Battle of Stalingrad

The Battle of Stalingrad was fought between Nazi Germany and its allies and the Soviet Union for the city of Stalingrad, today's Volgograd, on the Volga River, from July 1942 to 2 February 1943. After months of street fighting, a Soviet counter-offensive encircled the German Sixth Army, which was forced to surrender. One of the largest and deadliest battles in history, it marked a turning point of World War II on the Eastern Front.

After failing to take Moscow in 1941, Adolf Hitler launched a summer offensive in the south in June 1942, codenamed Case Blue. Its main goal was the oilfields of the Caucasus. One army group was sent south towards the oil, while another, including General Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army, advanced east to the Volga to protect its flank. Stalingrad was an industrial centre and river port, and it bore the name of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, which gave it symbolic weight for both dictators. In July Stalin issued Order No. 227, known as "Not a step back", forbidding retreat without orders.

German forces reached the Volga north of the city in late August 1942, and on 23 August heavy air raids devastated Stalingrad and killed many civilians. The Soviet 62nd Army under General Vasily Chuikov defended a shrinking strip along the west bank, supplied by boats across the river under fire. Fighting went on for weeks over individual factories, grain elevators, the hill of Mamayev Kurgan and single buildings. Chuikov kept his troops as close as possible to the Germans to limit the effect of their air and artillery support. By November the Germans held most of the city but could not dislodge the last defenders.

While the city absorbed German strength, the Soviet command prepared a counter-attack. On 19 November 1942 Operation Uranus struck the long, thinly held flanks north and south of Stalingrad, which were defended largely by Romanian armies. The two Soviet pincers met near Kalach on 23 November, trapping the Sixth Army and part of the Fourth Panzer Army, perhaps 250,000 to 330,000 men by different estimates. Hitler forbade a breakout, trusting a promise that the air force could supply the pocket, but airlifted supplies fell far short of what was needed. In December a relief attack under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein came within some fifty kilometres of the pocket before it was stopped.

Starving and freezing, the trapped army was pushed into ever smaller pockets in January 1943. Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal on 30 January, expecting him not to surrender, but Paulus was captured the next day, and the last German troops in the northern part of the city surrendered on 2 February. Roughly 91,000 men were taken prisoner at the end; only around 5,000 to 6,000 of them returned home after the war.

Casualty figures are uncertain. Soviet losses in killed, wounded and captured are commonly put at over one million, and Axis losses, including Romanian, Italian and Hungarian troops destroyed on the Don, at several hundred thousand or more. Tens of thousands of civilians died. The defeat ended Germany's run of major victories in the east. Together with the Soviet victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, it gave the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front to the Red Army, which advanced from then on towards Germany.

Our 1938 map shows the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany before the war, and our 1945 map shows Europe after Germany's defeat.