After sweeping across western Europe with incredible ease in 1940. Germany had suffered 1 million casualties.

 After sweeping across western Europe with incredible ease in 1940. Germany had suffered 1 million casualties.

 By the turn of the year - the winter of 1941-1942 - Germany had suffered about 1 million casualties. Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 with the strength of over 3 million men and 3,000 tanks.

 But by early spring 1942, the Nazi regime was feeling the strain of trying to find able-bodied soldiers.

 It was also down to a total of 140 operational tanks to cover over 1,000 miles of front line.

This was the situation because, contrary to Hitler’s expectations, the Soviet Union had not collapsed quickly. Instead, it fought on stubbornly. 

To make matters worse, Germany’s unsuccessful air campaign earlier in the war - at the Battle of Britain in summer and fall 1940 - had failed to compel Britain to surrender.

Furthermore, the United States - with all the manpower and material recourses that opened up to the Allies - was now in the war against Germany thanks to Hitler’s rash decision to declare war against them.

 Things were starting to turn, and Germany needed a decisive victory.

One short-term priority for Hitler in spring 1942 was oil. 

By far the biggest source was at Baku on the Caspian Sea.

That was how Stalingrad ended up becoming a decisive battle of World War II. Stalingrad, a regional industrial center in the southeastern section of European Russia, was important because it stood in the way of Hitler’s drive to seize Russian oil fields.

And if they were to move oil from Baku to Germany, they had to be in control of Stalingrad.

As spring 1942 rolled on, Hitler assembled the troops he needed and built up an armored strike force at the southern end of the Russian front, ready to push southeast to Baku and the Caspian Sea.

The Soviets made Hitler’s job easier with an ill-advised offensive of their own.

 In May 1942, the Soviets tried to retake the major industrial city of Kharkov in eastern Ukraine.

 They were eventually encircled, cut off, and eliminated. The Soviets lost a quarter of a million men in this campaign.

The Soviets also fell victim to a German deception.

 Stalin expected that the main German effort in spring 1942 would be in the north against Moscow, finishing off what Hitler had almost accomplished in December 1941.

 The Germans sent enough deceptive signals that they’d be attacking Moscow that Stalin held his reserves in the north, making the German southern offensive easier.

The Germans, after defeating that initial Soviet offensive, now launched their own.

 At the end of June, Hitler’s forces pushed east from the Donets River, clearing the space between the Donets and the Don River.

 While the Germans moved quickly, taking only a month to push forward, they found that the Soviet army was getting better - it was retreating.

During the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa - the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union - Stalin’s men had generally not retreated when they were danger of being surrounded.

 Instead, they’d held in place, and ended up being encircled and destroyed. But Stalin had learned and had listened to his generals. 

So the German offensive in June 1942 was grabbing territory, but territory wasn’t what Hitler needed. He needed to get to the oil or wipe out Soviet soldiers. He wasn’t able to do either one.

By late July, the problem of Russia’s vast distances was becoming quite serious. German troops had more than 1,000 miles to go to get to Baku to the southeast. East of them, on the Volga River, were numerous Soviet forces. 

If German soldiers kept on going to Baku, they would have Soviet soldiers sitting on their left flank to stop them.

 The Germans had no choice but to do what military theorists and theories say not to do: divide their efforts.

Hitler used two army groups to do two different things. Army Group A was in charge of pushing southeast to the Caucasus and oil.

 Army Group B would push east to the Volga River to protect the flank of that long German drive to grab Soviet oil fields. 

Sitting on the west bank of the Volga - just where the Germans needed to set up a defense for their long push to the Caucasus - was the city of Stalingrad.

Today known as the city of Volgograd, Stalingrad was not the primary German objective, but geography meant that the Germans needed to do something about it. 

The Germans could not let Stalingrad remain in Soviet hands. It was much too big a threat to the flank of their push to grab Baku.

In late August 1942, Hitler ordered the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus to take Stalingrad as part of the broader campaign to reach the oil fields of Baku. 

The Germans began with savage bombing, followed up with a ground assault to take the city. The bombing began August 23 and leveled much of city.

