What was Operation Uranus?
Operation Uranus was the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad that began on 19 November 1942. Instead of attacking the Germans in the ruined city, it struck the Romanian armies holding the flanks to the north and south. On 23 November the two Soviet pincers met at Sovetsky, near Kalach on the Don, and the German Sixth Army was surrounded. It never broke out, and its last men surrendered on 2 February 1943.1
For three months the Germans had fought their way through Stalingrad street by street, and by November they held most of the city. They were looking the wrong way. While the Sixth Army spent itself in the ruins, the Red Army gathered fresh forces on both sides of the salient, and in four days it turned the attacker into a prisoner.2
Background: a city that became a trap
Hitler's summer offensive of 1942, Fall Blau, aimed at the oil of the Caucasus. In July he split his southern armies, sending Army Group A toward the Caucasus and Army Group B toward the Volga, where Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army was to take the city that bore Stalin's name. On 23 August German spearheads reached the Volga north of the city.3
What followed was some of the fiercest fighting of the war. By mid-September the Soviet Sixty-second Army under Vasily Chuikov held only a narrow strip along the river, supplied by boats across the Volga. The German army reached the river and took most of the city, but it never took all of it, and the battle became a matter of prestige for Hitler as much as of strategy.4› Battle of Stalingrad, 1942 to 1943
The price of the push was paid on the flanks. To feed the fight in the city, the Germans drew reserves away from the long fronts on either side, which stretched hundreds of miles across the open steppe. Along the Don to the northwest stood the Romanian Third Army, to the south the Romanian Fourth Army, and farther up the Don Italian and Hungarian troops, less well trained and worse supplied than the Germans.5
The plan
The idea of a great counterblow came from the Soviet generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky in September 1942. Their plan was to keep the Germans locked in the street fighting while fresh armies massed opposite the weak flanks, then break through north and south and meet far behind Stalingrad. Britannica adds the artillery chief Nikolai Voronov to the planners. The operation was given the code name Uranus, and the Stavka, under Stalin, approved it on 13 November. The distances were great: Rossiyskaya Gazeta gives the northern pincer 120 to 140 km to cover and the southern one about 100 km, and the US Army history measures some seventy miles from the Serafimovich bridgehead to the bridge at Kalach alone.6› Georgy Zhukov
Secrecy was the whole point. If the Germans caught wind of the plan, they could pull troops out of the city and form a reserve, so the buildup was hidden behind an elaborate deception. Britannica judges that the blow utterly surprised the Germans, who thought the Soviets incapable of mounting such an attack, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia likewise records Hitler's belief that the Red Army, after the hard fighting of the summer, could not stage a major offensive in the south.7
Armies and commanders
Three Soviet fronts took part. The new Southwestern Front under Nikolai Vatutin, with the Fifth Tank Army and the Twenty-first Army, would strike from bridgeheads on the Don at Serafimovich and Kletskaya. The Don Front under Konstantin Rokossovsky made supporting attacks. The Stalingrad Front under Andrei Yeremenko, with the Fifty-first, Fifty-seventh and Sixty-fourth Armies, would attack from the lakes south of the city. The two strike groups were to meet in the Kalach and Sovetsky area.8
Opposite them, Army Group B under Maximilian von Weichs held the front, with the German Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army, under Hermann Hoth, around Stalingrad and the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies on the wings.9
The battle in phases
19 November, the northern pincer. At 7:30 in the morning the Soviet guns opened an artillery preparation of about 80 minutes on the Romanian Third Army, after which the infantry and tanks of the Fifth Tank and Twenty-first Armies went in. That day they broke the Romanian line, and their tank corps drove south into the open steppe. A German panzer corps sent to stop them was brushed aside.10
20 November, the southern pincer. A day later the Stalingrad Front attacked south of the city and broke through the Romanian corps along the chain of lakes. Mechanized and cavalry corps poured through the gap and turned northwest toward the Don.11
21 to 23 November, the race to Kalach. Tanks of the 26th Tank Corps seized the crossing of the Don at Kalach, and on 23 November the town was in Soviet hands.12
