The 1942-43 Volga battle that destroyed the German 6th Army and turned the European war on the Eastern Front. The Battle of Stalingrad ran from the German 6th Army's approach and the 23 August 1942 air raid to Field Marshal Paulus's surrender on 2 February 1943. Hitler had made the city that bore Stalin's name a political object; Stalin forbade retreat with Order No. 227 ("Not one step back").
Street fighting in the ruins, the factory district, and Mamayev Kurgan produced casualty totals in a band of about 1.7-2 million killed, wounded and captured on both sides -- among the costliest single battles ever recorded. The Soviet encirclement (Operation Uranus, 19 November 1942) trapped the 6th Army when the Romanian and Italian flanks collapsed.
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The 1942-43 Volga battle that destroyed the German 6th Army and turned the European war on the Eastern Front. The Battle of Stalingrad ran from the German 6th Army's approach and the 23 August 1942 air raid to Field Marshal Paulus's surrender on 2 February 1943. Hitler had made the city that bore Stalin's name a political object; Stalin forbade retreat with Order No. 227 ("Not one step back").
Street fighting in the ruins, the factory district, and Mamayev Kurgan produced casualty totals in a band of about 1.7-2 million killed, wounded and captured on both sides -- among the costliest single battles ever recorded. The Soviet encirclement (Operation Uranus, 19 November 1942) trapped the 6th Army when the Romanian and Italian flanks collapsed.
Relief (Winter Storm) failed. The airlift could not supply a pocket. The surrender of a German field army on the Volga ended the myth of unbroken Wehrmacht success in the east and became the Soviet -- and later Russian -- patriotic hinge, taught in English as the Eastern Front's turning point beside Midway and El Alamein.
Case Blue (1942) aimed at oil and the Caucasus. The city on the river was a transport hinge and a name. Hitler and Stalin both refused to treat it as optional. The 19 November attack hit the weaker allied armies on the flanks, not the German urban spearhead. Within days the pocket closed.
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