stalingrad - russian tactics? poor nazi leadership? weather?

Hi folks,

Stalingrad has come to really fascinate me in the past few months. I've read Antony Beevor's book and some others. However, in none of these does it really voice an opinion in the descisive reason as to why the Reds won at Stalingrad.

I think personally, to state the obvious; Operation Uranus was the defining turning point in the battle yet can that be deemed a main reason for the Reds victory? Surely if Hitler would have attacked Moscow instead of Stalingrad, the construct and mobilisation of the Uranus force would have not manifested.

The failure of the luftwaffe airlift was obviously another key factor in the failure of the Germans, but again, the reason for this was surely the poor and rash promises of Hitler's henchman Goering. It seems the German leadership failed in many areas and idealised a facsist state of far too great proportions in such a small space of time. Hitler's obsession with the City that bore the name of his nemisis is possibly another key point in German failure.

I'd like to know what everyone else thinks about this?

 

Although I am sure we have discussed this somewhere before.

In my opinion it was the encircelment of the German 6th Army and her destrutcion. Although the weather made the positions in stalingrad unbearable, I think had it been summer the 6th army would still have been lost, lack of supplies such as food and ammuntiion cost the troops. I doubt that the Germans attacking moscow would have changed the Germans fate in stalingrad once they were engaged in the city.

Plus as I always say Hitler and Goering are Idiots and were not fit to command anything.

 

Well said, Tomcat



Paulus (German 6th Army commander) himself was not a true idiot I would say but he was nowhere near the General that Rommel or Guderian were.

 

I remember two specific things that though small had a big impact. The first was the type of construction used on the buildings prevented them from becoming large piles of rubble so it gave excellent cover to Russian snipers. The psychological impact is vast. The second was in the winter the Russians mixed the gun oil with a fuel(diesel maybe) and the mix kept the actions from freezing shut.

 

I agree Paulus was a sound commander, and love the animantion of hitler

 

quite simply, von paulus was ordered to stand, regardless.

 

Care to elaborate?

 

I think the campaign was doomed to fail from the moment the Germans entered the city. The Wehrmachts strength was in its mobility at that time, they didn't have Tigers and Panthers, just some MK IVs and the smaller ones and most of the supply train was still done by draft animals. They were over extended and getting bogged down there was the last thing they needed. As their supply lines stretched the Russians supply lines shortened. The Germans had one hell of a time supplying men and material in that type of combat enviornment. This gave them an edge although it was not the only factor.

 

Another part of the German loss was the fact that the Russians were able to get more artillery on the Germans, because of the Volga batteries and the U2 Recon birds the Russians were using. In the artillery factor, the Russians also won.

These batteries were also used to support operation Uranus (the encirclement of the 6th army).

 

The "interesting" thing is that the Soviets never believed they would trap that many troops in Stalingrad. They did not think Hitler would be that stupid...

Anyways, letting the Soviets have areas on this side of Volga like Serafimovitch and Kletskaja and also defending the flanks with weak troops, the attack was evident from the map, just like the Kursk offensive in late March 1943 map.

Map of the Encircling of 6th Army during Operation Uranus.

 

IIRC the U-2/PO-2 was used almost exclusively for night harassment sorties and not for spotting or recon by the 588th Night Bomber Regiment .

 

Wierd...I remember reading in Beevor's book about German soldiers who would see the U2 during the day and then several minutes later would come under artillery fire from the Russians.

 

Me too, they had a lot of them so most likely they were used for both purposes. They did have a scarcity of radios though so perhaps it was uncommon, there are other ways to do this.

The artillery was a key factor, it sat on the east bank of the Volga and harassed the Germans endlessly there is an instance of a battalion or a large group of German being slaughtered by a bombardment of Katyushi, before they had even fired a shot in the battle.

I sure can't understand the reasoning for leaving the flanks so weak, it can only be due to incompetence.

 

Artillery was a key factor in Kursk as well, but I'll stick to the thread topic.

Another thing: the idea that the Russians would throw their men into battle as though they were cattle is HIGHLY exaggerated. If you've seen the movie Enemy at the Gates and taken every bit of the first twenty mintues seriously, then you are highly mistaken. It was in fact very rare that the Russians would throw troops into a full scale, hopeless attack backed up by the NKVD.

It was far more common that the NKVD would engae in actions such as the excecution of prisoners who failed to cooperate, the excecution of deserters, traitors (often called kiwis-piwis? I can't remember), etc. And even this was rare after October of '42; the official rank of Commisar was removed from the Red Army textbooks and from the field in October 1942, so these types of excecutions for cowardice and retreat were far less liekly to happen after that date.

However, declassified Russian files state that the NKVD excecuted the equivalent of an entire army division of thier own men at Stalingrad.

 

Good post Huff.

 

And of course it helped that the rubble of the city provided an ample defense against Panzers and provided for one massive bastion, and the Volga a natural barrier against the encirclement tactics of blitzkrieg. Germany lacked the artillery development, the bomber development and the tank development to be able to fight the Soviets under less than ideal conditions.

And I remember seeing in some documentary how Soviet envoys sent to Paulus' HQ after the Soviet counter-offensive were bewildered by the fact that the Germans weren't surrendering.

 

Operations Uranus and Little Saturn also split the air-link that brought in supplies, which by that time were already stretched. The Germans could only be resupplied by airdrop after the encirclement, and alot of what was dropped went into Russian hands by mistake due to the often poor weather.

