Original subtitles

There is a number that requires no

context or explanation. 330,000.

That is the number of soldiers that the

sixth German army had with them when

they crossed the Dawn River in the

summer of 1942, marching toward a city

on the banks of the Vular that bore the

name of the man Adolf Hitler hated the

most. 330,000 soldiers with three years

of consecutive victories etched into

their bodies. Men who had crossed all of

Europe without knowing defeat, who had

destroyed entire armies and captured

hundreds of thousands of prisoners in

encirclement maneuvers that history

books still study with awe.

The forging of a war machine, origin and

doctrine of the Sixth Army. The Sixth

Army was formally established in October

1939, just weeks after the end of the

Polish campaign. It did not emerge from

nowhere. It was the reorganization of

the 10th Army which had fought on that

first front of the war transferred to

the west on October 10th, 1939 and

renamed under the command of General de

Infantry Valta von Reicha. But to

understand what this army really was,

what made it different from any other

formation of its size in the world at

that time, it is necessary to go even

further back to the very nature of the

doctrine that animated it and to the men

that doctrine had produced. Germany had

gone from having an army of 100,000 men,

the limit imposed by the Treaty of

Versailles in 1919, to deploying

millions of soldiers in less than a

decade. This transformation was

logistical and industrial but also and

above all doctrinal. The army that

Versailles had left alive, the Reichkes

of 100,000 men was paradoxically the

laboratory where the ideas that would

transform it were incubated. Deprived of

the possibility of having tanks,

military aviation, and heavy artillery,

the officers of the Reichkes spent the

1920s studying. They studied the war

they had just lost, sought the reasons

for the German collapse in 1918,

analyzed the armored experiments of the

British and the French, and arrived at

conclusions that their European rivals

took decades to assimilate. But there

was something even more fundamental,

something that is often omitted when

describing the German army of that era,

the Aftrack tactic, the mission tactic.

Its history is older than the 20th

century. Its roots lie in the Prussian

military reforms of the first half of

the 19th century in the thought of

Clausvitz and in the operational

practice of Marshall Helmouth von Molka

the Elder during the wars of German

unification.

Offrek's tactics started from a premise

that its rivals found difficult to

accept. The battlefield is inherently

chaotic and unpredictable and any

detailed plan begins to degrade the

moment contact is made with the enemy.

Consequently, the solution was not to

plan in greater detail, but to train

officers at all levels to act with

initiative within the framework of the

overall objectives assigned. In the

German army of 1939 to 1942, a battalion

commander who identified an opportunity

on the battlefield had not only the

authority but the obligation to act on

it without waiting for orders from

above. They were assigned a goal. Take

that village, cross that river,

neutralize that battery, not a method.

Initiative was a cardinal virtue. A

commander who awaited detailed

instructions when the situation changed

was considered a failure, regardless of

their rank. A commander who acted

without orders, but correctly identified

the superior objective and contributed

to its achievement was praised, even if

they had violated the letter of the

plan. This culture produced middle

commanders capable of making quick and

correct decisions under pressure, which

made German units move with a speed and

coordination that their enemies took

years to understand and even longer to

imitate. The training system that

produced these officers was equally

demanding. The Creeks Academy, the War

Academy, selected its candidates through

a series of tests that lasted months and

evaluated not only tactical and

operational knowledge, but the ability

to reason under pressure, clarity in

written expression, geographical and

logistical understanding, and

independent judgment. The selected

officers spent years learning to write

concise orders to analyze complex

tactical situations and to understand

the perspective of both higher and lower

levels simultaneously.

