Weet u ook hoe de operatie's mars en saturn verliepen?
Ook nog bedankt voor de informatie over operatie Uranus
Alvast bedankt,
Operaties Mars & Saturn
-
PPL
- Lid
- Berichten: 1889
- Lid geworden op: 24 okt 2002, 17:21
- Locatie: Amsterdam
- Titel gewijzigd ter veduidelijking.
- Voor operatie Uranus opende je reeds een apart topic ->operatie Uranus
Daar vind je trouwens een goede reaktie van Thomas !
Cover up your face, you can't run the race.
The pace is too fast, you just won't last.
-
Gast
PPL schreef:
- Titel gewijzigd ter veduidelijking.
- Voor operatie Uranus opende je reeds een apart topic ->operatie Uranus
Daar vind je trouwens een goede reaktie van Thomas !
Ja weet ik. Was ook dom van me om een andere topic erover te openen. Maar kunt u me uitleggen hoe operatie mars en saturn verliepen of zijn deze hetzelfde als operatie uranus?
http://www.h-net.org/~museum/stalingrad.html
deze site heb ik al gevonden die overgens wel fijn is.
-
PPL
- Lid
- Berichten: 1889
- Lid geworden op: 24 okt 2002, 17:21
- Locatie: Amsterdam
Eerlijk toegegeven is dit niet mijn kennis-gebied.Anonymous schreef:PPL schreef:
- Titel gewijzigd ter veduidelijking.
- Voor operatie Uranus opende je reeds een apart topic ->operatie Uranus
Daar vind je trouwens een goede reaktie van Thomas !
Ja weet ik. Was ook dom van me om een andere topic erover te openen. Maar kunt u me uitleggen hoe operatie mars en saturn verliepen of zijn deze hetzelfde als operatie uranus?
http://www.h-net.org/~museum/stalingrad.html
deze site heb ik al gevonden die overgens wel fijn is.
Ik had slechts een en ander verduidelijkt om ook andere gebruikers van dit forum verder te helpen
Cover up your face, you can't run the race.
The pace is too fast, you just won't last.
-
Gast
PPL schreef:Eerlijk toegegeven is dit niet mijn kennis-gebied.Anonymous schreef:PPL schreef:
- Titel gewijzigd ter veduidelijking.
- Voor operatie Uranus opende je reeds een apart topic ->operatie Uranus
Daar vind je trouwens een goede reaktie van Thomas !
Ja weet ik. Was ook dom van me om een andere topic erover te openen. Maar kunt u me uitleggen hoe operatie mars en saturn verliepen of zijn deze hetzelfde als operatie uranus?
http://www.h-net.org/~museum/stalingrad.html
deze site heb ik al gevonden die overgens wel fijn is.
Ik had slechts een en ander verduidelijkt om ook andere gebruikers van dit forum verder te helpen
Dan maar hopen op een reactie van iemand anders. Maar toch bedankt.
Want ik kan er echt niet zoveel over vinden
-
Gast
Stalingrad
At this stage Paulus and Stalin had a common perspective: Both believed Stalingrad was doomed. On August 26, the Soviet leader played his trump card. He appointed Georgi Zhukov his deputy supreme commander in chief. Zhukov typified a new breed of Soviet general: as fearless as they were pitiless, ready to do anything required to crush the Germans and not inhibited by threats, actual or implied. Arriving at Stalingrad on August 29, he insisted that further counterattacks with the available resources were futile. Stalingrad must and would be held-but in the context of a wider strategic plan.
Even as the situation around Stalingrad worsened and Zhukov busied himself with putting together a workable defensive plan, Stavka’s strategists insisted that the Red Army must not merely respond to enemy attacks, but concentrate its own strength and seize the initiative. In Zhukov’s absence, staff officers began developing plans for a winter campaign involving two major operations. Uranus involved committing large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, then encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed by Saturn, which would cut off and annihilate whatever remained of Army Groups A and B. Mars was the other half of the plan. With all eyes focused on the south, this operation would go in against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the hitherto quiet front of German Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. Described for years in Soviet literature as a diversion, Mars now appears to have been instead a complement to Uranus, intended like its counterpart to be followed by a second stage that would shatter Army Group Center and put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin. It was an ambitious strategy for an army still improvising its recovery from the twin shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold out.