 

Oh gods. I'm sure we're all aware of just how involved any given battlefield really was during WW2, especially all the major ones have so much background information to them it is really next to impossible to give a one sentence solution like some kind of chess game, "Oh darn, if I didn't move that bishop there I wouldn't have lost." One of the real detractors from an objective view of the Stalingrad battle is just leaping into it cold, and regarding the period say late October 42 to February 43 when the story really begins outside Moscow.

Let's just have a look at vehicle serviceability by the Stalingrad approach for one. Not only had virtually the entire transport column been replaced by horses, including field weapon tractors (only sporadically complemented by rail), the XIV Panzer Corps had less than 200 mostly light Sköda tanks left by November, and infantry companies reported less than 80 men apiece (plenty operated at 60 men). Probably their only teeth was powerful support from Luftflotte IV. The invasion army hadn't been properly re-equipped since the previous year, and only patched and band-aided.

Not much of the 4th Panzerarmee actually made it to Stalingrad in the first place, suffering high attrition due to constant reassignments and very limited supply, arriving with 1 armoured and 1 motorised division and requiring immediate reinforcement from Paulus' meagre resources (by way of which he managed to perform the link up to the south...later which was to become the Uranus secondary target).

Hitler had taken increasingly direct command of all operations, had sent some Army officials to Dachau whilst others had promptly resigned. His plans were not even all that clear, he made clearly outlined demands of the Army, used fear and intimidation to ensure they were followed to the letter and then proceeded to contradict them himself, thus even when his instructions were followed to the letter one was still likely to be accused of treason. His field commanders noted (in diaries on the Caucasus), that finally all sense had departed the OKW and it was now dominated by unrealistic fanaticism and Hitler worship as it had never before been.

The satellite forces involved in supporting the Wehrmacht had originally relied upon Germany for modern weapons in the first place, making them more a drain than support. The Romanian anti-tank crews had for example only 37mm anti-tank guns, incapable of penetrating the armour of any major types then used (they could maybe knock out a T-70 scout tank if you're lucky). Their commanders consistently requested the Germans for 50mm guns still used in reserve by the Wehrmacht (having been replaced by the 75mm), but the situation on the Russian Front meant the Wehrmacht needed all the guns it could get for its own troops. Other anti-tank weapons produced by occupied territories like Czechoslovakia were needed for SPG production. As it was flak guns were being used more often than not in the anti-tank/artillery role by the Germans outside Stalingrad.

Then there was Paulus himself, not a babbling moron like Hitler and Göring but neither was he in any way brilliant or even distinguished. He was a Prussian conservative, an old school commander who believed in classical frontal warfare which the new Wehrmacht had been designed specifically to avoid at all costs. There's nothing particularly unusual about that in the time period, all the major field commanders aside from the "new generation" geniuses still believed in classical warfare. The English practised it, as did the Americans and Soviets, Italians and Japanese. Tactical operations were still somewhat a recently introduced oddity in the scope of strategic warfare, handled by all sorts of new and generally independent departments like SOE. But it did mean the 6th Army and Army Group B in general lacked some leadership qualities which were only belatedly recognised with the reasignment of Manstein (who as he described took command of a uselessly insignificant speck whose components were listed as expressions only).

But Manstein awaited proper re-equipment, which wouldn't happen until February as it turned out, with the assignment of recently reorganised and equipped Waffen-SS panzergrenadier regiments that were in fact, fully equipped heavy Panzer battalions complete with Tigers. That effectively turned the tide back to the side of the Germans with the Kharkov affair (which itself resulted of SS commanders directly disobeying Hitler's orders once in the field).

I mean there's just so much to Stalingrad, needless to say it was a foregone conclusion and there was little the Germans could have done at that time. Hitler needed to take the advice of OKH/OKW and dig in at rearward positions until the mid-43 re-equipment if he really wanted to win. Meanwhile form either one Front at Stalingrad, or one around Rostov (with expeditionary attacks into the Caucasus).

Hitler's impatience and foolhardiness with other peoples' lives cost everything.

That being said, the Soviets also displayed patience and foresight. Their soon to become infamous "concentric ring" defence system also worked beautifully to tie down diminishing Luftwaffe presence, which had been the primary strength Army Group B.

 

Invading Russia was a mistake from the beginning. Hitler had men fighting on the Eastern front and now the western front which would later on cause the Germans to be attacked from two directions and create major problems as the war progressed. I believe that the Germans would have had a really good chance of winning WW2 because they lost nearly one million men in Russia if I'm not mistaken and they could have used those men for the defence at D-day and many other important battles.

I remember watching on the Military Channel that Stalingrad was supposed to be taken within a week, back in September of 1942. The Germans kept fighting regardless and eventually winter set in. Since the Germans were not equipped for winter weather and they were in a desperate need of a supply line, it was inevitable that defeat would soon follow. There were also other contributions to their defeat at Stalingrad such as the Soviet snipers making a major contribution plus the two Soviet armies surrounding the German 6th army. One army made sure the Germans couldn't escape and the other army made sure supplies couldn't be brought into the city. Hitler also ordered that the 6th army not leave the city, which was a crucial mistake on his behalf.

 

In a question akin to the whole of the Stalingrad campaign it is simply impossible to assign faults or attributes and cover every aspect of the factors that combine to play out a scenerio like that. Hitting the highlights as done is fine but there are so many deep-seated and underlying ingredients at work in battles from any time and place. It becomes over simplistic to assign a singular person, or factor and say that it decided the outcome.

So when we question Russian tactics, poor German leadership, weather? It is probably "yes" to all the above but much more too.