Stalingrad Ends: Soviet Victory Turns WWII Tide

The German 6th Army, which had entered Stalingrad with 300,000 men, surrendered its last 91,000 starving survivors on February 2, 1943, ending the bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, promoted to that rank just one day earlier by Hitler, who expected him to commit suicide rather than capitulate, became the first German field marshal ever taken prisoner. The defeat shattered the myth of Wehrmacht invincibility and shifted the momentum of World War II permanently to the Allies. The German offensive to capture Stalingrad had begun in August 1942, driven by Hitler’s obsession with taking the city bearing Stalin’s name and controlling the Volga River supply line. The Luftwaffe reduced much of the city to rubble, but the ruins proved ideal defensive terrain. Soviet soldiers fought from building to building, floor to floor, sometimes room to room. Snipers became decisive weapons. The average life expectancy of a Soviet reinforcement arriving at the Stalingrad front was twenty-four hours. On November 19, 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, a massive pincer movement that smashed through the weak Romanian and Hungarian forces protecting the German flanks. Within four days, Soviet forces had encircled the entire 6th Army. Hitler ordered Paulus to hold his position and wait for relief. Goering promised the Luftwaffe could supply the trapped army by air, but deliveries never exceeded a fraction of the minimum 300 tons per day needed. A relief column under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein pushed to within 30 miles of the pocket in December but could get no closer. By January 1943, German soldiers were eating horses, rats, and their own boot leather. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius. Nearly two million soldiers and civilians died in the five-month battle, making it the deadliest single engagement in human history.