![]() Since the initial operations were so successful, the Germans decided that their summer campaign in 1942 would be directed at the southern parts of the Soviet Union. Stalin was expecting the main thrust of the German summer attacks to be directed against Moscow again. Neither Army Group North nor Army Group South had been particularly hard pressed over the winter. Hitler was confident that he could master the Red Army after the winter of 1942, because even though Army Group Centre had suffered heavy losses west of Moscow the previous winter, 65% of its infantry had not been engaged and was rested and re-equipped. There were a number of salients, but these were not particularly threatening. In the east, they stabilized their front in a line running from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. Elsewhere, the war had been progressing well: the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic had been very successful and Rommel had just captured Tobruk. The battle lasted five months, one week, and three days.īattle of Stalingrad: Soviet soldiers attack a house, February 1943 Backgroundīy the spring of 1942, despite the failure of Operation Barbarossa to decisively defeat the Soviet Union in a single campaign, the Germans had captured vast expanses of territory, including Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic republics. The remaining elements of the 6th Army surrendered. By the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad had exhausted their ammunition and food. Heavy fighting continued for another two months. Adolf Hitler ordered that the army stay in Stalingrad and make no attempt to break out instead, attempts were made to supply the army by air and to break the encirclement from the outside. The Axis forces on the flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. On November 19, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a two-pronged attack targeting the weaker Romanian and Hungarian forces protecting the German 6th Army’s flanks. By mid-November 1942, the Germans pushed the Soviet defenders back at great cost into narrow zones along the west bank of the Volga River. The fighting degenerated into house-to-house fighting, and both sides poured reinforcements into the city. The attack was supported by intensive Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble. The German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in late summer 1942, using the German 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses. The heavy losses inflicted on the German Wehrmacht make it arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war and a turning point in the European theater of World War II. Marked by constant close-quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is often regarded as one of the single largest (nearly 2.2 million personnel) and bloodiest (1.7–2 million wounded, killed, or captured) battles in the history of warfare. The Battle of Stalingrad (Aug– February 2, 1943) was a major battle on the Eastern Front of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in Southern Russia, on the eastern boundary of Europe. It took place between October 1941 and January 1942 and was part of the German Operation Barbarossa.
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