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Stalingrad :GAME CHANGER
"Operation Uranus"
By
George Friedman
INVASION OF SOVIET UNION
Stalingrad :GAME CHANGER
"Operation Uranus"
By
George Friedman
READ ALSO
: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Uranus
Nov 22, 2017
On Nov. 19, 1942, the Soviet Union launched Operation Uranus. Its goal was to envelop and destroy the German army fighting in the city of Stalingrad. Uranus closed the noose on the Germans a few days later
I have been writing about the four great battles of 1942 that extinguished the Axis powers’ chances of winning World War II. So far, I’ve written about Midway, Guadalcanal and El Alamein. Now, it is time to write about the most massive, brutal and crucial of those four battles: Stalingrad. It was a battle that stretched over five months, from late August 1942 to early February 1943, but Operation Uranus was its decisive moment. As with the other battles I’ve discussed, Stalingrad did not win the war for Russia. What it did was make a German victory impossible.
Intelligence Failures
The Battle of Stalingrad had its origins in a pivotal German miscalculation at the start of the war. Operation Barbarossa, the code name for Germany’s invasion of the east, was designed to destroy the Soviet Union, securing Germany’s eastern flank and thereby guaranteeing German control of continental Europe. The invasion began on June 22, 1941.
But the Germans made a critical error even before the invasion began. Barbarossa was a three-pronged attack. One was into the Baltic states and then toward Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg), the second was toward Moscow, and the third was into the south, designed to capture Ukraine and then the Caucasus. Formulating the plan in this way violated one of the principles of warfare, one sacred to the German high command: the concentration of forces. By dividing their forces, none of the Germans’ goals were achieved. Leningrad held out in spite of Germany’s blockade, the Germans were stopped just outside of Moscow, and the southern thrust wasn’t set up to succeed
Operation Barbarossa
The Germans’ blunder was rooted in an intelligence failure. The Abwher, Germany’s military intelligence, severely
underestimated the size of Soviet
reserves.
Based on those estimates, German high command mistakenly believed it didn’t need to concentrate its forces. The Germans envisioned an initial battle of encirclement to capture Soviet armies, followed by an advance against feeble reserves, ending in victory well before the end of winter 1941.
The German plan also didn’t account for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that December. Germany had hoped the Japanese would attack Siberia, pinning down the Soviet army stationed there. After Pearl Harbor, however, the Soviets knew that Siberia was secure. Japan could fight on only one front at a time, and the United States would keep it busy. This freed up the Soviets to shift their eastern forces – forces that German intelligence thought would be irrelevant to the European war – to Moscow, where they were instrumental in blocking the German advance.
This intelligence failure cost the Germans a victory in 1941. They might have knocked the Soviet Union out if they had taken Moscow, but that’s unclear. Leningrad was a strategic sideshow. But the war could certainly have been won in the south. And the crucial battle in the south was at Stalingrad.
The Meat Grinder
Modern wars and economies run on oil, and the Soviets’ major source of oil was Baku, in Azerbaijan. The city in the South Caucasus had been developed by the Nobel Brothers (the family for whom the prize is named) in the mid-to-late 19th century and had been Europe’s first major source of oil. Had the Germans focused their entire invasion on the south and captured the land bridge between the Volga and the Don rivers, Baku’s oil wouldn’t have been able to flow to Soviet factories, and no amount of lend-lease could have made up for it. But because of their faulty intelligence, the Germans felt as though they could have all three goals in 1941. They were wrong.
By the next spring, the Germans had realized their mistake. It was now Stalin who fell victim to bad intelligence. Stalin believed (and the Germans led him to believe) that the main German assault in 1942 would be toward Moscow. Instead, Germany concentrated its forces in a thrust toward the Volga, the Don and the city of Astrakhan, intent on cutting off Baku. Stalin was stunned when the Germans launched Case Blue in the south.
By August 1942, the Germans had reached Stalingrad. It was a way station for them that they expected to take easily before crossing the Volga and advancing toward Astrakhan. The Soviets immediately understood the threat that Case Blue posed, but their forces were concentrated in the wrong place.
Without a massed army to throw into the fight, the Soviets implemented a meat grinder strategy. They shipped poorly trained, poorly armed troops across the Volga to be annihilated by the Germans. The Soviets’ hope was that this would buy them time to shift their forces south for a counterattack. The Germans misunderstood the threat. They thought Stalin was sending tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths simply to keep the Germans off-balance, and they decided that the Soviets were on their last legs. Instead of withdrawing from Stalingrad and engaging in a battle maneuver – the sort of thing the Germans were best at – they[GERMANS] accepted the worst kind of warfare for themselves: a static urban battle that put the attackers at a massive disadvantage.
Soviet soldiers in 1942 during the battle of Stalingrad. -/AFP/Getty Images
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