STALINGRAD: THE CITY THAT REFUSED TO DIE

The industrial heart of Soviet Russia was in fact never a German objective for Case Blue. So how did it become a turning point in the war and a devastating loss for the Nazis?

- JON TRIGG & DR MICHAEL JONES

In the summer of 1942 the German Sixth Army advanced to the city of Stalingrad as part of the Wehrmacht's Case Blue offensive to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. In its attempt to capture the city the Axis forces were encircled and destroyed, in a battle that became perceived as a turning point in the Second World War.

At first, the Germans seemed to have won, taking most of the city in a series of bloody battles in the autumn of 1942, only to be caught off-guard and surrounded by the brilliance of the Red Army's Uranus counteroffensive. Ordered to stay put, Nazi high command tried to airlift in all the supplies the Sixth Army needed until a relief force could break through to them. Both operations failed, the airlift especially becoming a disaster.

In the city itself the fighting was almost indescribable as men fought for days for possession of a single house or even room. As winter took its icy hold, the trapped Germans began to starve, with soldiers dropping like flies from disease and malnutrition.

The Battle of Stalingrad became a byword for the horror and savagery of the war on the Russian Front. Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides fought for months amid the rubble of the shattered city, until the remnants of Sixth Army finally surrendered in January 1943. Almost 100,000 German troops trudged into captivity, the vast majority of whom would be dead within months. In the end only around 5,000 ever made it home alive from an army that once numbered 250,000. The German Army never recovered from the defeat, and for the German people there was a realisation that Stalingrad was a moment where the war turned against them.

Background to the battle