On 28 June 1942 German armies opened their second summer offensive in the Soviet Union, code-named Case Blue (Fall Blau). Its target was the oil of the Caucasus; Stalingrad was at first only a point on the flank. Eight weeks later the German 16th Panzer Division stood on the Volga north of the city, and the campaign’s center of gravity had shifted to a place its planners had not intended to fight for street by street.

Why Germany went south in 1942

The failure of Operation Barbarossa to destroy the Red Army in 1941, and the Soviet counteroffensive before Moscow that winter, left Germany without the strength to attack along the whole Eastern Front in 1942. Hitler’s Directive No. 41 of 5 April 1942 concentrated the summer effort in the south. Its stated aim was to destroy Soviet forces west of the Don and then seize the oil-producing region of the Caucasus. Germany’s own oil supply depended heavily on Romania and on synthetic production, and German planners believed that taking the fields at Maikop, Grozny and Baku would weaken the Soviet war economy while easing their own shortages.

Stalingrad appeared in the directive as a secondary objective. German forces were to reach the city, or at least bring it under fire, so that it could no longer serve as an armaments center or a transport junction. The city mattered because of what passed through it: Volga barges carrying oil north from Baku and Astrakhan, rail lines linking central Russia to the Caucasus, and factories such as the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory, which by 1942 was building T-34 tanks. A German force on the Volga would also protect the long northern flank of any drive into the Caucasus.

The plan rested on assumptions that proved fragile. The German army in the east had not replaced its 1941 losses by spring 1942, and the U.S. Army history describes many infantry divisions as only partly rebuilt. To fill the front the German high command relied on its allies: the Romanian Third and Fourth Armies, the Italian Eighth Army and the Hungarian Second Army would eventually hold hundreds of miles of the Don. Supply depended on a rail network of a different gauge from Germany’s, on bridges rebuilt after the 1941 fighting, and on truck columns that had to cross the open steppe.

Before the offensive began, two events shaped it. In May a Soviet offensive near Kharkov ran into a German counterattack and ended with large Soviet forces encircled, which weakened the Red Army in the south just before Blue. Then on 19 June a German light aircraft carrying Major Joachim Reichel, a staff officer of the 23rd Panzer Division, came down behind Soviet lines with orders for the first phase of the offensive. The U.S. Army history notes that the incident compromised the Blau code name, which was changed. Soviet commanders received the captured papers, but Stalin and the Stavka continued to expect the main German blow to fall on Moscow.

Blue opens: Voronezh and the Don

The offensive began at daylight on 28 June 1942 with an artillery preparation. The German Second Army and Fourth Panzer Army, with the Hungarian Second Army, attacked eastward toward Voronezh on the upper Don. On 30 June Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army joined the attack farther south and broke through about twenty miles on its first day. Voronezh was taken on 6 July with relatively little fighting in the city itself, though Soviet counterattacks around it tied down German armor for days.

The early advance was rapid but did not produce the great encirclements of 1941. Soviet armies in the south, after the losses at Kharkov, withdrew eastward across the steppe rather than standing to be surrounded. The first phase netted about 70,000 prisoners, a figure the U.S. Army history describes as disappointing to the German command, and the total reached 88,000 by 13 July. Fuel shortages appeared within days: the 23rd Panzer Division ran out of motor fuel two or three times, and other divisions halted to refuel while Soviet rear guards slipped away.

Hitler grew impatient with the pace and with Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who wanted to secure Voronezh before turning south. On 13 July Bock was ordered to give up command; Army Group South was divided into Army Group A under Field Marshal Wilhelm List, aimed at the Caucasus, and Army Group B under Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs, responsible for the Don and Stalingrad. Hitler then shifted the Fourth Panzer Army south toward the lower Don to help Army Group A trap Soviet forces near Rostov. The move crowded roads and fuel supplies in the south and left the Sixth Army to push toward Stalingrad with less armor than planned.

On the Soviet side the Stavka formed a new Stalingrad Front on 12 July 1942 from the reserves of the former Southwestern Front, first under Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and from 23 July under Lieutenant General Vasily Gordov. Its 62nd and 64th Armies moved forward into the great bend of the Don west of the city. Soviet historians date the start of the Battle of Stalingrad to 17 July, when forward detachments of these armies first met the Sixth Army on the Chir River.

Directive No. 45 divides the effort

Rostov-on-Don fell to Army Group A on 23–24 July. On 23 July Hitler issued Directive No. 45, which abandoned the original sequence of Blue. Instead of taking Stalingrad first and then turning south, Army Group A was to drive into the Caucasus toward Maikop, Grozny and Baku while Army Group B took Stalingrad at the same time. The U.S. Army history records that Paulus received the same day a definite order to take the city, along with the XXIV Panzer Corps. Germany now had two diverging offensives, hundreds of miles apart, drawing on a single strained supply system.