That critical mission was, in turn, the responsibility of Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov. On September 12, he was appointed commander of the Sixty-second Army, the city’s principal operational formation. On one level his mission seemed obvious: hold or die, with the threat of army firing squads and the pistols of the secret police keeping his men on the line as long as any remained standing. Chuikov, however, was also a student of tactics. The Germans, he argued, had prevailed through complex combined-arms attacks. The broken terrain of an urban warfare environment like Stalingrad worked against that kind of sophistication. The Soviet commander used that to his advantage. Rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the Germans to batter him, Chuikov ordered his troops to “grab them by the belt” and engage them as closely as possible, to fight not merely street by street and building by building, but floor by floor and room by room. Such tactics would neutralize the Germans’ firepower and would deny them even the limited maneuvering space they needed for tactical initiatives. It would also cost lives, but the Soviet Union had lives to spend.
On September 14, the final German drive for the Volga began. By that afternoon Chuikov’s command post had been silenced and the fight was decentralizing to rifle-company level as German spearheads flicked toward the landing areas along the Volga that were Stalingrad’s last hope. With the fate of the city in the balance, a desperate Chuikov secured a single division from Zhukov, Aleksandr Rodimstev’s 13th Guards. That night the division crossed the Volga, clawed out a bridgehead and held it for five days. It was long enough for further reinforcements to reach the city. It was also long enough to create doubts on the German side about the wisdom of clearing the massive factory and warehouse complexes along the river that were becoming the focal points for a defense whose ferocity surpassed anything they had ever experienced.
Stalingrad became a city of rubble, smoke and ash, where seeing and breathing became chores and movement invited anything from a sniper’s bullet to an artillery barrage. In one of modern history’s great examples of leadership, Chuikov kept his men fighting by the force of his character. He offered no rhetoric and made no promises. Instead, he projected a dour fatalism that linked the fate of the city and its garrison. German generals and colonels also led from the front, hoping that inspiration would make up for lost mobility. Compelled to substitute courage for skill and lives for maneuver, however, the German army in Stalingrad was “demodernizing,” losing the capacity to fight anything but a close-quarters battle of attrition.
German Chief of Staff Franz Halder warned of the risks and was dismissed on September 24. The message was clear. To meet Paulus’ calls for reinforcements in the face of mounting casualties, Weichs began stripping less active sectors north and south of Stalingrad of German formations and replacing them with Romanians and Italians. The gamble might have been justified if the German-tipped spearhead had somehow been able to recapture the initiative. Instead, the most capable German formations were being chewed up in fruitless attacks in Stalingrad. A Luftwaffe never designed for sustained operations was suffering from increasing maintenance problems. Artillery pieces were wearing out. Tanks were breaking down. The Soviets by contrast had succeeded in systematizing their reinforcement and resupply system across the Volga. More and more heavy guns were supporting the infantry.
On September 30, Hitler had announced Stalingrad’s imminent capture. Instead, it was the Germans who were pinned in place, able to drive forward only locally and episodically, with losses far out of proportion to either military or propaganda gains. As the October rains heralded winter’s approach, the Führer hinted at great rewards for Paulus when the city was finally secured. The Sixth Army launched its final coordinated attack on October 14. It broke into and through Chuikov’s lines, once again driving spearheads to the Volga’s banks, halting the movement of reinforcements across the river. The German plan called for an urban encirclement, a battle of maneuver and annihilation following Stalingrad’s street network. It almost worked. Chuikov, as matter-of-fact a man as ever wore a uniform, talked about an inexplicable force driving the Germans forward. It was, however, merely a last brilliant flash of the fighting power, skill and spirit that had taken the Wehrmacht across Western Europe, North Africa and into the heart of Russia. Pressed against the riverbank, the Soviets rallied and held, fighting the Sixth Army to a standstill.
On October 31, Chuikov counterattacked. His force was only a division strong and gained less than 200 yards of polluted rubble, but it thrust at the heart of six weeks’ worth of denial on the part of the Germans. Twenty of the German army’s best divisions were packed at the tip of an immense salient hundreds of miles inside Russia. The salient’s flanks were held by troops for whom “dubious” was a compliment. The main supply route was a railroad that at one point ran barely 60 miles from the front line, and winter was setting in. It was at this moment that Zhukov unleashed Operation Uranus.