The result was a core of professional

officers whose technical competence was

in the period 1939 to 1942 unparalleled

in the world. The sixth army absorbed

this philosophy from its birth under Fon

Reichau. Walter von Reichenau was born

in 1884 in Kalsruer, the son of a

Prussian general. He was a man who

embodied the contradictions of the

German officer of that era. A brilliant

strategist, a convinced military

technocrat, a rigorous athlete, running

marathons and practicing extreme sports

at an age when his colleagues played

chess in the officer's casino and at the

same time one of the most ideologically

committed officers to the Nazi regime

within the high command. Unlike most of

his aristocratic peers, von Reichenau

had actively cultivated his relationship

with Hitler since the early 1930s and

had served as an intermediary between

the party and the army during the rise

to power. His ideology was documented in

the sheriff behel the order of severity

which he issued on October 10th 1941 for

the sixth army instructing his men on

what he described as the duty to

exterminate the Jewish Asiatic threat

and to consider Soviet political

commissars as representatives of a

subhumanity that did not deserve the

protection of the laws of war. The

document was distributed on the Eastern

Front at Hitler's request who presented

it as a model for the other army

commanders. It was one of the first

official documents in which a field

commander articulated genocide as part

of the ordinary military mission. The

sixth army units delivered captured Jews

and commisaars to the einsat group and

the feld jearm as occurred in the Kiev

region in September 1941 including the

massacre at Babin Ya where more than

33,000 people were killed in 2 days. But

his tactical influence on the sixth army

was equally real and profound. He

established a culture of initiative at

the intermediate command level, of rapid

decision-making, of sustained aggression

that would persist long after he left

command. The officers of the Sixth Army

learned that slowness was a vice and

audacity of virtue, that the momentum of

combat was an asset lost the moment the

advance was stopped, and that

uncertainty was never an excuse for

inaction. That culture would take the

Sixth Army from Poland to Kiev and from

Kiev to the banks of the Vular. It would

also be in the decisive hours of the

Stalingrad encirclement, the culture

that Pus did not embody and that his

army urgently needed. The organizational

structure that the Sixth Army would have

at its peak was generally composed of

four army corps. The 8th Army Corps, the

11th Army Corps, the 14th Panza Corps,

and the 51st Army Corps. The most

powerful corps in terms of

maneuverability was the 14th Panza Corps

led by General Deansa trooper Hans

Valentine Huber which grouped the

armored and motorized divisions. The

third motorized infantry division, the

60th motorized infantry division, the

94th Infantry Division, the 16th Panza

Division, and eventually fractions of

the 14th and 24th. These formations were

the sharp edge of the army, capable of

advancing 40 or 50 km in a day across

open terrain, bypassing enemy positions,

and sewing chaos in the rear. The

infantry core provided the mass and

sustained combat capability, securing

terrain, reducing defensive positions,

eliminating pockets left by the armored

cavalry behind them. This was further

complemented by integration with the

Luftvafer particularly with the eighth

fleer corps under General Leitant Martin

Feebig which assigned due 87 Stooka dive

bombers and fighter bombers for close

air support to ground units with speed

and effectiveness that no other army in

the world had been able to perfect. The

Stooka pilots supporting the Sixth Army

during the years of victories brought

vertical warfare to the battlefield,

attacking enemy artillery, destroying

bridges over rivers and disrupting

armored concentrations before they

reached the front. The communication

system coordinating those attacks with

Luftvafa liaison officers embedded in

the headquarters of the ground corps was

the invisible backbone of that combined

power. All of this, the doctrine, the

men, the structure, the integration with

aviation was what made the Sixth Army

unprecedented in German military history

and at that time in world military

history. It was a war machine fine-tuned

by 3 years of real combat by victories

that confirmed the validity of its

founding principles and by the

accumulated experience of hundreds of

thousands of men who had learned to

function together under fire. That

accumulated experience, that capital of

tactical competence and institutional

cohesion was an asset that could not be

manufactured in a factory or delivered

through replacement reinforcements.

It could only be earned in combat and

once lost, it could not be recovered.

Barbarosa, the Sixth Army on the Eastern

Front. On June 22nd, 1941, along a front

of more than 3,000 km, Germany launched

the most ambitious operation in its

military history, the invasion of the

Soviet Union. For this campaign, the

Sixth Army was assigned to the Southern

Army Group under the command of General

Feld Marshall Ger von Runstead. Its

mission was to advance from southern

Poland and Ukraine toward the Donbus and

the Caucuses, the industrial and oil

richch regions that Hitler considered

essential to sustain the German war

machine in the long term. What they

found upon crossing the Soviet border

was not what many had expected, though

not for the reasons one might assume.

The Red Army of 1941 was in a state of

deep crisis. Stalin's purges between

1937 and 1938 had literally decapitated

its officer corps. Thousands of

generals, colonels, and experienced

commanders had been executed or sent to

forced labor camps. The units that faced

the Germans in the early days of

Barbarasa were often poorly led, poorly

communicated, and in tactically

inadequate positions. The results were

catastrophic for the Soviets. The sixth

army along with armored units from the

first panzer group under the command of

Evil von Kle participated in a series of

encirclement battles that rank among the

largest in military history. In the

battle of Kiev in September 1941, the

forces of army group south closed a

giant pocket around four entire Soviet

armies from the southwestern front

commanded by General Pulovnik Mikail

Caponos. The number of prisoners

captured exceeded 600,000 men. There is

no comparable precedent in the

documented history of modern warfare.

The Sixth Army was an integral part of

this maneuver. Its infantry divisions

closed the flanks of the encirclement,

withtood desperate Soviet breakout

attempts from both inside and outside,

and held the pressure for weeks in an

open plane terrain crisscrossed with

rivers and ravines that offered little

natural cover. I don't know how many

there were. An infantry officer from the

Sixth Army who served during that period

would recall decades later, "Endless

columns for days. They marched westward

with almost no one guarding them because

we simply didn't have enough soldiers to

escort them all. But the triumph at Kiev

was also, though no one saw it that way

at the time, a trap. Germany was winning

battles of epic proportions while time

was running out. The 1941 campaign had

begun in June with the expectation of a

victory within weeks. By October, the

Red Army had suffered losses that would

have destroyed any other army on the

planet. And yet, it still existed. It

was still receiving reinforcements from

the Eurals and Siberia. It was still

fighting. Winter arrived. The German

advance came to a halt at the gates of

Moscow. For the Sixth Army, that first

Soviet winter was a test unlike anything

that had come before. The men who had

crossed Western Europe in a glorious

summer now found themselves in

temperatures of 40° below zero without

proper winter gear, holding defensive

positions against Soviet counterattacks

that came at night in the silence of the

snowfall. "German logistics, designed

for a short war, groaned under the

weight of a campaign that wouldn't end."

"The cold was unlike anything I had

imagined," wrote a soldier of the Sixth

Army in a letter that didn't reach its

destination until after the war. It's

not that it was cold and that was it. It

was that the cold changed everything.

Rifles jammed. Engines wouldn't start.

My feet stopped hurting because I

couldn't feel them anymore. I knew that

was worse, not better.

And yet, the Sixth Army survived that

winter. It absorbed the losses, held its

lines, and entered the spring of 1942

still as a functional and combative

force. Many German units on the Eastern

Front were so decimated during that

first winter that they had to be

disbanded or reformed practically from

scratch. The Sixth Army arrived battered

but structurally intact. Its chain of

command functioned. Its elite divisions

maintained their cohesion. Its

operational capacity was real. And yet

the Sixth Army survived that winter. It

absorbed the losses, held its lines, and

entered the spring of 1942 still as a

functional and combative force. Many

German units on the Eastern Front were

so decimated during that first winter

that they had to be disbanded or

reformed practically from scratch. The

Sixth Army arrived battered but

structurally intact. Its chain of

command functioned. Its elite divisions

maintained their cohesion. Its

operational capacity was real.

The man and the army. Friedrich Pace

takes command.

On January 12th, 1942, something

happened that would change the fate of

the sixth army in ways no one could have

foreseen at the time. General Feld

Marshall Valta von Reichenau suffered a

collapse while on his morning run in

Pava. The doctors diagnosed him with a

massive cerebral embolism. He was flown

to Leipzy where he died on January 17th.

The man who replaced him at the helm of

the sixth army was his former chief of

staff, General Depansa Trooper Friedrich

Wilhelm Ernst Pace. The choice of Powace

was neither accidental nor improvised,

von Reichenau himself had suggested him

to Hitler shortly before his death.

