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By Root 1754 0

defended from Manstein’s counter-attack in December and then developed into an unbreakable stranglehold in January 1943, ending with the German surrender there the following month. Chuikov was left as the tethered goat in the city, to distract the German wolf, and for four days after Thursday, 19 November Zhukov flung four army groups (called fronts) into the great assault, codenamed Operation Uranus. The secret logistical buildup had been impressive: in the first three weeks of November, 160,000 men, 430 tanks, 6,000 guns and mortars, 14,000 vehicles and 10,000 horses had been ferried across the Volga and Don rivers. By then, over 1.1 million men were ready to take part in both Uranus (the encirclement of Stalingrad) and Operation Saturn (a wider swing all the way to Rostov). In Uranus, the Voronezh, South-west and Don Fronts attacked north of Stalingrad and the Stalingrad Front came around the south in a classic pincer movement. The initial bombardment by 3,500 Russian guns, mortars and rockets at 07.30 hours on Thursday, 19 November woke up German soldiers more than 30 miles away. From 1944, that day was ever after known in Russia as Artillery Day, in commemoration of the salvoes launched before the infantry assault at 08.50. German minefields had been cleared by Russian engineers working through the night before the offensive.

The Romanians fought bravely, but Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks of the South-west Front soon created a 7-mile gap in the lines of General Petre Dumitrescu’s Third Romanian Army, and five divisions were swiftly trapped in the bend of the River Don. Every gap was exploited and expanded, and it was fitting that it had to fall to Kurt Zeitzler to break the news to Hitler, because three weeks earlier it had been he who had confidently assured the Führer that the Soviets were ‘in no position to mount a major offensive with any far-reaching objective’.48 On Friday, 20 November, the southern pincer ripped into the Fourth Romanian Army, where these forces too met with quick success, and forged an even larger, 17-mile gap, through which the IV Cavalry and IV Mechanized Corps were poured. Wide, sweeping, confident cross-country tank movements characterized Uranus just as they had the opening phases of Barbarossa, and Weichs’ Army Group B outside the city was pushed back westwards. The Russians closed the ring around Stalingrad at Sovietskiy village near Kalach-on-Don on the night of Monday, 23 November. ‘Dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape, they fired green flares periodically so that they did not miss each other, or think the other force were Germans.’49 The troops from the two connecting units came together with such speed, and at night, that they had to re-enact the whole scene the next day with cheering and mutual hugging for the propaganda footage.50

In a sense it was not the Germans who lost the battle of Stalingrad; they had taken the whole city except for a Russian toe-hold on the right bank; rather it was the Romanian Third Army and the Italian Eighth Army to the north and the Romanian Fourth Army in the south of the city who were comprehensively outfought. When the encirclement was completed, around 275,000 of Paulus’ army were trapped. Yet the pincers were still thin, in places only a few miles deep, so at this point Hitler ought to have ordered Paulus to attempt an immediate breakout. He did not, believing that Manstein, then flying down from Leningrad, could command yet another regrouping of the Wehrmacht in southern Russia and break through from the south-west, during which the Luftwaffe could keep Paulus provisioned with food and equipment.

Göring – against advice from the Luftwaffe generals on the spot – promised the Führer that he could fly 550 tons of supplies per day into Stalingrad.51 Yet that was based on having 225 Junkers Ju-52s serviceable every day, whereas in fact there were only about eighty serviceable at any one time, supported by two squadrons of Heinkel He-111s which could carry only 1.5 tons each.52 Admittedly, Göring hoped to bring in other planes from different theatres,