For a month Stavka had held its hand, building up forces in the face of Stalin’s demands for action, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze. Those forces now numbered a million men, 1,000 modern tanks, 1,400 aircraft and 14,000 guns-all of it undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures, and by its own conviction that the Soviets were as locked into Stalingrad as were the Germans. On November 19, a new Southwest Front, commanded by one of Zhukov’s protégés, General Nikolai Vatutin, hit the Romanian Third Army. A day later, another tank-tipped sledgehammer struck the Romanian Fourth Army on the Stalingrad salient’s southern flank. Hopelessly outgunned, the Romanians in both sectors collapsed. On November 23 the Soviet spearheads met near the town of Kalach, 50 miles from Stalingrad, in a textbook encirclement.
It took a week to complete the encirclement of the 20-odd divisions and 330,000 men caught in what soon became known as the “Stalingrad pocket.” Within days, internal friction among Soviet commanders slowed the advance and stiffened German resistance. Nevertheless, by November 30 a 100-mile gap existed between the Sixth Army and the rest of the Wehrmacht.
Professionals at the time and armchair generals since have argued that Paulus erred in not breaking out immediately, with or without orders. His best chance, the argument runs, was before the Soviets could consolidate the envelopment. Weichs ordered him to cease offensive operations the same day that Uranus began. But the Sixth Army was locked in close combat with an opponent determined not to let go. Breaking contact at the front was only the first step in what would have been an incredibly complex maneuver. Even had Paulus acted to break out, there was no guarantee that the army’s fuel and ammunition reserves would be sufficient for a fighting retreat across the steppe in midwinter.
The response to the unfolding disaster among the Sixth Army’s command structure was conditioned by the decline of the maneuver-war mentality after two months of static operations. Too many of the German sergeants, captains and colonels who knew how to fight in the open were dead, or had been promoted to replace other casualties. The new hands-so far as replacements had been forthcoming-were conditioned to moving a few yards at a time, and very cautiously. When Hitler proposed to relieve Stalingrad from outside, he reinforced an attitude held by many in the Sixth Army.
The Führer’s plans called for Weichs to stabilize the front and to launch the new Army Group Don toward Stalingrad. The new army group’s commander was Erich von Manstein, who since the start of Barbarossa had established a record as the Eastern Front’s specialist in difficult missions. Manstein’s command, however, was scraped together from various bits and pieces. It was not until December 12 that he was able to concentrate a half-dozen divisions for Operation Winter Storm, the projected grand advance to relieve what Hitler now proclaimed Fortress Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the garrison was dependent on supply from the air.
There is strong evidence that on November 20, alluding to the earlier success at Demyansk, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek told Hitler that under the right conditions Stalingrad could be supplied from the air-not Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, as has so often been asserted. Hitler used that information as a springboard for discussions with Göring, who assured the Führer of the Luftwaffe’s ability to successfully conduct the mission. By that time Jeschonnek had investigated further and concluded that the Sixth Army’s bare-minimum requirements of 500 tons of supplies a day could not be met by the available aircraft. Göring ordered him to keep his data to himself.
Doomed to failure from the start, hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots and aircrews soon set off on an operation to supply Paulus’ army. In the end nearly 500 aircraft were lost to weather and to a sophisticated Soviet defense system combining rings of guns and ground-controlled fighters. Only a steadily diminishing fraction of the required supplies arrived in a pocket under constantly growing pressure on the ground from increasingly superior Soviet forces. An increasing proportion of the reduced deliveries was necessarily ammunition. When Kurt Zeitzler, Halder’s successor as chief of staff, reduced his food intake to the level of Stalingrad rations as a gesture of solidarity with the besieged troops, he lost more than 25 pounds in two weeks.
The situation soon worsened even further. Operation Mars began on November 25, under Zhukov’s personal command. Its initial successes were countered by German armored reserves, and after losses appalling even by Soviet standards, Zhukov broke off the operation in mid-December. That ended Stavka’s original ambitious plan. As Manstein’s forces began assembling and advancing, Operation Saturn was in turn modified to Little Saturn, aimed at checkmating Manstein’s breakthrough by enveloping and crushing its left flank.