Convinced that his former collaborator

was the most capable of the available

candidates, Holder himself, chief of

staff of the OKH, had supported Paulus'

candidacy during the January 1942

crisis. When Paulus had helped maintain

the coherence of command in the most

pressured sectors of the Eastern Front

during the Soviet counteroffensive that

winter, he had the backing of the

system. He had the trust of the men who

held the power within the German high

command. What he did not have and what

no one within that system seemed to

value enough at that moment was the

experience of leading in actual combat

at the operational level. Friedrich

Powas was born on September 23rd, 1890

in Ghagen, a small town in what is now

the state of Hessa. He was the son of

Friedrich August Powas, a school

treasurer with no noble pretensions and

Bertha Lindenau. He came from a

non-aristocratic family, a detail

relevant in an army where the prefix

vaugh opened doors. Although his

movements and demeanor gave him a

distinction that led many to mistake him

for an aristocrat. He had attempted to

join the Imperial Navy as a cadet

without success and briefly studied law

at the University of Marberg before

finally finding his way in the 111th

Infantry Regiment of Bon in 1910 as a

cadet officer. He married Elena Rosetti

Solescu in 1912, a descendant of a

Romanian aristocratic family whose

social presence and ambition reinforced

in him an awareness of his position. He

fought in World War I as a junior

officer on the Western and Eastern

fronts and in the Balkans with mountain

hunter units. He ended that war with the

rank of captain and a solid reputation

as a meticulous officer with

organizational brilliance. During the

VHimar period, he was selected for the

small group of officers who would remain

in the 100,000man Reich, which itself

was a certificate of professional

quality. Within that restricted

framework, he perfected the skills that

would define him, analyzing complex

situations, drafting precise orders, and

understanding logistics deeply, as well

as the relationships between the various

elements of combined arms.

In the 1930s with the rearmament of

Germany, Powus rapidly rose through the

ranks of the general staff. In 1935, he

was appointed chief of staff of

Gderian's Panza grouper, participating

from that position in the development of

the tactical principles of the German

armored force. In 1938, he was promoted

to general major. In 1939 and 1940, as

deputy chief of the general staff of the

OKH, he participated in the planning of

the first military campaigns, Poland,

Norway, France, and the initial

preparation for Barbarasa. His war game

maps were legendary in their accuracy.

His Lagabert Tylungan situation

assessments were models of the genre.

The men who worked for him respected him

with an admiration that bordered on

religious awe for someone who seemed to

have eliminated human error from the

military planning equation. What those

same men noticed with less enthusiasm,

though they rarely voiced it, was the

difference between planning an operation

and conducting it. Pace had never

commanded a unit larger than a battalion

in actual combat before receiving the

Sixth Army. His direct command

experience was that of a company and

battalion officer in World War I.

Everything he had done after that had

been in the realm of the general staff,

where the primary virtue was the

precision of analysis and where the

consequences of an erroneous judgment

could be corrected on paper before they

cost lives. In field command, the

consequence of a wrong assessment was

measured in dead men before the next

dawn. His arrival at the command of the

sixth army on January 20th, 1942

coincided with one of the most difficult

moments for the German forces on the

Eastern Front. The Soviet

counteroffensive of winter 1941 to 1942,

launched in December by Marshall Jukov,

had pushed the forces of Army Group

Center to the west and created pockets

of German units holding out in isolated

towns. The sector of army group south

where the sixth army operated was

relatively more stable, but the pressure

was real. Pus inherited an army battered

by the first Soviet winter with

divisions that had suffered losses of

between 30 and 50% in men and equipment

and with a logistics chain still

creaking under the weight of a campaign

that no one had designed to last more

than 3 months. In that difficult

context, Paulus demonstrated the virtues

that made him a solid commander under

ordinary conditions. He reorganized the

army's sectors efficiently, ensured that

the chain of command continued to

function in the most pressured sectors

and maintained the cohesion of the units

during the tactical retreat that the

harsh winter forced to be carried out at

several points. General dear artillery

Walter Fonzidlitz Kurtzbach, commander

of the 51st Army Corps and one of the

most respected officers of the sixth,

valued Pus as an organizer and planner.

What he questioned privately in letters

to other generals that would become

historical documents was Palace's

tendency to seek perfection in planning

at the expense of tactical opportunity

and his inability to make decisions when

the situation was ambiguous. This

inability to improvise was the flip side

of the same coin that made Polus a

brilliant organizer. A general staff

works under the premise that there is

enough time to analyze before acting. A

field commander works under the opposite

premise that time is never enough and

acting with incomplete information is

better than not acting at all. Palace

had not internalized this second

premise. The offruck tactic which

animated the German army was a doctrine

of initiative. Pus was a man of

procedure. The system had promoted him

precisely because he was exceptional

within the system. What the system had

not measured was whether he was

exceptional outside of it. The death of

vonau, the man who had been his mentor,

his sponsor, and his support in the high

command was a blow that Powus never

publicly acknowledged, but that his

subordinates perceived. Reichenau was

the type of commander who could have

balanced Palace's strengths with the

tactical aggression he lacked, who could

have acted as a counterweight to Hitler

in moments when the Furer imposed

damaging operational decisions. With

Reikau dead just 3 days after Powus took

command, the new commander of the sixth

army was left alone without the network

of personal relationships and

institutional authority that might have

given him room to maneuver. The nervous

tick in his left eye, which his

subordinates would learn to interpret as

a barometer of the pressure he was

under, began to appear during the

following months in moments of greatest

operational tension. By the summer of

1942, it was visible to anyone who

looked at him for more than a few

minutes. It didn't incapacitate him, but

it was the outward symptom of an

internal tension that the man could not

or would not verbalize. His first major

test in command came in May 1942.

Marshall Seamon Timoshenko launched the

Karkov offensive with 640,000 soldiers,

1,200 tanks, and about 1,000 planes

using as a base the salient formed in

Barancovo in January. The Soviet

objective was to encircle the fourth

Panzer Army and the Sixth Army,

executing an enveloping maneuver from

the salient to the north and south.

During the first days, the pressure on

the left flank of the sixth was intense.

Powas coordinated with the first panza

army of general feld marshal Io vonist

for a pinsir response. While the eighth

core of the sixth army maintained

pressure on the salient from the north,

the first panzer army attacked from the

south, closing the encirclement in

Barancovo on May 22nd. Two Soviet armies

were trapped. The number of prisoners

captured exceeded 240,000 men. Paulus

received the knight's cross of the iron

cross for that operation. It seemed that

the man had found his measure in his

army and his profession. What the

success at Barnovo did not show because

the conditions did not put it to the

test was how Pace would respond when the

circumstances were adverse, when the

information was incomplete, when orders

from above were wrong and the time to

analyze them had run out. Those

conditions would arrive in November 1942

within a Soviet encirclement in the

ruins of a city on the banks of the

Vulgar. And Powus' responses to those

conditions would seal the fate of

330,000 men. Operation Blue and the

advance toward the Vular. In the summer

of 1942, Hitler designed the great

German offensive in the south, Operation

Blue, Fall Blau. The goal was twofold

and ambitious to the point of

recklessness. To capture the oil fields

of the Caucuses and cut off Soviet

supply lines via the Vular River. Army

Group South was split into two groups.

