The Battle of Stalingrad
by Staff WriterThe Battle of Stalingrad was a defining moment in World War 2. Battle of Stalingrad enabled the Russians to surround the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad, Russia. The battle was considered to be the most brutal and cruel battle in history.
In the years leading up to World War II, Joachim Von Ribbentrop was central to Nazi diplomacy, negotiating the Anti-COM intern and Axis Pacts and in 1938, negotiating the Munich Agreement, which ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany. In 1939, Ribbentrop negotiated the Nazi Soviet Non-Aggression Pact securing the cooperation of the Russians in the dismemberment of Poland. From that point on however, Ribbentrop’s influence declined steadily as diplomacy was overtaken by the war. At the end of the war, he was tried at Nuremberg and hanged as a war criminal. In prison during the purges of 1938, Marshal Rokossovsky was amongst those released and reinstated when it became clear that the Red Army would need every able commander it could get. After exemplary service commanding the winter troops in the Battle of Moscow, Rokossovsky was transferred to command the Don Front during the World War 2 Battle of Stalingrad.
On the west bank of the Volga stood the great Soviet city of Stalingrad. It was here in Stalin’s city that the German armies were to suffer their first great disaster of the World War II. The Russian forces falling back from the Don had been ordered to stand fast at Stalingrad, to hold it or to die in the attempt. While the Luftwaffe blasted the city from the air, the infantry and Panzer units pressed eastwards towards their nemesis in the cauldron that would become Stalingrad. By the end of August, the Germans had reached the Volga on either side of Stalingrad and began fighting their way into the suburbs. In mid September, the Germans began the diminution of the city itself.
Master artillery along the perimeter began a prolonged and intensive bombardment, hurling round after round of high explosive into an already shattered city. Under the rumble of the guns, the Sixth Army’s infantry supported by the tanks of the Fourth Panzer army began advancing into Stalingrad from the west and south. Their aim was to seize the heart of the city gaining control of the high ground overlooking the Volga, securing Stalingrad from any hope of relief from the east. For three days, the Sixth Army cut its way through Stalingrad towards the river forcing the Russian defenders back to shorter and shorter lines. The German advance was becoming bogged down in murderous urban warfare. Streets had to be cleared house by house, room by room. Strong points and strategic heights became the focus of fighting of unexampled cruelty, often changing hands several times.
For the Russians, there was to be no retreat over the Volga. The few boats that managed the crossing from the east bringing ammunition and reinforcements took back only the most severely wounded. For the Germans, the battle at Stalingrad was becoming the center of a great trap. The more resources they threw into its capture, the more they exposed their flanks. By mid November, ninety percent of Stalingrad had been captured and the river crossings brought under artillery and machine gun fire. Yet, the Russians though starved of food and ammunition and pressed into a tiny bridgehead on the west bank still grimly fought on. While these desperate battles ranged throughout the crated and ruined shell of Stalingrad, the Russians were gathering forces for a counteroffensive against the increasingly depleted flanks of the German front.
On November 19, 1942 the German and Romanian forces on either side of Stalingrad were awoken by the thunder of almost fourteen thousand heavy guns and the whine of innumerable rockets. Within days, the Russians had punched aside the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies driving in two great concentric spearheads deep into the rear of Sixth Army. On November 23, the Soviet pincers met near the village of Sovietsky, forty miles to the west of Stalingrad closing the trap on Sixth Army and part of the Fourth Panzer Army. The extent of the Soviet breakthrough plunged the German command into chaos. Sixth Army, one of the Wehrmacht’s finest was now fighting on all sides. In the city itself, the Russian defenders fought with great force. The winter would soon lock the Volga solid linking them with the east bank and the Russian forces investing Sixth Army. In all, a quarter of a million German and Romanian troops were trapped in the Stalingrad pocket ordered to hold fast and promised seven hundred tons of supplies a day, a figure well beyond the capabilities of the Luftwaffe.
The German airlift to Sixth Army was a disaster from the start. On the best days a little over a hundred tons a day were brought into Stalingrad, on many none at all. Throughout December and January, the Soviet encirclement tightened steadily. On January 21, 1943 the Russians over ran the only remaining serviceable airfield in German hands severing the last feeble link between Sixth Army and the outside world. By the end of the month, the Soviet forces of the encirclement had linked up with those holding the Volga bridgehead bisecting the Stalingrad pocket into two separate and isolated enclaves. On January 31, with the Russians blockading his head quarters, Field Marshal Von Paulus ordered the surrender of the remaining German and Romanian forces in the Southern enclave. He had been a Field Marshal for only one day, promoted by Hitler and ordered to hold out to the last man. By surrender, Von Paulus had hoped to put an end to the slaughter and save the starving and exhausted remnants of his army from almost certain annihilation.
Two days later with the admission of defeat by the Germans in the northern enclave, the battle at Stalingrad came to an end. For ten terrible weeks, Sixth Army, the army that had destroyed the Balkans and the Ukraine had fought a desperate but inevitably hopeless last stand. The sacrifice of Sixth Army enabled the Germans to stabilize the front and evacuate the caucuses and prevent an even greater disaster of arms.
In the bitter battles, in the autumn and winter of 1942 as many as two million men had lost their lives in the Stalingrad battle; Russians, Germans, Romanians and Italians. In Stalingrad itself, 140,000 Axis soldiers had died, often painfully of frostbite, starvation and untreated wounds. By their own permission, the Russians had taken more than 90,000 prisoners at Stalingrad. The triumph at Stalingrad marked the start of the Soviet Union’s liberation.