Little Saturn’s preliminary stages had already absorbed much of Manstein’s projected relief force by the time the main attack began on December 16. Soviet armor destroyed the Italian Eighth Army and temporarily overran the air base at Tatsinkaia, which was vital to the German airlift. Manstein drove forward with a single panzer corps on an ever-narrowing axis of advance in steadily worsening weather. Thirty-five miles from Stalingrad, the attack bogged down against Soviet armor. On December 19, Manstein informed Hitler that it was impossible to break through to Stalingrad and sustain a corridor. He recommended that the Sixth Army break out to meet him. Manstein flew his intelligence officer into the pocket to go over details of the plan and found the Sixth Army staff unwilling to risk such an attack until spring.
Whatever Winter Storm’s odds, it was the last chance to salvage the Sixth Army. In refusing to order the breakout, Manstein and Paulus showed an absence of the moral courage that is the principal requirement of high command. Instead they temporized, deferring to Hitler’s well-known and increasingly determined refusal to “abandon the Volga.” For three days the debate among the German commanders continued as the Soviets drove into the German flank and rear. Then, on December 22, the question became moot. The newly arrived Second Guards Army opened an attack that drove Manstein’s slender spearhead back toward its start line. To an officer who subsequently flew into Stalingrad as Hitler’s emissary, Paulus said simply, “You are talking to dead men.”
With Soviet tanks and cavalry running wild in its virtually undefended rear areas, Army Group Don fell back and the Germans’ attention focused not on the fate of the Sixth Army but on the survival of their position in southern Russia. Hitler initially refused to make reinforcements available and shorten the front by withdrawing from the increasingly untenable Caucasus salient. Manstein made the best of what he had. In a series of brilliant tactical-level ripostes between January and March 1943, he enabled most of Army Group A to escape. In doing so he confirmed his reputation as a battle captain and blunted an operation already suffering from Stalin’s determination to pursue the offensive beyond the Red Army’s capacity to sustain it.
Stalingrad, hopelessly isolated, was now expected to tie down as many Soviet forces as possible-a mission the Soviets initially sought to deny by negotiating a surrender. When Paulus refused, the final offensive began. On January 10, more than 7,000 guns and mortars began firing on every corner of the pocket within range. Tanks and infantry advanced simultaneously in all sectors, against resistance whose initial determination amazed even veterans of the earlier fighting. Even before the few remaining airfields were overrun, the Germans were living on rations measured in ounces, supplemented occasionally by horsemeat and the occasional rat. Conditions in the hospitals were beyond medieval. By January 17, the pocket had been reduced to half its size. Once again Paulus was summoned to surrender; once again he refused. German die-hards fell back into the city’s ruins, using tactics learned from the Russians to prolong the end as ammunition ran out and men sought terms at bayonet point. On January 31, Paulus’ headquarters was overrun. The field marshal, newly promoted by Hitler, was lying on his bed when a Russian lieutenant burst in and captured him.
Organized resistance continued until February 2. The Soviets took longer than that to sort out their 90,000 prisoners and start them on their long march into captivity. In Germany, radio stations played the funeral march from Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. In Russia, the propaganda machine tooled up to publicize the triumph of the Soviet motherland. Stalin and his generals began plans for a new campaign to crush the invaders once and for all. And from Alsace to Vladivostok, families waited for news of their missing men. In June 1942, Nazi Germany was looking forward to victory. Six months and a million casualties later, the Reich had barely averted catastrophe.
Zou ik dit misschien kunnen gebruiken voor mijn werkstuk onder de titel's het plan, en uitvoering van operatie Uranus?
