THE MOST DECISIVE WAR OF WORLD WAR TWO THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD
I picked the battle of Stalingrad
as my history project because I covered it when studying for my Junior Cert and
I really enjoyed studying it as it was interesting. It was the biggest turning
point in the war and when Germany
really started to go downhill.
To write a
brief outline of the start of the war and the invasion of Russia. To look briefly at the
invasion of Russia
in 1941. To look at the background of Stalingrad.
To write in detail of what happened through out the battle. To evaluate the
consequences and importance of the battle.
In my senior cycle of school I was told by my history
teacher about the project. Then he told us to go home and pick a topic that we
would like to do and come back with the idea. I firstly wanted to do the
invasion of Russia but I
couldn’t because it was too big of a project, so I took a major battle from it
and I choose the battle of Stalingrad. We were
also told to get at least two books and I got four
Operation Barbarossa 1941
Robert Kirchubel
=illustrated by Howard Gerrard
Stalingrad 1942
Peter
Anhill =illustrated by Peter Dennis
Days that changed the world
Hywell
Williams
Antony Beevor =Stalingrad
Then I checked the internet on these websites =
http://zhukov.mitsi.com/stalingrad.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/battle.of.stalingrad
finally I typed up my plan using Microsoft word and
then printed it out to give to my
teacher, he checked it to see if any changes were necessary.
A brief history of the most important battle of world
war two.
At 5:30 am, on the 22 June 1941 on what was called “a
perfect summers morning” Germany invaded the Soviet
Union. Part of the Germany
plan was to attack where the Russians least expected. This was “history’s
largest invasion force consisting of three million men” Their
forces were spread out along a 3,000 km line from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea. There forces consisted of three army groups,
in the north…it was commanded by Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, in the middle…it
was commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von bock, and in the south… it was
commanded by Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt. They planned to take out all of
Soviet opposition in swift advances on Leningrad,
Moscow, and Kiev. At this point Hitler had 183 divisions
to fight, while the Soviets faced 170 divisions.
This
invasion by the Germans was a big gamble as they were already at war with an
undefeated Great Britain.
Russia
at the same time had an ruthless climate, a vast area, and had a lot of
manpower. Hitler showed vague feelings on Operation Barbarossa. Hitler said at
this time to one of his generals “We have only to kick in the door and the
whole rotten structure will come crashing down” However
shortly after he stated “At the beginning of each campaign one pushes a door
into a dark, unseen room. One can never know what is hiding inside”
“By mid-July, the Red Army was in
desperate position” they had
massive amounts of out of date equipment, and lacked defensive positions. The
Russian frontier was quickly overtaken in many places. By 16 July, 1941, the Germans had
captured Smolensk, which was less than 250 miles
from Moscow,
and the army centre group alone had captured about 600,000 men and 5,000 tanks. By the end of
July the Germans controlled an area more than twice the size of France.
However the decisive battle of the Russian invasion was to begin in 1942 in the
city known as Stalingrad.
By 1942
Hitler planned to concentrate on the southern part of the USSR aiming to get Caucasus
oil which both sides needed for mobility. The battle of Stalingrad
took place between August
21, 1942 and February
2, 1943. Its considered as the turning point in the war were the
Germans really started to loose.1.5 million troops died fighting in this battle
showing how brutal it really was.
On August 23, 1942
at six o clock, one thousand airplanes began to bomb the city. Stalingrad had a population of 600,000 people, with many
wooden buildings, gas and fuel tanks and the resulting fires killed 40,000 civilians.
Also on the
same day the Wehrmacht tanks reached the Volga River.
At this time, the Soviet 62nd army was not in the city yet, and the
first attacks were met by one Soviet division, some NKVD troops and some
workers from the city tractor factory.
When the Germans troops stepped into Stalingrad,
they could see nothing but ruins. In all these ruins people were still alive and
surrender never entered their mind. Thousands of lesser battles erupted all
over the streets of what was once a city. The Wehrmacht met their toughest challenge yet in the
ruins, and from here Stalingrad was known as
one of the Germans army’s worst experiences of world war two.
“We saw
drunken Germans jumping down from their trucks, playing mouth organs, shouting
like madmen and dancing on the pavements” This is a quote written by Vasily
chuikov, the Russian commander. This quote shows how the German army thought they
had the battle won but really its only beginning. Hitler also believed victory was imminent as
Napoleon did in 1812.General Chuikov the commander of Soviet 62nd
army, used every last reserve.