Turning point: the ring closes
On 23 November the 4th Tank Corps of the Southwestern Front and the 4th Mechanized Corps of the Stalingrad Front met near the farm settlement of Sovetsky, southeast of Kalach, and the ring was closed. Britannica, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and the US Army's official history all date the encirclement to that day.13
Inside were the Sixth Army and part of the Fourth Panzer Army, along with Romanian remnants. The numbers differ by source. The German Historical Museum counts about 250,000 Germans and over 30,000 Romanians and Soviet auxiliaries, Britannica 250,000 men, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia 330,000 in 22 divisions.14
Paulus asked for permission to break out to the southwest. Relying on Hermann Göring's assurance that the Luftwaffe could supply the army from the air, Hitler refused, and on 24 November he ordered Stalingrad held. The airlift never came close. The US Army history records an average of about 90 tons a day in December, against a minimum need of 300, and the German Historical Museum says the daily 300 to 400 tons were not delivered once.15
Why Hitler insisted is no mystery to historians. The city carried Stalin's name, and Hitler had staked his personal prestige on it; to give it up, he told Manstein, would mean abandoning the greatest achievement of the 1942 campaign. The German Historical Museum notes that he now declared Stalingrad a symbol of the German will to win.16
Inside the pocket the army began to starve. With winter setting in, food, fuel and medical supplies dwindled, the wounded went untended, and men began to die of exhaustion and hunger in the bitter cold.17
Aftermath
Winter Storm. Hitler gave Field Marshal Erich von Manstein a new Army Group Don and the task of breaking through to the pocket. The relief attack, Operation Wintergewitter, set out from Kotelnikovo on 12 December. Its panzers reached the Myshkova River, about 40 km from the pocket by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia's count, 48 km by the German Historical Museum's and about 35 miles by the US Army's, but got no closer, and Hitler would not let Paulus break out to meet them. The attempt was broken off after nine days.18
Little Saturn. On 16 December the Southwestern Front struck the Italian Eighth Army on the middle Don and tore open its front, which forced the Germans to divert forces meant for the relief.19› Battle of Kursk, 1943
Ring. On 8 January 1943 the Soviets offered Paulus terms of surrender, and he refused them on Hitler's orders. Two days later Rokossovsky's Don Front opened Operation Koltso, Ring, to destroy the pocket. Starving and freezing, the Germans were driven back into the ruins of the city and split into two pockets.20
On 30 January Hitler made Paulus a field marshal; no German officer of that rank had ever surrendered. On 31 January Paulus gave himself up in the southern pocket, and on 2 February the northern pocket followed. About 91,000 men went into captivity. The allies paid too: in the course of the winter counteroffensive, both Romanian armies and the Italian Eighth Army were broken.21
The cost was immense on both sides. The German Historical Museum puts the Germans who died in the pocket at about 150,000, while Soviet counts cited by the US Army history give 147,000 German dead found on the battlefield. Britannica and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia both put total Axis losses in the counteroffensive at over 800,000 killed, wounded and captured. Of the prisoners, only some 5,000 to 6,000 ever came home. On the Soviet side, the German Historical Museum estimates more than 400,000 dead, and Britannica cites official Russian figures of 1.1 million casualties for the whole battle.22
Legacy and memory
Britannica calls Stalingrad the greatest battle of the war and the turning point of the struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union; for the German Historical Museum it was the Wehrmacht's first annihilating defeat in the East, after which the initiative passed to the Red Army. Keith Huxen of the National WWII Museum, in his own view, sees it as the great turning point of the war.23
The city, today Volgograd, was named a Hero City of the Soviet Union, and on the Mamayev Kurgan, the high ground fought over in September 1942, a vast memorial complex was finished in 1967. The Soviet victory was also bought at the price of the city itself, which was left in ruins.24› Battle of Moscow, 1941
The opening barrage left its own memorial. In 1944 the Soviet Union made 19 November its Day of Artillery, in honor of the gunners whose bombardment had opened the Stalingrad counteroffensive, and in 1964 it became the Day of Missile Troops and Artillery, still marked in Russia every 19 November.25