 The stories of the suffering civilians caught in the mix are heartbreaking. Ironically, this bombing created rubble and debris that would make the Germans’ task much more difficult.

 At the same time, Paulus’s troops moved almost fast enough to take the city before the Soviets could set up their defenses. Still, Stalin’s men managed to get established just in time to save it from immediate loss.

 Meanwhile, by the middle of September, German spearheads had reached the Volga River north and south of Stalingrad, isolating it on the west bank.

The Soviet commander Vasili Chuikov was given the task of holding the city with his 62nd Army, no matter the cost in lives. 

The only way for the Soviets to get in or out of Stalingrad was by ferry across the Volga, under constant fire.

 This meant supplies and food would be scarce for the city’s residents stuck inside. It’s estimated that starvation, disease, and exposure led to the death of over 40,000 civilians during the siege.

All the Germans had to do was to oust the Soviet force from the city itself, pushing them into the Volga River, but that turned out to be much harder than expected. 

Once the Soviets were defending inside the city of Stalingrad with their backs to the river, there was no open ground for the Germans to use to maneuver. 

The Germans couldn’t get around the Soviets to attack from the flank or from the rear. All they could do was slog forward through city streets that quickly turned into rubble. 

That meant the Germans would be trading soldier for soldier, which they could not afford to do for very long.

Furthermore, the Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad turned out to be excellent urban fighters.

 While the Germans actively used tanks in urban warfare, the Soviets became experts at channeling the armored vehicles into kill zones with anti-tank guns, mines, and Molotov cocktails to disable them. Every able bodied man and women fought, often hiding and sniping at German soldiers when they passed.

 Everyone else helped dig trenches if they were capable. Additionally, Soviet industry was also starting to kick in with supplies needed to wage war.

Because of the Soviets’ tenacious defense, the German advance made very slow progress. By late September, the Germans had captured the center section of Stalingrad, and they then turned to taking the factory district in the northern part of the city. All that fighting chewed up the elite German formations that General Paulus needed for fighting in cities. 

By the beginning of November, Hitler was channeling combat engineer battalions from throughout the Wehrmacht into Stalingrad, thereby spending the lives of highly trained soldiers - who were very difficult to replace - in an ongoing effort to seize the city.

Still, the Germans were getting close. By the middle of November 1942, the Soviet Army had been pushed back into a few tiny pockets on the bank of the Volga, and the Germans controlled all but about 10 percent of the city. Chuikov’s troops could not hold out much longer, but things were about to change dramatically.

As the Germans became bogged down in Stalingrad, the Soviets began to see the potential for a counteroffensive that might do the invaders some serious damage.

 The Germans simply didn’t have the manpower to hold the lines on the flanks of their thousand-mile offensive toward Baku. 

As a result, while the Germans were losing elite troops in the effort to clear Stalingrad, they also had to turn to their allies and satellites to hold their lines north and south of the city.

In particular, the Germans relied heavily on Romanians to hold quiet sectors of the front: the Third Romanian Army northwest of Stalingrad and the Fourth Romanian Army south of Stalingrad. 

The Romanians, however, were poorly equipped, and many Romanian soldiers had trouble seeing why their interests were at stake. Furthermore, those quiet sectors outside would not stay quiet much longer.

The months that Chuikov’s troops had stood and fought in the ruins of Stalingrad bought valuable time.

 Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the Soviet army’s chief of staff, used the time to build up enormous reserves of men and tanks and assemble them in secrecy north and south of Stalingrad. 

On November 19, 1942, the Soviets rolled across the snow and smashed the poorly equipped Romanians around Stalingrad. Four days later, Soviet pinchers trapped the German Sixth Army and 300,000 troops inside the city.

Germany’s General Paulus knew the situation was bad, and he asked Hitler’s permission to break out of the city to escape west to German lines.

 It would have meant the loss of a lot of military equipment, but it would have kept his troops together as a fighting force. 

Hitler refused. He couldn’t accept the blow to his prestige. Instead, he tried two things. The first was to support the Stalingrad pocket by air.