Even as the situation around Stalingrad worsened and Zhukov busied himself with putting together a workable defensive plan, Stavka’s strategists insisted that the Red Army must not merely respond to enemy attacks, but concentrate its own strength and seize the initiative. In Zhukov’s absence, staff officers began developing plans for a winter campaign involving two major operations. Uranus involved committing large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, then encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed by Saturn, which would cut off and annihilate whatever remained of Army Groups A and B. Mars was the other half of the plan. With all eyes focused on the south, this operation would go in against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the hitherto quiet front of German Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. Described for years in Soviet literature as a diversion, Mars now appears to have been instead a complement to Uranus, intended like its counterpart to be followed by a second stage that would shatter Army Group Center and put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin. It was an ambitious strategy for an army still improvising its recovery from the twin shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold out.
That critical mission was, in turn, the responsibility of Lt. Gen. Vasili Chuikov. On September 12, he was appointed commander of the Sixty-second Army, the city’s principal operational formation. On one level his mission seemed obvious: hold or die, with the threat of army firing squads and the pistols of the secret police keeping his men on the line as long as any remained standing. Chuikov, however, was also a student of tactics. The Germans, he argued, had prevailed through complex combined-arms attacks. The broken terrain of an urban warfare environment like Stalingrad worked against that kind of sophistication. The Soviet commander used that to his advantage. Rather than simply sitting back and waiting for the Germans to batter him, Chuikov ordered his troops to “grab them by the belt” and engage them as closely as possible, to fight not merely street by street and building by building, but floor by floor and room by room. Such tactics would neutralize the Germans’ firepower and would deny them even the limited maneuvering space they needed for tactical initiatives. It would also cost lives, but the Soviet Union had lives to spend.
On September 14, the final German drive for the Volga began. By that afternoon Chuikov’s command post had been silenced and the fight was decentralizing to rifle-company level as German spearheads flicked toward the landing areas along the Volga that were Stalingrad’s last hope. With the fate of the city in the balance, a desperate Chuikov secured a single division from Zhukov, Aleksandr Rodimstev’s 13th Guards. That night the division crossed the Volga, clawed out a bridgehead and held it for five days. It was long enough for further reinforcements to reach the city. It was also long enough to create doubts on the German side about the wisdom of clearing the massive factory and warehouse complexes along the river that were becoming the focal points for a defense whose ferocity surpassed anything they had ever experienced.
Stalingrad became a city of rubble, smoke and ash, where seeing and breathing became chores and movement invited anything from a sniper’s bullet to an artillery barrage. In one of modern history’s great examples of leadership, Chuikov kept his men fighting by the force of his character. He offered no rhetoric and made no promises. Instead, he projected a dour fatalism that linked the fate of the city and its garrison. German generals and colonels also led from the front, hoping that inspiration would make up for lost mobility. Compelled to substitute courage for skill and lives for maneuver, however, the German army in Stalingrad was “demodernizing,” losing the capacity to fight anything but a close-quarters battle of attrition.
German Chief of Staff Franz Halder warned of the risks and was dismissed on September 24. The message was clear. To meet Paulus’ calls for reinforcements in the face of mounting casualties, Weichs began stripping less active sectors north and south of Stalingrad of German formations and replacing them with Romanians and Italians. The gamble might have been justified if the German-tipped spearhead had somehow been able to recapture the initiative. Instead, the most capable German formations were being chewed up in fruitless attacks in Stalingrad. A Luftwaffe never designed for sustained operations was suffering from increasing maintenance problems. Artillery pieces were wearing out. Tanks were breaking down. The Soviets by contrast had succeeded in systematizing their reinforcement and resupply system across the Volga. More and more heavy guns were supporting the infantry.
On September 30, Hitler had announced Stalingrad’s imminent capture. Instead, it was the Germans who were pinned in place, able to drive forward only locally and episodically, with losses far out of proportion to either military or propaganda gains. As the October rains heralded winter’s approach, the Führer hinted at great rewards for Paulus when the city was finally secured. The Sixth Army launched its final coordinated attack on October 14. It broke into and through Chuikov’s lines, once again driving spearheads to the Volga’s banks, halting the movement of reinforcements across the river. The German plan called for an urban encirclement, a battle of maneuver and annihilation following Stalingrad’s street network. It almost worked. Chuikov, as matter-of-fact a man as ever wore a uniform, talked about an inexplicable force driving the Germans forward. It was, however, merely a last brilliant flash of the fighting power, skill and spirit that had taken the Wehrmacht across Western Europe, North Africa and into the heart of Russia. Pressed against the riverbank, the Soviets rallied and held, fighting the Sixth Army to a standstill.