Army Group A would advance toward the

Caucuses, while Army Group B, which

included the Sixth Army and the fourth

Panzer Army, would advance east and

southeast. On June 28th, 1942, Operation

Blue began with an attack toward

Vorones.

The bulk of the sixth army did not

advance until 2 days later with the

second Hungarian army and first Panzer

army protecting its left and right

flanks respectively.

The first days confirmed the hopes the

Soviet front in southern Russia was

collapsing. Timosenko's forces were

retreating instead of holding fixed

positions. Learning the bitter lesson of

1941, the encirclement pockets that had

characterized the first year of the

campaign were becoming more difficult to

execute. But the advance was real. On

July 23rd, Rostoff on Dawn fell. This

success led to the issuance of Fura

directive number 45, which changed the

execution order of operation blue with

consequences that some generals

immediately interpreted as a symptom of

overextension. It was ordered that Army

Group A advance toward the Caucuses

without waiting for Army Group B to

secure the vulgar. Both objectives would

be taken simultaneously.

And in the same document, the Sixth Army

was assigned a task that the directive

presented as secondary, but that would

become the center of gravity for the

entire war. Advance solely towards

Stalingrad and take the city.

Stalingrad,

an industrial city on the banks of the

Vular, stretching more than 50 km along

the western riverbank with enormous

factories manufacturing T34 tanks and

heavy armorament, even while shells

rained down on its roofs. a workingclass

city functional without the

architectural beauty of Kiev or the

vastness of Karkov, but it had the river

and it had Stalin's name. And these two

factors made it the place where the war

would change direction forever.

The rapid advance of the sixth army

toward the vulgar had created an exposed

left flank of more than 560 km to

Vorones, protected by the second

Hungarian army, the eighth Italian army,

and the third Romanian army. On the

right flank, the fourth Romanian army.

These troops with inferior material

capabilities and lacking modern

anti-tank defenses would determine the

future of the Sixth Army in the months

to come. No one in the German high

command wanted to see it. Or perhaps no

one had the courage to say it out loud.

On August 23rd, the vanguard of the 16th

Panza division cited the vulgar. On the

same day, the fourth Luft flatter, the

fourth airfleet of General Obus

Wolffrram Fryhertoen

bombed Stalingrad with approximately 600

aircraft. The civilian death toll from

this bombing exceeded 40,000. The city

was burning and the Sixth Army was

preparing to enter.

The Raten, the rat's war in the ruins.

No one who has studied the first days of

the Sixth Army's assault on Stalingrad

can fail to notice the gap between

expectations and reality. The initial

combats in August 1942 seemed to confirm

what prior experience had promised. The

Soviets were giving ground in the

suburbs, fragmenting under the combined

pressure of infantry and aviation, and

the city appeared destined to fall

within weeks. General Paulus calculated

that organized resistance would soon

collapse. General Feld Marshall

vonvikes, commander of Army Group B,

shared this optimism. Even in the OKW,

the reports of the advance were read as

the final phase of an operation that

followed the logic of all the previous

ones. It was not to be. Stalingrad was

not France. It was not Belgium. It

wasn't even the Ukrainian step where the

large encirclement pockets had worked

with clockwork precision. Stalingrad was

an industrial city of Soviet

construction from the 1920s and 1930s.

Reinforced concrete buildings of four

and fivetory structures designed not for

aesthetics but for resistance to the

climate and industrial weight. Metal

structures hundreds of meters long with

steel and concrete walls, stone barns

with 1 m thick walls, industrial

drainage canals that cut the terrain

into sectors of close combat. The city

didn't have the wide avenues or open

spaces that made tanks and artillery

decisive in open fields. It was a

labyrinth. And in a labyrinth, offragic

and blitzkrieg lost their most

fundamental advantage, speed.

On September 13th, 1942, General

Lieutenant Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov took

command of the 62nd Army from Nikita

Kruchev and Andre Yerimeno with an order

that left no room for interpretation.

defend Stalinrad to the death.

Chuikov, 42 years old, had been in the

Red Army since he was 15 when he

enlisted as a volunteer in the Red Guard

in 1918 during the Civil War. He had

fought in the Winter War of 1939 to 1940

as an army commander. And that

experience, in many ways a fiasco for

Soviet forces, had shaped his

understanding of what it meant to fight

in conditions of reduced visibility,

restricted terrain, and the tactical

superiority of the adversary. He was

explosive in demeanor, prone to

expelling subordinates who did not act

with the speed he demanded, and had an

intuitive grasp of what set urban combat

apart from any other form of warfare.

TWF understood something his adversaries

took weeks to accept. The only way to

survive inside Stalingrad was to not

leave space between their own lines and

the German ones. The standard distance

between enemy lines in conventional

combat, typically between 300 and 500 m,

was the distance needed by German

artillery to fire safely without hitting

their own positions and the distance

needed by stookers to identify targets

and attack them without risking hitting

friendly troops.

If Soviet defenders got close enough to

the attackers that artillery and

aviation lost their utility. Bombing the

enemy meant bombing themselves. Triov

called this hugging the enemy. His men

practiced it with a ferocity that was

beyond any manual of tactics. The

practical implementation of this tactic

transformed the battlefield into

something the Germans had never

encountered. Soviet sapper units turned

every building into an independent

fortress. They would demolish internal

staircases to prevent vertical movement,

block doors with rubble, open loopholes

in separating walls between apartments

to create fire networks covering

hallways and inner courtyards. Snipers

operated from positions in the upper

floors and basement simultaneously,

keeping German attackers in a state of

constant alertness that wore down

concentration and consumed the soldiers

psychological energy with an

effectiveness no frontal assault could

match. German assault engineers, the

Pionera, who entered a building, never

knew if it was completely clear or if

there were still Soviet soldiers alive

on the floor below, on the roof, or

behind the wall they had just crossed.

