Stalingrad
The goal of the German summer offensive of 1942 was to capture the Soviets’ oil fields in the Caucasus. Stalingrad was intended as the easternmost anchor for a line stretching between the rivers Don and Volga, that would be manned in order to protect the advance into the Caucasus from attack in the rear by Soviets advancing from the north. However, the symbolism of the city being named after Stalin grabbed the attention of the egomaniacal German and Soviet warlords, and what began as relatively unimportant morphed into a major showdown.
Hitler unnecessarily poured more and more resources into capturing the city. The Soviets’ fierce resistance, as with the Germans’ fierce attacks, was initially based on the symbolism of the city’s name. However, the Soviets soon saw potential that went beyond the fight for the city, while the Germans did not, and therein lay the seeds that germinated into a German debacle: the story of the battle could be summarized as the Germans thinking small, while the Soviets thought big.
The Germans focused on the fight for the city, with its capture being an ultimate end. The Soviets saw the defense of the city as simply a means to a more ambitious end: they fed enough forces and supplies into Stalingrad to keep the battle going and the Germans engaged, while massing huge armies hundreds of miles to either side, with the aim of launching them in a pincer attack, Operation Uranus, that would bag the Germans inside the city and the Axis armies guarding their flanks.
Operation Uranus went like clockwork, as the Soviets smashed through the Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian armies protecting the Germans in Stalingrad, and within 4 days, the Soviet pincers met. The disaster was made worse by Hitler’s insistence that the Germans inside Stalingrad stay put and fight it out until relieved by a rescue force, rather than try and break out. No rescue came, and by the time the last Germans in Stalingrad surrendered in February of 1943, the Axis had suffered 728,000 casualties, and the German spell of invincibility was broken.
