STALINGRAD 1942-43

Stalingrad changed the face of World War II. In a cataclysmic strunggle,
the wehrmacht experienced its first major army-sized defeat and the strategic advantage on the Eastern Front began to shift to the Red army.
As the crushing Russian winter of run its course, Adolf Hitler was faced
with a critical strategic decision.

His Barbarossa campaign to smash the soviet union, which began in June 1941, had stalled before Moscow and was even put into temporary retreat by a Soviet counteroffensive. Only the late spring would return the Wehrmacht to mobility and Hitler decided to apply this mobility in a new direction. Instead of renewing the Moscow offensive, much as the Soviets expected, Hitler ordered Operation Blue- a massive offensive by this Army Group South through the Ukraine and into the Crimea toward the Caucasus. The ultimate objective was to capture the Soviet oilfields of the Caucasus, oilfields upon which Germany relied to power its war machine.

Army group south was divined into Army Groups A and B, and the plan was for both groups to converge on the city of Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga, at which point Army Group B would remain on the Don and Volga rivers to provide flank protection for Army Group as assault into the Caucasus. with the Wehrmacht operations of the previous spring/summer, the Germans made good headway, and by mid-July the sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus- the main component of Army Group B - was closing in on Stalingrad. On 23 July, Hitler gave the order to take the city itself. General Hermann Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army was deployed south of Stalingrad to assist in the assault. On the same day, Stalin issued his own directive stating the Stalingrad would be defended to the last. Soviet forces in the newly designated Stalingrad Front consisted of the  Sixty-second, Sixy-Third and Sixty-Fourth Armies. Although Stalingrad was an important industrial center, the fact that it bore Stalin's name gave the Soviet leader a definite psychological imperative to see that it did not fall.

STREET BATTLEThe prelude to fighting within the city was a heavy air bombardment which reduced much of the city torubble and killed more that 30,000 people. By 12 September, German troops were already pushing into the city's suburbs, where the faced a defense of almost psychotic vigour from the troops of Sixty-Second Army within the city. commander in contrast to the urbane Paulus, had a numerical disadvantage within the city compared to the Germans. Yet the battle for Stalingrad was to be pure street fighting, a form of warfare depriving the Germans of the mobility that was their accustomed route to success in battle. Moreover, Chuikov deliberately pushed his troops into extreme close-quarters battle, ordering them to 'hug' the German troops and thus limit enemy use of air bombardment and heavy artillery fire, both of which would risk the danger of 'friendly fire' casualties. The effect was that every building, and every room in every building, became a battleground, the Germans paying for each yard with blood.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END
The German defeat at Stalingrad tilted the balance of the war both strategically and psychologically, it put paid to Operation Blue and began, in effect, the German retreat the would end in Berlin in 1945. Psychologically it gave the Soviets an enormous boost of confidence and showed that they could compete with the Germans on both tactical and strategic levels. For the Germans, it was an undeniable sign that they could be defeated - the glory days of were now forgotten.