But the
Russian troops were still out numbered and could not stop the Germans advancing
on. To the end of November the Wehrmacht were cutting through Stalingrad,
taking out the 62nd army on the way. The Red Army was holding out
mainly over the Mamaev Mound, this hill changed hands at least 8 times.
“Pavlov’s house” was a house defended by a single platoon. It’s known as
Pavlov’s house because Sergeant Pavlov led the men when defending this house. This
became a symbol of determination of Russians to hold the city no matter what.
With the house surrounded by Germans, Pavlov’s soldiers were held out until
relief came. This attack lasted fifty nine days and afterwards “Pavlov was,
made a Hero of the Soviet Union”
The fighting never stopped. With all the
equipment and technology involved, there was close hand to hand battles all
over Stalingrad. The Russians practiced night
attacks on the isolated German units. German soldiers who fought on the eastern
front said how Russians found some inspiration in close combat, and in very
desperate situations they fought with some crazy passion. Stalingrad
definitely seemed to be a desperate situation for Russians who were surrounded
and outnumbered in ruins of what used to be a city.
In
autumn the Soviet General’s Aleksandr Vasilyevskiy and Georgy Zhukov were
responsible for strategic planning in the Stalingrad
area. The Germans northern flank was vulnerable, as it was defended by Italian,
Hungarian, and Romanian units that suffered from lesser training, equipment, and
morale. This weakness was exploited by the Soviets, who preferred to make their
breakthroughs against non German troops whenever that was possible. The plan
was to keep pinning the Germans down in the city, then push through the
overstretched and weakly defended German flanks and surround the Germans inside
Stalingrad. During the preparations for the
attack Marshal Zhukov personally visited the front. The operation was code
named “Uranus” and launched in combination with Operation Mars, which was
directed at army group centre. The plan was similar to Zhukovs victory at
Khalkin Gol three years before, where he had destroyed the 23rd
division of the Japanese army.
On
November 19th, the red army unleashed Uranus. The attacking Soviet units
under the command of gen. Nikolay Vatutin consisted of three complete armies,
the 1st guard’s army, 5th tank army, and 21st
army group. The preparations for the
attack could be heard by the Romanians, who continued to push for
reinforcements, only that to be refused again. Outnumbered and poorly equipped,
the Romanian third army, which held the northern flank of German sixth army,
was shattered. On the 20th of November a second Soviet attack was
launched to the south of Stalingrad, against
places held by the Romanian 4th corps. The Romanians were mainly
made up of infantry which didn’t last as they collapsed almost straight away.
Soviet forces raced west in a pincer movement , and met two days later near the
town of Kalach, sealing the ring around Stalingrad. The Russians later
reconstructed the link up for use of propaganda.
Hitler
declared in a public speech in Berlin
that the German army would never leave the city. At a meeting, German army chiefs
pushed for a quick breakout to a new line on the west of the Don. Hitler was at
his Bavarian retreat of Obersalzberg in Berchtsgaden with goring the head of
Luftwaffe. Goring said that the Luftwaffe could supply the Sixth army with an
“air bridge”. This would allow the Germans in the city to fight on while a
relief force was assembled.
The head of the fourth air fleet, Wolfram
Von Richthofen, tried in vain to overturn this decision without success. The Sixth
army would be supplied by air. The Sixth army was the largest unit of this type
in the world, almost twice as large as a regular German army. Also trapped in
the pocket was a corps of the Fourth Panzer Army. It should have been clear
that supplying the pocket by air was
impossible, and the maximum tons they could deliver a day was 117.5 which was
less than the 800. To supplement the limited numbers of junkers transports,
bomber units equipped with aircraft wholly inadequate for the role, were
pressed into service. Hitler backed Goring’s plan and reiterated his order of
“no surrender” to his trapped armies.
The
air supply mission failed. Bad weather conditions, technical failures and heavy
Soviet anti aircraft fire led to the loss of 488 German transport aircrafts.
The Luftwaffe failed to achieve even the maximum supply capacity
of 117 tons that it was capable of. An average of 94 tons of supplies per day
was delivered to the trapped German Army. Often useless supplies arrived. In on
case an aircraft arrived with 20 tons of Vodka and summer uniforms, completely
useless in their current situation the transport aircraft that did
land safely were used to evacuate sick or wounded men. (42,000 were evacuated
in all).