On September 13th, 1942, the 71st, 76th,

and 295th German Infantry Divisions

advanced toward the city center,

defended at the time by around 20,000 of

Chikov's men. The 71st division reached

the city center and captured the main

railway station. However, a

counterattack by the 13th Guard's rifle

division under General Major Alexander

Rodimsef, which had crossed the vulgar

on barges under German fire the previous

night, preserved the central dock, the

vital point for maintaining the flow of

reinforcements and supplies from the

eastern riverbank. Of that Soviet

division, only 320 men out of the

initial 10,000 survived the entire

battle, but the dock was held. Control

of the Vulgar was the heart of the

Soviet defensive strategy. The eastern

bank of the river remained in Soviet

hands throughout the battle, and from

that bank came night after night the

reinforcements, ammunition, food, and

medical supplies that kept the 62nd Army

alive. The fies crossed under fire from

German artillery and aviation. Many

sank, those that made it unloaded under

fire and returned with the wounded. The

river in September and October was at

temperatures that killed anyone who fell

into the water within minutes. The

barges navigated between the blocks of

ice that began to form in November. The

logistical bridge over the vulgar was

fragile, intermittent, and costly in

lives, but it was never entirely broken.

The Sixth Army bled in September and

October. The divisions that had entered

the battle with thousands of men each

were reduced to skeletal remains, but

often more lethal because the survivors

were the most experienced and adapted to

the specific type of combat in the city.

The figures from the 14th Panza Corps

are revealing by the end of September,

the 16th Panza Division, one of the

elite units of the sixth that had

reached the vulgar in August, had fewer

than 2,000 effective combatants. The

24th Panza Division, another of the

jewels of the sixth, had lost more than

60% of its officers since the beginning

of the fighting in the city. Some

regiments were fighting with fewer than

100 effective soldiers, the equivalent

of a nominal company. The factories that

named the combat sectors became the

epicenters of the most brutal battles.

The Zurgjinsky tractor factory, with its

steel and concrete halls 800 m long, its

assembly pits several meters deep, and

its overhead cranes still hanging over

the shattered battlefield, was the scene

of fighting that lasted weeks and was

literally measured in meters per day.

The Barricadi Gun Factory, where the

Soviets had been producing artillery

until days before the Germans arrived,

was a complex of industrial buildings

that the defenders had converted into a

fortress of concrete and steel that

required an enormous effort to be taken

room by room. The Red October steel

factory in the northern sector was a

conglomerate of smelting furnaces,

warehouses, and administrative buildings

that changed hands in some sectors

several times a day. Inside the factory

it was different, wrote a German

corporal who served in the fighting for

Baricardi. Outside there was sky, even

if it was gray. Inside there was only

darkness, cement dust, and the noise

always the noise. The shots inside those

spaces sounded different, drier, closer.

You'd go deaf after a while and fight in

silence, looking at shadows. On October

14th, 1942, Powus launched what would be

the most concentrated assault of the

entire battle. Five full divisions. the

14th Panza Division, the 3005th and

389th Infantry Divisions, the 100th

Jagger Division, and the 60th Motorized

Infantry Division with more than 90,000

men and 300 tanks concentrated on a

front of 4 km with massive support from

the Luftvafer, which carried out over

3,000 combat sorties on the most

intensive days. The objective was the

Jurgjinsky tractor factory and the

surrounding industrial area. In the

first hours, the overwhelming weight of

the strike shattered several Soviet

battalions. The 14th Panza Division

broke the lines of the 37th Guards

Division and advanced northeast,

reaching the edge of the factory and

splitting the 62nd Army into two

sectors. For a moment, it seemed the

resistance would finally collapse.

The 138th Siberian Rifle Division

arrived, crossing the Vular on rafts

during the nights of October 15th and

16th under continuous German fire with

water temperatures close to freezing.

Every man who crossed that river knew

that the chances of their barge being

sunk before reaching the shore were real

and calculable. They crossed anyway.

This division and the fresh units that

followed in the days after injected

exactly the kind of resistance capacity

needed to prevent the sector from

collapsing. The Germans took the

Zerjinski tractor factory. They took

most of Baricardi. They occupied half of

the Red October factory, but the 62nd

Army survived.

By the end of October 1942, the state of

the Sixth Army was that of a force that

had gained nearly all the available

ground and consumed an irreplaceable

portion of its combat potential in the

process. It controlled 90% of the city,

but that percentage represented

destroyed buildings, useless rubble, and

terrain that had no operational value.

The remaining 10% in Soviet hands was a

narrow strip along the vulgar riverbank

with a depth in some sectors of only 200

or 300 m. But that strip led to the

vulgar, and as long as it led to the

vulgar, reinforcements would continue to

arrive. "We were no longer an army,"

recalled one of the survivors of those

weeks with the flat voice of someone who

had learned to speak of such things

without letting the tremor show. We were

small groups, four men here, eight

there. Each building was a separate

world. You didn't know what was

happening 50 m from you. You heard shots

and didn't know if they were yours or

the enemies. Sometimes it didn't matter

to know. On November 11th, 1942, the

last German attempt to take the city

before the winter came was the assault

on the coastal strip in the southern

sector, where the forces of the 71st

Infantry Division attempted to push the

remnants of the 62nd Army toward the

river in the central dock sector. They

managed to advance to within 300 m of

the vular at some points, but they never

reached the water. And the men who

attempted this final advance had already

been fighting for weeks with a tenth of

the personnel they had started the

campaign with. At that very moment,

hundreds of kilometers to the north and

south of the vulgar, the Red Army was

finishing the secret concentration of

the forces that would make all of this

irrelevant. The time the Sixth Army had

spent inside the city, every day of

urban combat, every decimated battalion,

every tank lost in the hallways of a

factory that was worth no tank had also

been the time that Vasilki and Zhukov

needed to prepare what was to come on

November 19th. The trap closes.

Operation Urinus.