On October 31, Chuikov counterattacked. His force was only a division strong and gained less than 200 yards of polluted rubble, but it thrust at the heart of six weeks’ worth of denial on the part of the Germans. Twenty of the German army’s best divisions were packed at the tip of an immense salient hundreds of miles inside Russia. The salient’s flanks were held by troops for whom “dubious” was a compliment. The main supply route was a railroad that at one point ran barely 60 miles from the front line, and winter was setting in. It was at this moment that Zhukov unleashed Operation Uranus.
For a month Stavka had held its hand, building up forces in the face of Stalin’s demands for action, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze. Those forces now numbered a million men, 1,000 modern tanks, 1,400 aircraft and 14,000 guns-all of it undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures, and by its own conviction that the Soviets were as locked into Stalingrad as were the Germans. On November 19, a new Southwest Front, commanded by one of Zhukov’s protégés, General Nikolai Vatutin, hit the Romanian Third Army. A day later, another tank-tipped sledgehammer struck the Romanian Fourth Army on the Stalingrad salient’s southern flank. Hopelessly outgunned, the Romanians in both sectors collapsed. On November 23 the Soviet spearheads met near the town of Kalach, 50 miles from Stalingrad, in a textbook encirclement.
It took a week to complete the encirclement of the 20-odd divisions and 330,000 men caught in what soon became known as the “Stalingrad pocket.” Within days, internal friction among Soviet commanders slowed the advance and stiffened German resistance. Nevertheless, by November 30 a 100-mile gap existed between the Sixth Army and the rest of the Wehrmacht.
Professionals at the time and armchair generals since have argued that Paulus erred in not breaking out immediately, with or without orders. His best chance, the argument runs, was before the Soviets could consolidate the envelopment. Weichs ordered him to cease offensive operations the same day that Uranus began. But the Sixth Army was locked in close combat with an opponent determined not to let go. Breaking contact at the front was only the first step in what would have been an incredibly complex maneuver. Even had Paulus acted to break out, there was no guarantee that the army’s fuel and ammunition reserves would be sufficient for a fighting retreat across the steppe in midwinter.
The response to the unfolding disaster among the Sixth Army’s command structure was conditioned by the decline of the maneuver-war mentality after two months of static operations. Too many of the German sergeants, captains and colonels who knew how to fight in the open were dead, or had been promoted to replace other casualties. The new hands-so far as replacements had been forthcoming-were conditioned to moving a few yards at a time, and very cautiously. When Hitler proposed to relieve Stalingrad from outside, he reinforced an attitude held by many in the Sixth Army.
The Führer’s plans called for Weichs to stabilize the front and to launch the new Army Group Don toward Stalingrad. The new army group’s commander was Erich von Manstein, who since the start of Barbarossa had established a record as the Eastern Front’s specialist in difficult missions. Manstein’s command, however, was scraped together from various bits and pieces. It was not until December 12 that he was able to concentrate a half-dozen divisions for Operation Winter Storm, the projected grand advance to relieve what Hitler now proclaimed Fortress Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the garrison was dependent on supply from the air.
There is strong evidence that on November 20, alluding to the earlier success at Demyansk, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek told Hitler that under the right conditions Stalingrad could be supplied from the air-not Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, as has so often been asserted. Hitler used that information as a springboard for discussions with Göring, who assured the Führer of the Luftwaffe’s ability to successfully conduct the mission. By that time Jeschonnek had investigated further and concluded that the Sixth Army’s bare-minimum requirements of 500 tons of supplies a day could not be met by the available aircraft. Göring ordered him to keep his data to himself.
Doomed to failure from the start, hundreds of Luftwaffe pilots and aircrews soon set off on an operation to supply Paulus’ army. In the end nearly 500 aircraft were lost to weather and to a sophisticated Soviet defense system combining rings of guns and ground-controlled fighters. Only a steadily diminishing fraction of the required supplies arrived in a pocket under constantly growing pressure on the ground from increasingly superior Soviet forces. An increasing proportion of the reduced deliveries was necessarily ammunition. When Kurt Zeitzler, Halder’s successor as chief of staff, reduced his food intake to the level of Stalingrad rations as a gesture of solidarity with the besieged troops, he lost more than 25 pounds in two weeks.
