tanks. The battle wore on and both the Soviet and German leaders perceived Stalingrad as symbolically important, more so perhaps, than her actual strategic value. Stalin had the strategic reserves of the Red Army brought into the lower Volga region and had thousands of aircraft flown from all over the Soviet Union to the Stalingrad area.
By October, the German Air Force had dramatically increased its presence and activities in the Stalingrad area. On the 5th, the Stuka dive-bombers of Luftflotte 4 flew 900 sorties targetting the crucial Soviet positions at the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Factory complex, completely destroying several Soviet infantry regiments there. The Stukas dropped 540 tons of bombs on the Volga west bank positions of the Soviets on the 14th of the month, as units of German infantry encircled the three factories. The Stukas then turned their attention to eliminating the Soviet artillery positions on the eastern bank of the river before returning to the job of attacking enemy reinforcement and supply shipping on the river. The ships were being used in support of the Soviet 62nd Army which was being held to a standstill there by the German forces. What remained of the 62nd, some 47,000 men and only nineteen tanks, was confined to a narrow 1,000-yard strip along the west bank of the river. Though under the additional intense bombardment of 1,200 Stuka sorties, the Soviets somehow prevented the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army from capturing the west bank.
While the Luftwaffe continued to hold air superiority in the skies over Stalingrad, it had lost nearly half of its aircraft in the more than 20,000 sorties it had flown by the end of October, with more than half of its bomber force destroyed. Eighty percent of the entire German Air Force was committed to action on the Eastern Front. Despite the German air superiority there, the Luftwaffe was unable to halt or slow the rapid growth of the Soviet Air Force to this point. The Soviets would soon outnumber the Germans in the air. Qualitatively, however, for now, the Soviet aircraft, training and tactics were still largely inferior to that of the Germans and they had sustained huge losses against the Germans, to the extent that they were restricted to night operations which were achieving relatively little.
But with November came ever increasing challenges for the German Air Force. The great Allied invasion in North Africa starting on the 8th suddenly required the withdrawal of several important units of Luftflotte 4 to combat the landings. The German Air Force was becoming badly overstretched across Europe and the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Soviets were starting to receive enormous shipments of Lend-Lease aid from the Americans— 230,000 tons of aviation gas, 450,000 tons of steel, 45,000 tons of explosives, 11,000 Jeeps, 60,000 trucks, and two million pairs of boots.
The winter cold set in in November, freezing the Volga and preventing further use of the river for the resupply of the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad. Finally, following three months of agonizingly slow advance, the Germans moved to the river banks and managed to take ninety percent of the the ruined city. The action shoved the Soviet defenders into two tight pockets of resistance. Still, they fought on as fiercely as before, within the factory complex area and on the sides of the Mamayev Kurgan hill, from the Dzerzhinskiy Tractor Factory, from the Barrikady gun factory, and from the Red October Steel Factory. The Soviets were well aware of the condition of many of the German troops in the treacherous winter that was building in intensity and severity daily. They knew that the Germans were poorly prepared to cope with extreme and unrelenting offensive operations in winter as they launched into an unprecedented winter campaign on 19 November, fielding fifteen armies on several fronts.
With the coming of the Russian winter and the Soviet winter offensive campaign, the exhausted, war-weary and ill-equipped Germans were stymied in Stalingrad, effectively halted by the unbelievably stubborn resistance of the Red Army defenders, together with the extreme weather.
Early in their new winter offensive, the Soviets identified and exploited a major weakness in the enemy force. Soviet generals Alexsander Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, who were handling the strategic military planning for the Stalingrad battle, assembled huge army forces in the steppes areas north and south of the city. The generals were aware that the German northern flank was especially vulnerable as it was defended largely by Romanian and Hungarian units with inferior equipment, morale and leadership problems. The Soviet generals planned to crash through the weakly-defended German flank and encircle the German forces within Stalingrad. Soon, in that city, the Germans would experience one of their greatest defeats of the entire war.
Approximately 250,000 German and Axis soldiers were effectively surrounded in the city. The Soviet offensive ended the German hopes for taking Stalingrad. By the third week of January, the German forces in the city were starving and nearly out of ammunition, their resupply efforts having largely failed. In the belief, though, that any Germans who surrendered would be executed by the Soviets, most of the beleaguered German troops continued to resist. The Germans had few tanks left within the city and those that remained were only usable as pillboxes.
Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich von Paulus was in command of the German 6th Army’s assault on Stalingrad as his forces were encircled and defeated in the massive Soviet counter-attack. The Soviets sent a small envoy to Paulus with an offer: If Paulus would surrender within twenty-four hours, the Soviets would guarantee the safety of all prisoners, medical care for the sick and wounded, normal food rations, and repatriation to any country after the war. Paulus had been ordered by Hitler not to surrender and he did not respond to the Soviet offer.
On 22 January Paulus requested that he be allowed to surrender in order to save the lives of his troops. Hitler denied the request, telegraphing the 6th Army that it had “made an historic contribution to the greatest struggle in German history and that it should stand fast, to the last soldier and the last bullet.” As no German Field Marshal had ever been taken prisoner, Hitler assumed that Paulus would either fight on or take his own life. As Soviet forces closed in on Paulus’ headquarters in the ruined GUM department store building the next day, the German commander surrendered, and on 2 February the remains of the starving, demoralized Axis forces in Stalingrad surrendered.
Nearly 110,000 Germans became prisoners of the Soviets at Stalingrad. Of these, fewer than 6,000 ever returned. Of the others, the causes of death were many; wounds, cold, starvation, overwork, malnutrition, mistreatment, typhus and other diseases. Slightly less than 1,300,000 Red Army soldiers were casualties (killed, wounded, captured or missing) in the campaign for Stalingrad.
Today a massive monument, The Motherland Calls, overlooks the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Other war memorials abound in the city including the heavily damaged remains of the buildings left just as they were at the end of the battle, as well as the old apartment building called Pavlov’s House where a small group of Red Army soldiers held out for two months until they were finally relieved.