On the morning of 19 November 1942, in fog and snow, Soviet artillery opened fire on the Romanian Third Army along the Don northwest of Stalingrad. A day later a second blow fell south of the city. On 23 November the two Soviet pincers met at the farm settlement of Sovetskiy, near Kalach, and the German Sixth Army, part of the Fourth Panzer Army and attached Romanian and other units were encircled between the Don and the Volga.

The plan behind the city

The counteroffensive took shape in September and October 1942, while the 62nd Army was fighting for its survival in the city. General Georgy Zhukov, Stalin’s deputy supreme commander, and Colonel General Alexander Vasilevsky, chief of the General Staff, proposed to leave the Sixth Army committed in Stalingrad and strike instead at the long flanks held by Germany’s allies. The plan, code-named Uranus, called for converging attacks from the Don bridgeheads northwest of the city and from the lake district south of it, meeting near Kalach to cut the Sixth Army’s communications to the west.

Three fronts took part. The new Southwestern Front under Lieutenant General Nikolai Vatutin, with the 5th Tank Army and the 21st Army, would attack from the bridgeholds the Soviets had kept south of the Don at Serafimovich and Kletskaya. Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Don Front, with the 65th, 24th and 66th Armies, would attack the Sixth Army’s northern flank inside the Don bend. Andrei Yeryomenko’s Stalingrad Front would attack from south of the city with the 51st and 57th Armies, while the 62nd and 64th Armies held the Sixth Army in place.

The buildup was concealed with considerable success. Troops and equipment moved at night, and radio traffic was controlled. The U.S. Army history records that between 1 and 19 November 160,000 troops, 430 tanks, 600 artillery pieces and 14,000 motor vehicles crossed the lower Volga to the Stalingrad Front’s southern sector, and that 27,000 trucks and horse-drawn vehicles moved supplies to the attacking forces. John Correll, summarizing published figures, puts the forces under Zhukov’s coordination by mid-November at almost one million troops, about 1,000 tanks, 1,400 aircraft and 14,000 guns. Ziemke judges overall Soviet superiority in the sector to have been probably about two to one.

The flanks the Germans could not hold

The German command knew its flanks were weak. The Romanian Third Army under General Petre Dumitrescu held about 90 miles of the Don front northwest of Stalingrad with eleven divisions, few antitank guns heavier than 37 mm, and almost no armor. South of the city the Romanian Fourth Army and the German Fourth Panzer Army held the Kalmyk steppe with a thin screen of positions. The main German reserve behind the Romanians was the XXXXVIII Panzer Corps, which consisted of the understrength 22nd Panzer Division and the Romanian 1st Armored Division, equipped largely with light tanks.

German intelligence detected Soviet concentrations opposite the Romanian Third Army in late October and November but underestimated their scale and expected, if anything, a limited attack. Hitler continued to insist on the capture of the last Soviet footholds in the city; Operation Hubertus began on 11 November, eight days before Uranus. The Sixth Army’s infantry and much of its armor were committed in the ruins, many miles from the threatened flanks.

The Soviet commanders chosen for the operation had learned from a year of defeats. Vatutin had served as deputy chief of the General Staff; Rokossovsky had commanded an army before Moscow in 1941; Yeryomenko had held the city front since August. Zhukov and Vasilevsky visited the attacking armies in the weeks before the offensive to check preparations, coordinate artillery and air support and decide the timing. The start date was postponed more than once while ammunition, fuel and the mobile corps were brought up; Stalin finally approved 19 November for the northern attack and 20 November for the southern.

The Romanian commanders had warned their German counterparts. Dumitrescu and his staff reported Soviet bridgehead activity and asked for German armor and antitank guns to be placed behind their sector. Their divisions held frontages far wider than German doctrine considered safe, with little depth and few prepared positions in the frozen ground. When the attack came, many Romanian units fought on for days after being surrounded, a fact often missed in accounts that treat the collapse of the front as a failure of the troops rather than of the dispositions imposed on them.

19 November: the northern pincer

At 0730 Moscow time on 19 November, artillery of the Southwestern and Don Fronts opened fire on the Romanian Third Army. The U.S. Army history counts about 3,500 guns and mortars in the barrage, which lasted about an hour and a half; the infantry of the 5th Tank Army and the 21st Army attacked at 0850. Fog limited air support on both sides. Romanian infantry resisted strongly in places, but by early afternoon the Soviet commanders committed their mobile corps. The 5th Tank Army’s 1st and 26th Tank Corps moved through the gap after 1300, and the 21st Army sent in the 4th Tank Corps and the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps.

The German counterattack failed. The XXXXVIII Panzer Corps was ordered first in one direction and then another, its 22nd Panzer Division had lost many tanks to mechanical problems, and its two divisions never joined. The corps barely escaped west across the Chir. Hitler blamed its commander, Generalleutnant Ferdinand Heim, who was recalled, stripped of his rank and imprisoned without trial. To the east, Lieutenant General Pavel Batov’s 65th Army of the Don Front attacked German divisions on the Sixth Army’s left and advanced only about three miles, but it pinned them in place.