On September 13th, 1942, while the Sixth

Army began to push into Stalingrad, a

different plan was presented to Stalin

in Moscow. Not a reinforcement of the

city's defense, but the encirclement of

the attacker. Its authors were General

Gorgijukov and General Pulovnik

Alexander Vasilvki, chief of the Soviet

general staff. The concept was brutally

elegant. Instead of trying to defeat the

sixth army inside Stalenrad, the idea

was to surround it from the outside. The

flanks of the sixth army were protected

by Axis ally units whose commanders knew

better than anyone their own

vulnerability. Romanian general of army

Petra Dumitrescu in command of the third

Romanian army on the northern flank had

repeatedly requested additional

anti-tank weapons from the Germans. His

grouper B sent him 67.5 cm pack 97/38

anti-tank guns. Dumatrescu replied that

it was not enough. It wasn't. The

Soviets knew this. The mascarovka,

deception and camouflage was carried out

with a meticulousness the Germans had

not seen before. For weeks, large masses

of infantry, tanks, and artillery were

secretly concentrated to the north and

south of Stalinrad in the sectors

defended by the Romanians. The movements

were carried out only at night. Trains

advanced without lights. Our Reinhard

Galen, head of intelligence for FM

Dehira Ost foreign army's east, had

detected signs of concentration on the

Dawn bridges in front of the Third

Romanian army, but dismissed the threat

as limited. The nine Panza divisions

that OKH kept as a strategic reserve

were not sent south. They stayed in

front of the ROV salient where Galen

believed the main strike would occur. On

November 19th, 1942, at 7:30 a.m., with

temperatures several degrees below zero

and thick fog limiting visibility to 200

m, the southwestern and dawn fronts

initiated an 80minute artillery

preparation. About 3,500 Soviet guns

opened fire. The fog and snow prevented

forward observers from adjusting the

fire, so the artillery simply fired on

known or estimated positions. The damage

to the third Romanian army was real but

not devastating. What destroyed them was

what came after. The fifth tank army of

Lieutenant General Prooi Romanenko

advanced in four assault groups. The

47th Guard's rifle division supported by

64 tanks destroyed the 14th Romanian

Infantry Division. The 50th Guards Rifle

Division with 74 tanks collapsed the

fifth Romanian Infantry Division. By

noon, the tank brigades of the first

tank corps and the 26th tank corps were

flowing through the holes in the

Romanian front. The sudden appearance of

nearly 200 tanks caused the complete

collapse of the 14th Romanian infantry

division. The center of the Romanian

army disintegrated. On November 20th,

the Stalingrad front launched its own

arm of the encirclement from the south

with the 51st Army of Major General

Nikolai Trufanov and the 57th Army of

Major General Fedor Tolbujin attacking

the right flank of the fourth Panzer

army. The weak Romanian divisions of the

sixth corps quickly collapsed. Tolbujin

committed the fourth mechanized core of

Major General Vasilei Vulski which

advanced westward against minimal

resistance. On November 22nd, Lieutenant

Colonel Georg N. Philipov led a column

of five T34 tanks, two motorized rifle

companies in trucks, five armored

vehicles, and three captured German

vehicles toward the pontoon bridge over

the dawn at Berisovvski northwest of

Kalak. Pretending to be a German column,

Philippov reached the bridge before

dawn. The guards, a military police

unit, an 8.8 8 cm anti-aircraft gun and

personnel from an engineering school did

not recognize the deception until the

Soviet soldiers were already on the

bridge. The 8.8 cm gun destroyed two T34

tanks before being neutralized. The

bridge was captured intact. Philip off

established a defensive perimeter and

waited for 11 hours alone with his small

force until reinforcements arrived. He

was awarded the title of hero of the

Soviet Union. On November 23rd, 1942,

the Soviet encirclement arms closed to

the east of Kalak. The Sixth Army,

330,000 men in 22 divisions, along with

troops from other core and Axis allied

units, was completely surrounded.

It was the first time in history that a

complete German field army had been

trapped. More than 30,000 Axis soldiers

escaped to the south before the pinsers

fully closed. Inside the castle, the

cauldron, as the Germans called the

pocket, about 284,000 men remained. The

paper fortress, the encirclement, and

the airlift. The initial reaction inside

the kessle was one of disbelief. Many

officers and soldiers did not

immediately understand the magnitude of

what had happened. Communications were

confused, reports contradictory. But

those who understood right away, the

commanders of the more veteran

divisions, the staff officers who knew

the maps and the numbers, felt something

that very few described in their diaries

with the correct word. The word was

despair.

When I realized the encirclement was

real, that it was not a temporary

movement of the enemy, but a closed

trap, I stared at the map for a long

time, wrote a left tenant colonel, whose

name did not survive the war. I didn't

think about Germany. I didn't think

about my family. I thought about the men

who were sleeping a 100 meters from

where I was standing, who still didn't

know what I already knew.

Polus immediately requested permission

to attempt a breakout to the west before

the encirclement was consolidated. On

the night of November 23rd at 11:45

p.m., he sent a radio signal to OKW

requesting freedom of action. The

euphemism for permission to break out of

the encirclement. Hitler's response the

next day was unequivocal. The Sixth Army

would stay in position, be supplied by

airlift, and wait for Fon Mannstein to

break the encirclement from the outside.

The promise of the airlift had an

involuntary architect, Reichkes Marshall

Herman Guring, commander of the

Luftvafer, who had assured Hitler that

his air force could supply the sixth by

air. He did so without consulting

technical experts, basing it on the

precedent of the Demunks encirclement

the previous winter, where the

Luftbuffer had supplied six trapped

divisions, 96,000 men, with an average

of 300 tons per day for 3 months. But

the comparison was flawed. The sixth

army was more than three times larger

than the force trapped at Demiansk. Its

headquarters calculated that it would

need at least 750 tons per day to

operate. General Oitant Martin Febig,

commander of the 8th Fleer Corps, had

already told Polus on November 21st that

the Luftvafer did not have the means to

supply the sixth army by air.

When the airlift began on November 24th,

Feiig only had 25 operational JW 52

transports in theta, each capable of

carrying about 2 tons. The first day of

the airlift delivered 86 tons. The first

5 days totaled 269 tons. The

temperatures in the Stalingrad area

during November and December of 1942

ranged between 0 and -10° C during the

day, dropping to -35 during the coldest

nights. The Pomonic airfield inside the

kessle began receiving flights.

Tatsinskaya, 237 km away, was designated

as the main base for the airlift. The

army inside the kessle began to ration

itself. The daily bread rations were

reduced first to 400 gs, then to 200.

The 25,000 horses of the artillery

units, which the soldiers needed to move

the pieces across the snowy terrain,

were sacrificed for food. When the

horses were gone, whatever could be

found was eaten. Of the 58,000 Soviet

auxiliaries, the Hiwis, prisoners who

had agreed to serve as labor and

logistical support for the German army,

more than 19,000 remained inside the

kessle, and some fought alongside the

German units. The 3,500 Soviet prisoners

the Germans held in two detention camps

inside the kessle survived in even worse

conditions. Of that total, it is

estimated that fewer than 20 survived.

