Uranus trapped a German army on the Volga’s ruined shore
Stalingrad (now Volgograd) became the Eastern Front’s hinge in 1942–43: an industrial Volga hub Germany needed on the road to Caucasus oil. From July clashes to August bombing, then street fighting, the fight grew into one of the war’s largest before a Soviet encirclement named Uranus.
By spring 1942 Germany held Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states despite Operation Barbarossa's failure to knock out the Soviet Union in one campaign, and Hitler chose the south for his summer push. Stalingrad, on the Volga, was one of the largest Soviet industrial centres and a key river crossroads. Germany's fuel was running low after a year of fighting, so it needed the Caucasus oil fields; holding the city would guard that route and cut Soviet traffic on the river. The name of Stalin himself added symbolic weight.
German forces first met the Red Army's Stalingrad Front on the outer approaches on 17 July. The main assault came on 23 August, led by the 6th Army with elements of the 4th Panzer Army, as Luftwaffe bombing reduced much of the city to rubble. The fighting turned into house-to-house combat that swelled as both sides fed in reinforcements. By mid-November the Germans had, at heavy cost, pressed the defenders into thin strips on the Volga's west bank. Then winter arrived, with temperatures often tens of degrees below freezing, and the struggle sank into trench warfare.
On 19 November the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, a pincer aimed at the Romanian armies guarding the 6th Army's flanks. Both flanks collapsed and the 6th Army was surrounded. Hitler, directing the war daily from the Wolf's Lair, forbade a breakout and tried instead to supply the pocket by air and relieve it from outside, but the Soviets kept the airlift from delivering enough. After two more months of combat, out of food and ammunition, the 6th Army surrendered on 2 February 1943, the first of Hitler's field armies to do so.
Historians rank Stalingrad as the largest and deadliest urban battle ever fought and the deadliest battle of the Second World War, with heavy civilian losses from bombing. It ended Germany's 1942 offensive, shattered the 6th Army, badly mauled the 4th Panzer Army and routed Army Group B, handing the initiative in the east to the Soviet Union. Russia now marks the victory among its Days of Military Honour.
Source: Battle of Stalingrad