Army Group A moved quickly at first. Its spearheads took Maikop on 9 August, finding the oil installations wrecked by the retreating Soviets, and German mountain troops raised a flag on Mount Elbrus on 21 August. The advance then slowed in the Caucasus foothills, short of Grozny and far short of Baku. On 9 September Hitler dismissed List and took personal command of Army Group A; two weeks later he replaced the chief of the army general staff, Franz Halder. Neither change produced the oil. By autumn the southern drive and the battle on the Volga were competing for the same fuel, aircraft and replacements.

The fight in the Don bend

The Battle of Stalingrad began more than 60 miles west of the city, on the steppe inside the great bend of the Don. Through late July the 62nd and 64th Armies held a bridgehead west of the river around Kalach, while Soviet tank armies counterattacked the German flanks. The Sixth Army’s advance slowed as fuel ran short and Soviet resistance stiffened. Hitler sent the XIV Panzer Corps and an infantry corps to Paulus on 18 July, and the panzer corps reached the Chir within two days.

On 7 August the XIV and XXIV Panzer Corps attacked the Kalach bridgehead from the north and south and trapped most of the 62nd Army west of the Don. The U.S. Army history counts nearly 50,000 prisoners taken in the following four days. The victory was costly for the Germans too. Ziemke’s figures for the Sixth Army in August, the month it crossed the Don, are 7,700 killed, 30,200 wounded and 1,100 missing. These were heavy losses for an army that would soon need every infantryman for the city fight.

On 5 August the Stavka split the overextended Stalingrad Front in two: Gordov kept the Stalingrad Front north of the city, and Colonel General Andrei Yeryomenko took command of a new Southeastern Front responsible for the city itself and the approaches from the south. Between 1 and 20 August the Stavka sent 15 rifle divisions and 3 tank corps to the area, according to Ziemke and Bauer. At the same time, Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, sent back north from the lower Don, attacked toward Stalingrad from the southwest along the railway from Kotelnikovo.

Soviet units fought delaying actions across the steppe between the Don and the Volga, a strip roughly 40 to 60 miles wide. The outer and inner defensive belts around Stalingrad, dug largely by civilians during the summer, slowed the Germans but could not be fully manned. Soviet air units, though outnumbered by the Luftwaffe’s VIII Air Corps, attacked German columns where they could. The German soldiers who photographed this landscape recorded a flat, treeless country of dry gullies (balkas), scattered villages and summer dust.

23 August: to the Volga

On 21 August German infantry forced a crossing of the Don at Vertyachiy and other points north of Kalach. Before dawn on 23 August the XIV Panzer Corps, led by Generalleutnant Hans Hube’s 16th Panzer Division, broke out of the bridgehead and drove east across the land bridge between the two rivers. In about twelve hours it covered roughly 36 miles and reached the Volga north of Stalingrad near the suburb of Rynok. The same afternoon and evening the Luftwaffe’s VIII Air Corps, according to Ziemke and Bauer, dropped about 1,000 tons of bombs on the city. Chapter 2 describes what those raids did to the people still living there.

The corridor to the Volga was narrow and immediately counterattacked. For several days the XIV Panzer Corps was effectively cut off from the rest of the Sixth Army, supplied partly by air, while Soviet armies attacked its northern flank from the area of Kotluban. Antiaircraft batteries near the Tractor Factory, many crewed by young women, fired on German tanks over open sights, and workers’ militia units from the factories joined the defense. Only on 2–3 September did the Sixth Army open a secure corridor to the panzer corps and make contact with the Fourth Panzer Army coming from the south.

By the first days of September the Germans held a continuous front from the Volga north of the city around its western edge to the river south of it. The Soviet 62nd and 64th Armies had been pushed back into the city and its southern suburbs. On 25 August the Stalingrad city defense committee had declared a state of siege. The battle for the city itself was about to begin, and it would fall mainly to the 62nd Army and its new commander, Vasily Chuikov, whose story is told in Chapter 3.

What the summer advance cost Germany

The summer campaign had carried the German army farther east than at any other time in the war, but its results fell short of its aims. The Red Army in the south had been badly hurt but not destroyed; many of its formations had escaped east across the Don and south into the Caucasus. The oil fields had not been taken. The German front now ran in a great salient whose northern face along the Don, more than 300 miles long, was held mostly by allied armies with few antitank weapons and little armor in reserve.

Supply was the deeper problem. The railheads lay far behind the front, and the Sixth Army’s ammunition and fuel had to be trucked across the steppe. Ziemke records that in September alone the army fired 25 million small-arms rounds, more than half a million antitank rounds and three-quarters of a million artillery rounds. Each week of street fighting drew more infantry into the city and left the flanks thinner. Those flanks, and the Soviet reserves gathering opposite them, are the subject of Chapter 4.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The advance across the steppe

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