On December 9th, 1942, General Curt

Zitzler, newly appointed chief of staff

of OKH, began consuming the same daily

rations of calories as the soldiers

trapped in Stalinrad in an attempt to

persuade Hitler of the urgency of the

situation. He visibly lost weight in

days. Hitler did not change his

position.

The attempted rescue winter field

marshal Eric von Manstein arrived in

Novacherkasque on November 26th and

activated Hus Groupadon. He had few

forces available but those arriving were

of first rate quality. General Major

Ehard Rouse brought the sixth Panza

division from France with 150

operational tanks. The 23rd Panza

division arrived from the Caucusus

though with reduced resources. The 17th

Panza Division with only 57 tanks was

promised but took time to arrive. On

December 12th, 1942, at 6:30 a.m., Hoth

launched Operation Wintergitta, Winter

Storm. The sky was clear, visibility was

excellent. The sixth Panza division with

141 tanks was the Schweperpunct, the

spearhead pushing north along the

railway line. The first day was

encouraging. Hoth advanced about 20 km

and shattered Soviet rifle divisions.

The Luftvafer was able to provide close

air support with Stuka sorties. But

starting on December 13th, General Major

Vasili Vulski committed the fourth

mechanized corps to defensive positions

around Verknumski. What followed was a

5-day battle that consumed the time von

Mannstein didn't have. The fourth

mechanized corps suffered enormous

losses, more than 5,500 casualties and

around 70 tanks, but its resistance was

brilliant. It allowed the second guard's

army of Lieutenant General Rodon

Malininovski to reach the Mishkova River

and form a solid defensive line with

five fresh rifle divisions. On December

19th, the sixth Panza division finally

crossed the Mishkova and captured an

intact bridge at Vasilvka. It was 48 km

from the southern perimeter of the

castle. This was the closest the rescue

would get. Fon Manstein sent a radio

message to Polus that same night

instructing him to initiate the breakout

southward. The code name was Donishlag

Thunder. General Hans Valentine Huber

had at least 60 operational panzas and

had started to concentrate the 14th

Panza Corps at the southwestern corner

of the kessle. The distance to cover was

about 50 km. It was risky, but it was

possible. Pace did not order the

breakout. The decision or nondecision of

Pace during those hours is one of the

most studied debates in the military

history of World War II. His defenders

point out that Hitler had expressly

denied authorization for a retreat. His

critics argue that at that moment, Fon

Mannstein was implicitly giving him

permission and that there were German

commanders who in similar situations

acted without waiting for formal

approval from Hitler.

General de Artillery Valta Fon

Sidlitzkbach, commander of the 51st Army

Corps inside the kessle, had attempted

to force the issue on November 23rd by

issuing his own orders for preparing a

breakout. Paulus tolerated this act of

insubordination without consequences.

What Polus did believe with a sincerity

that his later memoirs did not conceal

was that the Sixth Army did not have the

fuel or the fighting capacity to survive

a 50 km advance in open terrain during

the winter, abandoning all its heavy

equipment. He thought that most of the

men who survived the breakout attempt

would reach the other side without

equipment, without organization, and

without the possibility of being

reorganized into a fighting force. He

may have been right, but not attempting

it meant that everyone would die. By

December 23rd, Fon Mannstein recognized

the reality. The sixth Panza division

was withdrawn from the Mishkova salient

to support the Cheerf, which was

collapsing under the impact of Operation

Little Saturn. On December 24th, the Red

Army launched its Kotelnikovo offensive

with the second guard's army and the

seventh tank corps of General Rott

Mistro. Hoth's forces already decimated

withdrew. Catelnikova was captured on

December 29th. There would be no rescue.

Little Saturn and the collapse of the

flanks. While Wintergitta advanced and

failed at the Mishkova, another element

of the Soviet plan was unfolding on the

northern flank. Operation Little Saturn,

a scaledown version of the original

Operation Saturn that the Stafka

planners had designed, launched on

December 16th, 1942.

Two Soviet armies against the 8th

Italian army of General Italo Gary

Baldi, which was defending a 125 km

sector along the dawn. The eighth

Italian army consisted of 10 infantry

divisions in three core, the second,

35th, and alpine corps along with the

298th German infantry division. The only

armor available as a reserve for the

Italians was a provisional formation

called the 27th Panza Division, which

was little more than a regimental-sized

battle group with 65 mostly obsolete

tanks. Batutin began the operation at

8:00 a.m. on December 16th with a

90-minute artillery preparation which

was practically ineffective due to the

dense fog. The first day did not produce

a decisive breakthrough. But on the

second day, December 17th, the 17th tank

corps was introduced into the gap

between the Italian divisions Koseria

and Ravena. The defense broke. The 25th

tank corps of General Pavof and the 24th

tank corps of General Vasili Bardonov

poured into the open space. On December

24th, the 24th tank corps of Bardinoff

with 58 operational tanks under a sky

that German Stookers had been

relentlessly attacking for days reached

the Tatsinskaya airfield. The airfield

was filled with nearly 200 transport

aircraft. Luftvafa personnel were

completely caught by surprise. The first

Soviet shells triggered panic. The

planes began taking off in emergency

conditions, some without cleared

runways. More than 50 aircraft were

destroyed on the ground. The supply

depots accumulated for the airlift

caught fire. The airlift to Stalingrad

was severely damaged. Badnov reported

his position to Vatutin. He had

completed his mission, but his tanks

were out of fuel and ammunition. Vatutin

had no means to resupply him

immediately.

On December 25th, General Herman Balk's

11th Panza Division surrounded Badenov's

core and began systematically destroying

it. On the night of December 27th to

28th, Badonov made an unauthorized

breakout and reached the Soviet lines

with nine tanks and around 900 men. The

collapse of the 8th Italian army and the

loss of Tatsinskaya dismantled the last

external support for the Sixth Army. Von

Manstein organized emergency defensive

lines along the donets with what was

left available. But for the Sixth Army

inside the kessle, the message was

clear. There would be no rescue. There

would be no corridor. Only the cold, the

hunger, and the time they had left

remained.

Operation Ring, the final blow. The new

year of 1943 arrived in the castle of

Stalingrad with temperatures regularly

dropping to -20° C during the day and

minus35 at night. The daily bread ration

was reduced to 80 g on December 30th.

