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Russian generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky organized Russian troops in the mountains to the north and west of the city. From there, they launched a counterattack, famously known as Operation Uranus. Although they again sustained significant losses, Russian forces were able to form what in essence was a defensive ring around the city by late November , trapping the nearly , German and Axis troops in the 6th Army.
This effort became the subject of a propaganda film produced after the war, The Battle of Stalingrad. With the Russian blockade limiting access to supplies, German forces trapped in Stalingrad slowly starved. The Russians would seize upon the resulting weakness during the cold, harsh winter months that followed.
They began consolidating their positions around Stalingrad, choking off the German forces from vital supplies and essentially surrounding them in an ever-tightening noose. Thanks to Russian gains in nearby fighting, including in Rostov-on-Don, miles from Stalingrad, the Axis forces — mostly Germans and Italians — were stretched thin.
Through Operation Little Saturn, the Russians began to break the lines of mostly Italian forces to the west of the city. At this point, German generals abandoned all efforts to relieve their beleaguered forces trapped in Stalingrad.
Still, Hitler refused to surrender even as his men slowly starved and ran out of ammunition. By February , Russian troops had retaken Stalingrad and captured nearly , German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March. Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation.
The loss at Stalingrad was the first failure of the war to be publicly acknowledged by Hitler. In the end, many historians believe the Battle at Stalingrad marked a major turning point in the conflict. It was the beginning of the march toward victory for the Allied forces of Russia, Britain, France and the United States.
In February , Russians gathered in what is now known as Volgograd to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of the battle that had ravaged their city. Barnes, T. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler predicted a quick victory, but after initial success, the brutal campaign dragged on and eventually failed due to strategic blunders From July 10 through October 31, , pilots and support crews on both sides took to the On August 23, —shortly before World War II broke out in Europe—enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the Dunkirk is a small town on the coast of France that was the scene of a massive military campaign during World War II.
Marines stormed the beaches of the strategically significant Japanese island of Saipan, with a goal of gaining a crucial air base from which the U. At the start of the war we reckoned with about enemy divisions. Now we have already counted … When a dozen have been smashed, then the Russian puts up another dozen. But as the weather grew bitterly cold, the German offensive ground to a halt, and was then pushed back by a Soviet counteroffensive.
The front line froze in place some two hundred kilometers west of Moscow — and kilometers east of Berlin. A German reconnaissance photo of Stalingrad after bombing from the air in October Bundesarchiv. During the bitter winter months, the OKH began planning for a renewed counteroffensive in the spring, hoping to achieve the decisive victory that had evaded them in Thus was born Operation Blue, an attack to seize the oil fields of the Caucasus, and then drive on to the Volga.
Launched in June , it caught the Red Army off-guard, as they had expected a renewed push towards Moscow. Within two weeks, the Wehrmacht advanced more than miles.
Hitler, increasingly directing military operations in Berlin, decided to shift his offensive in early August. For both symbolic and strategic reasons, he ordered the Sixth Army under General Friedrich von Paulus to advance towards the city of Stalingrad.
By August 23, the Germans were in the suburbs, where fighting turned ferocious. Bombed into rubble by German aircraft and artillery, the city became impassable to tanks and ideal terrain for defenders. The Stalingrad Flour Mill: the mill, near the waterfront, was one of the few buildings to remain relatively intact throughout the battle. It was preserved as a memorial and part of the Battle of Stalingrad Museum after the war. This meant a horrific price for the Soviet defenders within the city of Stalingrad.
In September, Stalin sent General Vasily Chuikov to take command of the embattled survivors of the 62 nd Army in the city itself. They were tenaciously clinging to rubble on the west bank of the Volga, with only a few hundred meters between its front lines and the river to its back. Three of my deputies had fled… But the main thing was that we had no dependable combat units, and we needed to hold out for three or four days…We immediately began to take the harshest possible actions against cowardice.
On the 14 th I shot the commander and commissar of one regiment, and a short while later, I shot two brigade commanders and their commissars. This caught everyone off guard. We made sure news of this got to the men. Despite his brutality, Chuikov earned the respect of his soldiers, taking the same risks they did. He was buried alive twice by German bombardments, and kept his headquarters in the city, less than two hundred meters from the German front line.
By November, the OKH had committed 1. As the fighting reached its fevered peak in the city itself, Generals Alexander Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov at Stavka the Red Army High Command came up with a master stroke to counter the enormous pressure on the city. They proposed a massive double encirclement of the entire German Sixth Army. Stalin approved their plan — Operation Uranus — on November The Frontlines at Stalingrad from the beginning of Operation Uranus to the end of the battle.
On the snowy, foggy morning of November 19, the Soviets struck. Within four days, they had encircled , Axis soldiers, trapped in a frozen wasteland in and around Stalingrad.
German attempts to break into the pocket failed. Over the next three months, the Red Army began to squeeze the life out of them.
By December, when German airlifts ceased, life in the kessel became a living hell. Soviets defend a position in Stalingrad, As rations reached zero, sentries froze to death on guard duty.
A typhus epidemic ravaged the survivors. Rumors of cannibalism grew increasingly frequent. As conditions became unbearable, Hitler ordered his men to fight to the last. In an effort to encourage his commanding general, he made Paulus a field marshal on January 30; as no German field marshal had ever surrendered, Hitler hoped Paulus would kill himself rather than be captured.
Instead, on January 31, , Paulus surrendered the 91, skeletal German soldiers still left under his command; some would fight on until February 2. Only 6 percent would survive Soviet captivity. The Germans would launch one more major offensive — Kursk — in July , but it failed.
Stalingrad marked the shift of initiative to the Red Army on the Eastern Front. There were no more decisive victories for the Wehrmacht in the east.
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