No Encirclement at Stalingrad?
By Dana Lombardy, Associate Editor

Published Monday, March 10, 2008  |  Comments  | Print  | E-mail

Perhaps the most famous turning point on the Eastern Front in World War II was the Red Army’s victory at the battle of Stalingrad. For two months, from mid-September to mid-November 1942, and with its back against the Volga River, the Soviet 62nd Army grimly hung on to a steadily shrinking perimeter of this industrial town as elements of the German 6 th Army made repeated attacks to conquer Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s city.

On November 19, as winter set in, a massive counter-offensive overran the 6 th Army’s weak flanks and trapped twenty-three German and Romanian divisions and nearly a quarter million men inside a huge pocket. After a relief attempt by ground and supply of the besieged troops by air both failed, the last German units surrendered on February 2, 1943. Only 91,000 Axis soldiers were left to march into captivity.

Without substantial reinforcements that were not historically available, or a different attitude by Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler to permit the immediate breakout of 6 th Army in November, was a different conclusion really possible?

An alternative outcome at Stalingrad is not just a fantasy “what if” scenario. However, in order to present this hypothesis, we need to examine what happened that November 1942 about 600 miles north of Stalingrad in the German bulge around Rzhev near Moscow.

For many years after World War II, the disastrous 1942 Soviet attack outside of Moscow remained buried in their archives virtually unknown in the West. In 1999, the University of Kansas Press published historian David Glantz’s groundbreaking study Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat (reprinted in paperback in 2005). This book revealed that there were two major offensives planned by Georgi Zhukov, Stalin’s Chief of the General Staff, that winter: Operation Uranus at Stalingrad, and Operation Mars at Rzhev. The two operational objectives were similar: break through the enemy lines at two opposing points with tanks and then push on with these armored “pincers” to link up and encircle the Axis forces.

At Stalingrad, the Soviet plan worked. At Rzhev, despite initial success, the Soviet assault became a catastrophe – the Red Army lost 1,600 tanks and more than 330,000 soldiers in just three weeks. Why?

Soviet forces employed directly in both operations were about the same. Operation Mars: 668,000 men; 2,000 tanks; 1,170 planes. Operation Uranus: 700,000 men; 1,400 tanks; 1,463 planes. So what was different?

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