The Sixth Army slowly starved.
Pilots were shocked to find the troops assigned to offloading the planes too
exhausted and hungry to unload food. General Zeitzler, moved by the troops'
plight at Stalingrad, began to limit himself
to their slim rations at meal times. After a few weeks of such a diet he'd grown
so thin that Hitler, annoyed, personally ordered him to start eating regular
meals again
The expense to the transportgruppen was
heavy. Some 266 Junkers Ju 52s were destroyed, one-third of the fleets strength
on the Soviet-German front. The He 111 gruppen lost 165 aircraft in
transport operations. Other losses included 42 Junkers Ju 86s, nine Fw 200
"Condors", five He 177 bombers and a single Ju 290. The Luftwaffe
also lost close to 1,000 highly experienced bomber crew personnel.
So heavy were the Luftwaffe's
losses that four of Luftflotte 4s transport units (KGrzbV 700, KGrzbV
900, I./KGrzbV 1 and II./KGzbV 1) were "formally dissolved".
Soviet forces consolidated their
positions around Stalingrad, and fierce
fighting to minimize the pocket began. An attack by a German battlegroup formed
to relieve the trapped armies from the South, Operation Wintergewitter (“Operation
Winter Thunderstorm”) was successfully fended off by the Soviets in December.
The full force of the harsh Russian winter set in. The Volga
froze solid, allowing the Soviets to supply their forces in the city more
easily. The trapped Germans rapidly ran out of heating fuel and medical
supplies, and thousands started dying of frostbite, malnutrition and disease.
On December 16, the Soviets
launched a second offensive, Operation Saturn, which attempted to punch through
the Axis army on the Don and take Rostov.
If successful, this offensive would
have trapped the remainder of Army Group South, one third of the entire German
Army in Russia, in the Caucasus. The Germans set up a "mobile defense"
in which small units would hold towns until supporting armor could arrive. The
Soviets never got close to Rostov, but the
fighting forced von Manstein to extract Army Group A from the Caucasus
and restabilize the frontline, 250 km away from the city. The Tatsinskaya
Raid also caused significant losses to Luftwaffe’s transport fleet. The Sixth
Army now was beyond all hope of German reinforcement. The German troops in Stalingrad were not told this and continued to believe
that reinforcements were on their way. Some German officers requested that
Paulus resist Hitler’s orders to stand fast and instead attempt to break out of
the Stalingrad pocket. Paulus refused, as he
abhorred the thought of disobeying orders. Also, whereas a breakout may have
been possible in the first few weeks, at this late stage, Sixth Army was short
of the fuel required for such a breakout. The German soldiers would have faced
great difficulty breaking through the Soviet lines on foot in harsh winter
conditions.
The Germans inside the pocket
retreated from the suburbs of Stalingrad to
the city itself. The Germans were now not only starving, but they were running
out of ammunition and continued to not surrender. The soviets were initially
surprised by the large number of German forces they had trapped. Bloody urban warfare began again in
Stalingrad, but this time it was the Germans who were pushed back to the banks
of the Volga. A Soviet envoy made Paulus a
generous surrender offer—that if he surrendered within 24 hours, the Germans
would receive a guarantee of safety for all prisoners, but Paulus, ordered not
to surrender by Adolf Hitler, did not reply, ensuring the destruction of the
6th Army. Hitler promoted Friedrich Paulus to Generalfeldmarschall on January 30, 1943. Hitler
assumed that Paulus would fight on or take his own life. Nevertheless, when
Soviet forces closed in on Paulus' headquarters in the ruined GUM department
store the next day, Paulus surrendered. Remnants of the German forces in Stalingrad surrendered on February 2. Hitler was furious
at the Field Marshal’s surrender and confided that "Paulus stood at the
doorstep of eternal glory but made an about-face”. It should be said that von paulus
was the first German field marshal to be captured alive in German history. Most
of the others committed suicide when threatened of being captured. German forces
continued to resist until early March 1943, hiding in cellars and sewers of the
city with their numbers being diminished at the same time by Soviet forces
clearing the city of remaining enemy resistance. By March, what remained of
these forces were small and isolated pockets of resistance that surrendered.