The situation soon worsened even further. Operation Mars began on November 25, under Zhukov’s personal command. Its initial successes were countered by German armored reserves, and after losses appalling even by Soviet standards, Zhukov broke off the operation in mid-December. That ended Stavka’s original ambitious plan. As Manstein’s forces began assembling and advancing, Operation Saturn was in turn modified to Little Saturn, aimed at checkmating Manstein’s breakthrough by enveloping and crushing its left flank.
Little Saturn’s preliminary stages had already absorbed much of Manstein’s projected relief force by the time the main attack began on December 16. Soviet armor destroyed the Italian Eighth Army and temporarily overran the air base at Tatsinkaia, which was vital to the German airlift. Manstein drove forward with a single panzer corps on an ever-narrowing axis of advance in steadily worsening weather. Thirty-five miles from Stalingrad, the attack bogged down against Soviet armor. On December 19, Manstein informed Hitler that it was impossible to break through to Stalingrad and sustain a corridor. He recommended that the Sixth Army break out to meet him. Manstein flew his intelligence officer into the pocket to go over details of the plan and found the Sixth Army staff unwilling to risk such an attack until spring.
Whatever Winter Storm’s odds, it was the last chance to salvage the Sixth Army. In refusing to order the breakout, Manstein and Paulus showed an absence of the moral courage that is the principal requirement of high command. Instead they temporized, deferring to Hitler’s well-known and increasingly determined refusal to “abandon the Volga.” For three days the debate among the German commanders continued as the Soviets drove into the German flank and rear. Then, on December 22, the question became moot. The newly arrived Second Guards Army opened an attack that drove Manstein’s slender spearhead back toward its start line. To an officer who subsequently flew into Stalingrad as Hitler’s emissary, Paulus said simply, “You are talking to dead men.”
With Soviet tanks and cavalry running wild in its virtually undefended rear areas, Army Group Don fell back and the Germans’ attention focused not on the fate of the Sixth Army but on the survival of their position in southern Russia. Hitler initially refused to make reinforcements available and shorten the front by withdrawing from the increasingly untenable Caucasus salient. Manstein made the best of what he had. In a series of brilliant tactical-level ripostes between January and March 1943, he enabled most of Army Group A to escape. In doing so he confirmed his reputation as a battle captain and blunted an operation already suffering from Stalin’s determination to pursue the offensive beyond the Red Army’s capacity to sustain it.
Stalingrad, hopelessly isolated, was now expected to tie down as many Soviet forces as possible-a mission the Soviets initially sought to deny by negotiating a surrender. When Paulus refused, the final offensive began. On January 10, more than 7,000 guns and mortars began firing on every corner of the pocket within range. Tanks and infantry advanced simultaneously in all sectors, against resistance whose initial determination amazed even veterans of the earlier fighting. Even before the few remaining airfields were overrun, the Germans were living on rations measured in ounces, supplemented occasionally by horsemeat and the occasional rat. Conditions in the hospitals were beyond medieval. By January 17, the pocket had been reduced to half its size. Once again Paulus was summoned to surrender; once again he refused. German die-hards fell back into the city’s ruins, using tactics learned from the Russians to prolong the end as ammunition ran out and men sought terms at bayonet point. On January 31, Paulus’ headquarters was overrun. The field marshal, newly promoted by Hitler, was lying on his bed when a Russian lieutenant burst in and captured him.
Organized resistance continued until February 2. The Soviets took longer than that to sort out their 90,000 prisoners and start them on their long march into captivity. In Germany, radio stations played the funeral march from Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. In Russia, the propaganda machine tooled up to publicize the triumph of the Soviet motherland. Stalin and his generals began plans for a new campaign to crush the invaders once and for all. And from Alsace to Vladivostok, families waited for news of their missing men. In June 1942, Nazi Germany was looking forward to victory. Six months and a million casualties later, the Reich had barely averted catastrophe.
Zou ik dit misschien kunnen gebruiken voor mijn werkstuk onder de titel's het plan, en uitvoering van operatie Uranus?