By 20 November Soviet mobile corps were driving southeast across the steppe behind the Romanian front. Large Romanian forces were cut off around Raspopinskaya; most of the group under General Mihail Lascăr surrendered on 23–24 November and Lascăr himself was taken prisoner, while some Romanian units broke out to the west. The Romanian Third Army as an organized force had largely ceased to exist.

20 November: the southern pincer

South of the city Yeryomenko’s Stalingrad Front attacked on 20 November, delayed for several hours by fog. The 57th Army under Major General Fyodor Tolbukhin and the 51st Army under Major General Nikolai Trufanov broke through the Romanian VI Corps between the lakes south of Stalingrad. The 4th Mechanized Corps and the 13th Tank Corps pushed through the gap. The U.S. Army history quotes Hermann Hoth, commander of the Fourth Panzer Army, as reporting that what had taken weeks to build had been “ruined in a day.”

The 51st Army had a double mission: part of its strength turned northwest toward Kalach and Sovetskiy to complete the ring, while the rest advanced southwest toward Kotelnikovo to build an outer front against any German relief. The Romanian Fourth Army’s headquarters took command of the broken Romanian VI and VII Corps. Some German units of the Fourth Panzer Army, including the IV Corps, were pushed back into the area that would become the pocket.

Kalach and Sovetskiy

On 21 November, around noon, Soviet tanks came within sight of Kalach, the main Don crossing behind the Sixth Army. The same day Hitler ordered Paulus to stand fast “regardless of the danger of a temporary encirclement,” in the words of the order as quoted in the U.S. Army history. Paulus moved his headquarters from Golubinsky on the Don to Gumrak, near the city. Before dawn on 22 November a battalion-sized detachment of the 26th Tank Corps seized the Don bridge at Kalach intact; German troops in the town held out until the next day.

On 23 November the 4th Tank Corps of the Southwestern Front met the 4th Mechanized Corps of the Stalingrad Front at Sovetskiy, a few miles southeast of Kalach. The ring was closed. Inside it were the German Sixth Army’s IV, VIII, XI, XIV Panzer and LI Corps, parts of the Fourth Panzer Army, two Romanian divisions, a Croatian regiment and thousands of support troops, Luftwaffe personnel and Soviet auxiliaries. Correll counts 22 divisions in Paulus’s force. In the days that followed the Soviets built an inner ring around the pocket and an outer front along the Chir and Aksai rivers, in places separated by 60 miles or more.

Hold or break out

Paulus and several of his corps commanders wanted to break out to the southwest before the Soviets could reinforce the ring. On 22–23 November Paulus asked for freedom of action. General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, commanding LI Corps, began withdrawing units on the northern front on his own authority, and the army staff prepared plans. Hitler refused. On 24 November he ordered the Sixth Army to hold its positions, designated the pocket “Fortress Stalingrad,” and promised air supply.

The air supply decision rested on assurances from Hermann Göring and the Luftwaffe chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek. Accounts of what Göring promised differ. The U.S. Army history reports that the Luftwaffe undertook to deliver 600 tons per day. Joel Hayward’s study of the decision, published in Airpower Journal in 1997, finds that Göring gave no specific tonnage in his first assurances but accepted a figure of 500 tons when the army chief of staff, Kurt Zeitzler, put it to him. Wolfram von Richthofen, whose Fourth Air Fleet would have to fly the missions, doubted from the start that it could be done. How that promise played out is the subject of Chapter 5.

On 20 November the German high command created Army Group Don under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein to restore the situation. Manstein, arriving on 26–27 November, initially supported holding the pocket until a relief force could open a corridor, provided the airlift worked. That decision, and the relief attempt that followed, are covered in Chapter 6.

What Uranus changed

Uranus reversed the situation on the southern front in four days. It was the first large Soviet encirclement operation of the war to succeed against a full German army, and it showed a Red Army that had learned to concentrate armor, artillery and deception on narrow sectors. It also showed the limits of the German position in the east: an offensive pushed far beyond its supply lines, flanks held by allies who had been given neither the equipment nor the reserves to hold them, and a command structure that subordinated operational choices to Hitler’s political commitment to the city.

The Soviet offensive was not flawless. Some cavalry and tank corps suffered heavy losses in the steppe fighting; Ziemke notes that two Soviet cavalry corps lost 36 and 45 percent of their strength between 19 November and 2 December. A companion offensive against the German Ninth Army near Rzhev, Operation Mars, launched on 25 November under Zhukov’s direction, failed with heavy losses. The Battle of Moscow collection describes the earlier fighting on that front, and the 1943 battle at Kursk shows how both armies applied what they had learned. For the background to the city fighting that held the Sixth Army in place, see Chapter 3.

Gallery · 8 photographs · select to enlarge

The counteroffensive

Sources and further reading

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