THE BATTLE OF STALINGRAD, 1942–1943

Stalingrad (now Volgograd) was an industrial city on the Volga River. It became the site of a ferocious battle between German and Soviet forces in World War II and marked a downturn in the military fortunes of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The battle for Stalingrad grew out of a German campaign in June 1942 for the oil resources of the Caucasus region. The Sixth German Army was ordered to take Stalingrad to block Russian efforts to intervene in the Caucasus campaign. Both sides soon came to see Stalingrad as the place where the main battle in the south would be fought. The German attack, led by General Friedrich Paulus, came in August. Soviet troops in Stalingrad were led by General Vasily Chuikov. with General Georgii Zhukov in overall charge of Soviet forces. Hitler, especially, and Josif Stalin followed the campaign closely and often participated in the planning. The German forces were at first overwhelmingly successful, pushing the Russian forces almost into the Volga River. By the end of September the Germans controlled most of Stalingrad, which was an oddly shaped city strung out along twenty miles General Zhukov devised a plan in September for a wide encirclement of the German forces. While the battle raged in Stalingrad, street by street, building by building, and, finally, room by room, Zhukov assembled troops to the north and south of Stalingrad. The Russian counterattack began on 19 November 1942. On 23 November the Russian forces met at Kalach on the Don River west of Stalingrad. This was Operation Uranus. Its success left the Germans, their Romanian, Austrian, and Italian allies, and the so-called Hiwis (Russian and Ukrainian volunteers) encircled in what was called the Kessel or cauldron. Hitler refused to let Paulus attempt to break out, and efforts to supply the troops by air failed. By January conditions within the Kessel were unbearable. Soldiers slowly starved to death or froze. After sending the Germans an ultimatum to surrender, the Russian forces launched a final attack on 10 January 1943. At the end of the month the German headquarters was overrun. Stalingrad was a staggering defeat for the German army. Hundreds of thousands of troops were killed. A great deal of equipment that could not be easily replaced was destroyed. Germany continued to fight for two more years, but the Soviet Union now had the upper hand in the east. After the British and American forces landed at Normandy in 1944, defeat was only a matter of time.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Investigate the personal reasons Stalin had for wanting to maintain Soviet control of Stalingrad.
2. Hitler had not been particularly interested in the conquest of Stalingrad originally, yet it eventually became an obsession with him. Write a research paper on his obsession with Stalingrad and the consequences of this for the German war effort. 3. Stalingrad was only one of the several desperate situations the Soviet Union contended with in 1942. Place it in the context of events of that year by discussing the major campaigns and issues of that time.
4. Review some of the descriptions of combat in Stalingrad and write a short story that describes a day in the life of a Soviet or German enlisted man.
5. Georgii Zhukov was the Soviet Union’s great military hero from World War II, easily the equivalent of Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur. Study his wartime and postwar career and compare it with either Eisenhower’s or MacArthur’s.
6. What happened to Stalingrad (later Volgograd) after the war? Read about the reconstruction of the city and efforts to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad.

Research Suggestions

In addition to boldfaced terms, look under the entries for “The Holocaust, 1941–1945” (#34) and “The Yalta Conference, 1945” (#36). Search under Hermann Göring, Vasily Grossman, Nikita Khrushchev, NKVD (Soviet security police), Operation Barbarossa, and Stavka (Soviet Supreme General Staff).

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Battle for Stalingrad: The 1943 Soviet General Staff Study. Edited by Louis Rotundo. Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defence, 1989. The Soviet military’s view of what happened and why.

Chuikov, V. I. The Battle for Stalingrad. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. The memoirs of the Soviet commander in Stalingrad.

Werth, Alexander. The Year of Stalingrad: A Historical Record and a Study of Russian Mentality, Methods and Policies. New York: Knopf, 1947. An excellent account by a perceptive and well-informed British journalist of Russian background.

Zhukov, Georgii K. Marshal Zhukov’s Greatest Battles. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Includes Zhukov’s account of his great triumph in the Battle of Stalingrad.
Secondary Sources

Beevor, Anthony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. The best single book on Stalingrad, based on archival material and extensive interviews with Russian and German survivors.

Erickson, John. The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984. A fine history of the war on the Eastern Front. The last two chapters cover the Battle of Stalingrad through Operation Uranus.

Görlitz, Walter. Paulus and Stalingrad: A Life of Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus. London: Methuen Press, 1963. A biography of the main German commander by a German military historian.

Grossman, Vasily. Life and Fate. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. A major twentieth-century novel on Stalingrad by a journalist who spent many years after the war studying the battle.

Jukes, Geoffrey. Hitler’s Stalingrad Decisions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. A study of Hitler’s disastrous intervention in the Battle of Stalingrad.

Ryback, Timothy W. “Stalingrad: Letters from the Dead,” The New Yorker, 1 February 1993. Letters from German soldiers describing conditions at Stalingrad.

Stalingrad. Directed by Joseph Vilsmaier, 1996. 105 minutes, subtitles. A highly praised film by the director of Das Boot.

Webster, Donovan. Aftermath: The Remnants of War. New York: Pantheon Books , 1996. Chapter 2, “Ghosts,” is an unusual look at Stalingrad, focusing on the efforts to identify and bury the many thousands of dead left unburied for decades after the battle.