Waffen-SS: Russia, Winter 1942-43

Background

The Red Army counteroffensive around Stalingrad trapped the German Sixth Army in the city. The whole of the German southern front in Russia was in danger of being ripped apart. Hitler, true to form, ordered Paulus in Stalingrad to hold firm as Göring's Luftwaffe tried to organize supplies to be flown into the city, while Manstein mustered his panzers to form a relief force.

Stalingrad

In November 1942, seven Soviet armies had launched a counteroffensive against the Wehrmacht's Sixth Army at Stalingrad, trapping its 220,000 men inside a pocket along the frozen banks of the River Volga. Six months before, these men had been the spearhead of Operation Blue. Two German army groups, led by nine panzer divisions and seven motorized divisions equipped with some 800 tanks, at first swept all before them. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were trapped in pockets as German panzers manoeuvred effortlessly across the featureless steppe.

By the autumn, fanatical resistance by Red Army troops in Stalingrad had brought the German eastward advance to a halt. Street battles sucked in German division after division, until the bulk of the Sixth Army's combat troops were fighting in an area of only a few score square kilometres. No matter how hard General Friedrich Paulus drove his tired troops forward into the alleys and ruined factories of Stalingrad, the Soviet defenders refused to give up the fight. The Sixth Army's commander loyally followed his Führer's orders to fight on in the devastated city, despite warning signs that the Soviets were massing forces elsewhere for a counteroffensive.

Operation Saturn

On 19 November, the Red Army launched Operation Saturn. Hundreds of tanks surged forward across the thinly held lines of the Romanian Third Army, which had the task of holding hundreds of kilometres of front to the north of Stalingrad. The Romanians had no effective anti-tank weapons, and within hours they had either fled westwards, died in the snow or surrendered. The following day, another Soviet tank force broke through the Romanian Fourth Army, to the south of the Sixth Army. A day later the claws of the two Russian pincers met to the west of Stalingrad, trapping Paulus and his troops in the city. The 100 German Panzer III and 30 Panzer IV tanks of the three badly weakened panzer divisions in what was now known grandly as "Fortress Stalingrad" were unable to challenge the 635 Russian tanks ringing the Sixth Army, because Hitler refused to allow them to be redeployed to counter the new threat. Any sort of relief would have to come from outside the pocket.

The Chir defence line

The immediate German reserve, some 80km (50 miles) to the west of Stalingrad, was the 22nd Panzer Division, but most of its 22 Panzer III and 11 Panzer IV tanks were useless because rodents had eaten into their power cables. In any case, it was soon surrounded by marauding Russian tanks and only just managed to escape westwards after suffering heavy casualties. The division was disbanded soon afterwards.

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