Battle of Stalingrad Begins
The Battle of Stalingrad began - the bloodiest battle in human history
August 23, 1942
The City That Would Not Fall
The Battle of Stalingrad, fought between August 1942 and February 1943, was one of the largest and most brutal battles in the history of warfare. German forces under Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus attacked the Soviet city of Stalingrad, now called Volgograd, on the Volga River in southern Russia. Hitler was determined to capture the city both for its strategic value controlling Volga river traffic and for the symbolic importance of taking a city bearing Stalin's name. Soviet defenders, commanded ultimately by General Vasily Chuikov, refused to yield the city despite being pushed to narrow strips of rubble along the river bank. Urban combat became extraordinarily fierce, with soldiers fighting room to room and floor to floor.
Operation Uranus and the Encirclement
While fighting raged in the city, Soviet commanders Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky planned a massive counteroffensive. Operation Uranus, launched on November 19, 1942, struck the weaker Romanian and Hungarian armies protecting the German flanks north and south of the city. Within four days, the two Soviet spearheads met and encircled the entire German 6th Army, over 250,000 men, inside the Stalingrad pocket. Hitler refused to allow Paulus to break out while there was still time. A relief attempt by German armored forces failed to break through in December 1942. The soldiers inside the pocket starved and froze as the brutal Russian winter deepened.
The Turning Point of the Eastern Front
On February 2, 1943, Field Marshal Paulus, who had been promoted in the final days apparently so he would be the first German field marshal to surrender, formally capitulated with the remaining 91,000 survivors of his army. The battle had killed an estimated 800,000 Axis soldiers and 1.1 million Soviet soldiers and civilians. Stalingrad is widely regarded as the turning point of World War II on the Eastern Front. The strategic initiative passed to the Soviet Union and never returned to Germany. The psychological shock of the defeat was enormous in Germany, where the government had been telling the public that Stalingrad was being won. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels declared four days of national mourning.