Russia to mark 75 years since Nazi troops defeat in Battle of Stalingrad

MOSCOW, February 2. /TASS/. Russia marks 75 years since the defeat of the Axis troops in the Battle of Stalingrad on Friday, February 2. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most impressive combat operations during World War II in terms of geographic span, duration, intensity, and the size of armies engaged in it. Russian historian Andrei Issayev has prepared a review of the conclusive phases of the battle specially for TASS. Operation Ring Capitulation of the so-called northern grouping of the encircled 6th Army of the Wehrmacht became the final chord of the protracted battle, which began in August 1942. The 6th Army laid down arms and gave up resistance after a powerful fire attack by Soviet artillery. Its commander, Gen Karl Strecker surrendered. His superior, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, surrendered two days earlier. On February 2, Soviet forces took prisoner more than 33,000 men and officers of the enemy. The overall defeat of Paulus’s Army in the Stalingrad area resulted in the surrender of 91,000 servicemen of the Wehrmacht, including about 2,500 officers and 24 generals. This was one of the main results of the pivotal battle of World War II. The Defeat of Nazi Troops The Red Army dealt the crushing blow to the Nazis at the moment when the Third Reich, according to the notions harbored by its leaders was at the peak of its mightiness. The defeat suffered near Stalingrad had no precedents in the Reich’s previous history. The Soviet troops encircled and fully destroyed the largest army the Germans had positioned on the Soviet -- some 300,000 men and officers. Then followed a collapse of the entire southern sector of the front. It manifested itself in a chaotic retreat of forces of the Army Group A from North Caucasus and the Army Group B towards Rostov-on-Don and Kharkov. The flattening of the 6th Army in Stalingrad was echoed in the battles of a smaller scale on the river Don where the Red Army defeated the allies of Nazi Germany - the Hungarian and Italian troops. The losses of manpower by the Wehrmacht in December 1942 and January 1943 did not have a parallel previously. Bigger numbers of Nazi soldiers were killed only the summer of 1944. How Did the Red Army Manage It? There were several factors that made it possible for the Red Army to launch an unexpected counteroffensive in November 1942. Number one was a rational accumulation of combat reserves. The Soviet command gradually withdrew behind the lines the divisions battered during the summer operations of 1942, filled the vacant positions with newly drafted men, trained them and did the necessary replacements. Secondly, the Red Army went over to a quality new level of forming mechanized infantry and armor units. The mobility of the fully motorized armored and mechanized infantry corps increased considerably. They were now capable of making deep breakthroughs and conducting combat operations in isolation from the main forces, sometimes at distances as big as 50 km to 100 km. It was a strike by the mechanized corps from the sparsely populated steppe-lands to the south of Stalingrad where roads were few and far between that caught the Wehrmacht commanders practically unawares. Formation of mechanized corps was as much a revolutionary solution in the first half of the 1940’s as the setting up of air-mobile helicopter-airlifted divisions is in our days. A detail that is important to stress in this context is that the mechanized corps of November 1942 had mostly Soviet-manufactured vehicles in their fleets, as the U.S. supplies by Arctic Convoys could not meet the demands of the Eastern Front yet. Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vassilevsky: an Important Role Two remarkable Soviet military commanders, Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vassilevsky, played a vital role in organizing the counteroffensive near Stalingrad [Operation Uranus]. The planning of an offensive of a scale and scope not known before required an indisputable dimension of thinking and confidence in one’s own strength. Resolve and confidence was also required at the level of commanders of armored and mechanized corps who steered their units towards the targets in the enemy rear through the steppes, on the terrain without landmarks, amid blizzards and fog. The persistence and courage of the soldiers engaged in Operation Uranus was rewarded when they trapped the 300,000-strong grouping of enemy forces consisting of the 6th Army and a part of the 4th Tank Army in what was then called ‘a pot’ [which in this context stands for ‘entrapment’]. Remarkably, the ‘pot’ turned out to be bigger than the one that Zhukov and Vassilevsky had planned initially. The Outcome The high level of Germany’s economic development and advanced technologies helped the Nazi commanders prolong the resistance of the encircled troops, the final defeat of which in the course of Operation Ring lasted from January 10 through February 2, 1943. Isolated small groups of German soldiers and officers continued fighting amid the ruins of Stalingrad for another two or three days after that but these combat clashes could not affect the outcome of the whole battle anymore. Surprising as it might seem, a very significant effect achieved by the Battle of Stalingrad lay in the sphere of human psychology. It consolidated faith of the Red Army soldiers in their ability to overwhelm the enemy, while the troops of the Wehrmacht began to perceive the possibility of entrapment with an ever-increasing nervousness. Last but not least, the Soviet Union’s allies in the anti-Hitler coalition saw in an extremely graphic way the practical ability of the Red Army to wipe out huge military formations of the Reich. Read more