 Second, while he was not willing to let Paulus and the Sixth Army break out from inside Stalingrad, he was willing to let his other troops break in from outside Stalingrad.

Hitler now had 300,000 men inside Stalingrad who needed food, fuel, and ammunition. The Sixth Army required a bare minimum of 300 tons of supplies a day. Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, promised that supplies would be no problem.

 That was a lie, and Göring had to have known it. The Germans simply didn’t have enough of their Junkers Ju 52 cargo aircraft available.

 And the Soviets used everything they could against that airlift: fighters, anti-aircraft guns, bombs, and artillery strikes. 

The Germans also steadily lost aircraft to accidents from flying in bad weather. On a good day, the Germans would be lucky to get 100 tons into the Stalingrad pocket. It simply wasn’t enough.

The other option was breaking in. On December 12, Hitler sent two panzer divisions under Hermann Hoth - one of his better tank commanders - to push through to Stalingrad. 

They quickly stalled. Hoth wanted Paulus to meet him halfway with any soldiers who could get away, but Hitler vetoed this. Hoth had to retreat.

By the end of 1942, Hitler had no choice but to accept defeat. The Soviets were pushing west past Stalingrad. As they neared the Don River and the Black Sea, the German forces heading south to Baku were in danger of being cut off and destroyed like the Sixth Army. Hitler gave the order to pull back at the very end of 1942.

 German troops raced north to escape before the Soviets slammed the gate shut. That meant no Soviet oil and no chance of waging a global war on to victory.

Meanwhile, the Soviets waged an operation to squeeze that German pocket in Stalingrad tighter and tighter.

 The German Sixth Army, trapped there, couldn’t pull back. The German troops slowly starved and froze as the Soviets methodically pounded them with artillery. 

When Stalin’s men took the last airfield in the German Stalingrad pocket, the trap was complete. No more Germans could get out.

Hitler promoted General Paulus to field marshal, hoping he would take the hint that no field marshal had ever surrendered. It didn’t work.

 In February 1943, Paulus surrendered. Some 91,000 German troops - the remnant of the Sixth Army - marched into captivity. Of these men, only about 5,000 ever returned to their homes. 

The rest died slow, miserable deaths - marching to Russian prison and labor camps or during their long captivity in frozen, isolated Siberian gulags. What remained of them were not released until 1955.

Given the resources lined up against Nazi Germany, victory was going to be tough under any circumstances. 

But prevailing at Stalingrad - which might have enabled the Germans to make it to Baku - could have made the difference for them. Failure at Stalingrad meant failure to get the oil Germany needed for victory

After Stalingrad, Germany was never again able to carry out an offensive on the scale equal to its campaign of spring 1942. It did launch more major offensives, but those were aimed at more limited objectives. 

Because of German losses of manpower at Stalingrad and the army’s failure to secure the necessary resources, it’s hard to see how Germany could have won the war after this.

For the Allies, Stalingrad also meant a great deal. The years 1939, 1940, and 1941 had been bad ones for the coalition against Hitler, punctuated by humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat. 

Even the Allied successes had been matters of survival, not really victory. By the second half of 1942, however, things clearly started to change.

The Axis powers, to take a term from the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, had gone beyond their culminating point of attack - that is, they pushed beyond what they could sustain. 

The further they went, the more soldiers they lost, the longer their supply lines got, and the more ammunition and fuel they expended.

 By mid-1942, they had culminated. Now, the human and material resources of the Grand Alliance finally began to kick in.

Stalingrad mattered particularly for the people of the Soviet Union. We have a view in the West that the Red Army consisted of mere cannon fodder and men thrown into the battle against their will. But Stalingrad, while a brutal example of civilian suffering, showed the fighting spirit of the country.

Also, the initial German attack had put about a third of the Soviet population under German rule. 

While Stalin had certainly given a large segment of the population zero reasons to love him or communism, many soon found German-occupation to be far worse.

 After Stalingrad, though, it was clear that Stalin and Soviet rule were coming back. And everyone knew that the communists would be interested to learn how people acted under German rule. 

This caused explosions of revolts in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. German soldiers on Red soil would have to sleep with one eye open for the rest of the war.