The army had 103 operational tanks and

35 assault guns by mid December, but the

fuel necessary to move them ran out

faster than it could arrive.

On January 7th, 1943, General Pulkovnik

Constantine Roosovvski, now in command

of the Dawn front, which had taken on

the responsibility of the encirclement,

sent an ultimatum to Polus through

special emissaries. The terms were

specific, normal rations, medical

treatment for the wounded and sick,

repatriation to any country after the

war. Palace rejected the offer. Hitler's

orders were equally specific. Resist to

the death. On January 10th, 1943, at

8:05 a.m., Rokosvski initiated Operation

Ring Cultso. General Pulovnik Nikolai

Voronov, chief of artillery for the Red

Army and Stafka representative, had

concentrated 500 guns and howitzers,

plus 450 multiple rocket launchers in a

12 km wide attack sector. It was the

highest artillery density achieved by

the Red Army up until that point in the

war. Unlike previous operations, the sky

was clear and visibility was excellent.

Soviet forward observers were able to

adjust fire with precision. The

55-minute bombardment that opened

operation ring destroyed German

positions across the entire western

front of the kessle, especially in the

sector of the 44th Infantry Division.

The five rifle divisions of the 65th

Army under General Bat advanced against

the 44th Division. The Germans resisted

position by position, sometimes engaging

in hand-to-hand combat. Four German

battalions were destroyed, but Hub's

Panza reserves arrived in time to

contain the most dangerous advances, and

the Western Front held on that first

day. January 11th was different. Helpman

Rudolph Hyan with four tanks awaited the

advance of the 57th Guard's tank

regiment with its British-made Churchill

tanks. In a fight lasting minutes, Hyan

destroyed 18 of the 21 Churchills before

the attack was contained. It was the

kind of tactical action the Sixth Army

could still produce, but Hube lost 30 of

his 46 tanks and 11 of his 18 heavy

anti-tank guns in just the first two

days of Operation Ring. On January 16th,

the 51st Guards Rifle Division captured

the Pomonic airfield. The Sixth Army

lost its main airfield. The Luftvafa was

forced to withdraw its escort fighters.

Transport flights continued unprotected

toward the secondary airfield of Gumra.

On January 23rd, Gumra also fell. The

last German flight left the kessle at

10:45 that morning. From that moment,

resupply depended exclusively on air

drops, most of which fell on Soviet

controlled territory. Roasovski paused

on January 17th to replenish ammunition

and reorganize his units. The Dawnfront

had suffered approximately 26,000

casualties in one week of fighting and

lost half of its tanks. The pause cost

the Soviet offensive some momentum, but

the final outcome was not in doubt. On

January 21st, the offensive resumed.

Four rifle divisions from the 65th Army

and all available artillery struck the

German line around Baburkin. The 44th

Infantry Division, already reduced to a

third of its strength, could not hold.

The western front of the kessle began to

collapse. On January 26th, 1943, at

11:00 a.m., the 21st Army under Major

General Chisikov broke through the

remnants of the 8th Army Corps and

linked up with the 62nd Army of Chuikov

at Mamay of Kiran. The castle was split

in two. Streker's 11th Army Corps was

isolated in the north in the ruins of

the tractor factory and Baricardi. The

bulk of what remained of the Sixth Army,

including Powas and his staff, was

trapped in the southern pocket around

the univer stores in the city center. On

January 30th, 1943, the 10th anniversary

of Hitler's rise to power, Friedrich

Powas was promoted to General Feld

Marshall by radio. It was simultaneously

an honor and an implicit order of

suicide. No German Field Marshall had

ever been captured. Palace told a

subordinate who recorded his words, "I

have no intention of shooting myself

because of this Bohemian corporal."

Referring to Hitler, he chose surrender.

The end. Surrender and captivity.

The morning of January 31st, 1943, the

Univer warehouse building in the

southern center of Stalingrad was the

last headquarters of Friedrich Powus. In

the basement of this building, among

mattresses, scattered papers, and the

sour smell of the wounded, the newly

promoted General Feld Marshall awaited

the end. Soldiers from the 38th

motorized rifle brigade of the 64th Army

under General Mikail Schumof surrounded

the building. At 7:15 a.m., Paulus and

his staff emerged into the open and

surrendered. In the northern part of the

castle, General Carl Streker initially

refused to surrender. His 11th Army

Corps, about 50,000 men scattered across

the remains of seven divisions,

entrenched in the ruins of the tractor

factory and Baricardi, held out for two

more days. On February 1st, 1943, at

8:30 a.m., the Dawn front launched the

final assault with the 65th and 66th

Armies, preceded by a 90-minute

artillery bombardment. The 16th Air Army

bombed the German positions with all

available capacity. The northern and

western fronts of the pocket were

shattered. About 4,000 Germans were

killed or wounded in the final assault.

More than 20,000 were captured.

Streker's subordinates initiated

surrender talks without his

authorization. On February 2nd, 1943, at

7:00 a.m., Streker finally agreed to

surrender. At 9:20 a.m., Hus Groupadon

received the last message from

Stalinrad. The resistance had ended. The

Sixth Army no longer existed. Of the

284,000 men trapped in the castle on

November 23rd, approximately 150,000 had

died during the encirclement from

combat, cold, hunger, or disease. The

Soviets claim to have captured 91,000

prisoners. Other estimates suggest the

number may have reached 107,800,

including about 700 Croats and

approximately 3,000 Romanians. Of those

prisoners, most died in the following

months during the marches to the camps

and in the conditions of the camps

themselves. Many were sent to Povsky

camp number 127 near Saratov. Of 8,7

prisoners sent there. 1,526

died on the way and another 4,663

in the first 6 weeks after arrival.

Others were sent to Beckovka camp number

108 where they were employed in clearing

the battlefield rubble. The officers

were distributed into three camps.

Orangi number 74, Yalabuga number 97,

and Krasnogsk number 27, where they were

interrogated and some processed for war

crimes.

Some disabled prisoners were released in

1947 and 1948. Most were not released

until after Stalin's death in 1953.

Only about 6,000 of the prisoners

captured at Stalingrad ever returned to

Germany.

The last group returned in 1955, 12

years after the surrender. "I was no

longer afraid of dying," wrote a German

soldier on a piece of paper found many

years later among the ruins of the city.

"I was afraid of dying alone with no one

knowing my name.