Operation Uranus

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Uranus began at 07:20 Moscow time on the 19th of November 1942, when Soviet artillery commanders received a single codeword: "Siren". What followed was an 80-minute bombardment from 3,500 guns and mortars, directed almost entirely at the non-German Axis units guarding the flanks of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. The Romanian soldiers holding those lines lacked heavy anti-tank guns. Their Czech-built tanks carried a 37 mm gun, useless against the armor of Soviet T-34s. And stretched across 140 km of open steppe, they had almost nowhere to run.

  In just four days, a Soviet force of over one million personnel executed one of the most consequential encirclements in the history of modern warfare. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Axis soldiers were trapped in a shrinking pocket between the Don and Volga rivers. The questions the rest of this documentary will explore are how such a massive Soviet operation was kept secret for months, why the Germans were so badly caught off guard, and what the days of combat looked like as the trap snapped shut.

• 2. A Front Stretched Too Thin

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  On the 28th of June 1942, the Wehrmacht launched Case Blue, its great summer offensive in the south. German forces broke through Soviet lines by the 13th of July and captured Rostov. Hitler then made a fateful choice: he split his southern forces to chase two objectives at once, sending the Sixth Army toward Stalingrad and other forces toward the Caucasus oil fields.

  The result was Army Group B, a formation that looked formidable on paper. It included the Second and Sixth German armies, the Fourth Panzer Army, the Third and Fourth Romanian armies, the Eighth Italian Army, and the Second Hungarian Army. In practice, the German flanks running north and south of Stalingrad were held by these non-German allied armies, while German units were funneled into the grinding street battles inside the city itself.

  The Third Romanian Army occupied a line 140 km long. The Fourth Romanian Army held a line no less than 270 km long. Their anti-tank guns were largely antiquated 37 mm PaK weapons, and they received only six 75 mm PaK guns per division after repeated requests. The First Romanian Armored Division held roughly 100 Czech-built R-2 tanks, all armed with a 37 mm gun that could not penetrate Soviet T-34 armor.

  Two of Germany's best mechanized formations, the elite Leibstandarte and the Grossdeutschland, had been pulled from Army Group A and redeployed to Western Europe as a reserve against a possible Allied landing in France. The only mobile reserve left to backstop the Romanian flanks was the 48th Panzer Corps, which had the equivalent strength of a single weakened panzer division. General Franz Halder, head of the Army General Staff, had already been dismissed in September after repeatedly warning about the danger gathering along these over-extended flanks.

• 3. Planning in Secret

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  As early as September 1942, the Soviet Stavka began designing a series of counteroffensives that would target German forces across the south, from the Caucasus to Stalingrad, and also strike at Army Group Center to the north. Operation Uranus was conceived as a double envelopment: deep Soviet mechanized columns would plunge into the German rear from the north and south, while a complementary attack would hit German units closer to the Sixth Army from behind.

  The attack's starting points were deliberately placed on stretches of front where Axis units were too overstretched to reinforce quickly. Over a period of three weeks, the Red Army ferried roughly 111,000 soldiers, 420 tanks, and 556 artillery pieces across the Volga River under fire, as Soviet forces on the Stalingrad front endured heavy bombardment that made every supply run dangerous.

  Concealing the build-up from German intelligence required an elaborate deception operation. Soviet units reduced their radio traffic, used couriers instead of radios, applied camouflage, erected fake bridges over the Don to draw attention away from the real crossings, and publicly increased troop movements around Moscow to suggest the main blow would fall farther north against Army Group Center. Dummy formations were established, and the Red Army stepped up attacks on Army Group Center to reinforce the impression.

  Despite all of this, the operation nearly unraveled. Transportation delays forced the Stavka to postpone the launch from the 8th of November to the 17th of November. Then, just days before the rescheduled date, General Volsky, commander of the 4th Mechanized Corps, sent a letter directly to Stalin urging that the offensive be cancelled entirely. Volsky believed the forces earmarked for the operation were not ready. Many Soviet soldiers had not yet been issued winter garments, and some died of frostbite before the attack even began. Vasilevsky, the overall Soviet commander, initially sided with Volsky. Stalin telephoned Volsky personally; Volsky confirmed he would carry out the operation if ordered. The offensive was not cancelled. It was postponed two more days, to the 19th of November, when General Georgy Zhukov reported that the air units assigned to the operation were still not ready.

• 4. Day One: The Northern Strike

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  Shortly after 5 a.m. on the 19th of November, a German lieutenant named Gerhard Stöck, posted with the Romanian IV Army Corps in the Kletskaya sector, telephoned Sixth Army headquarters at Golubinsky with intelligence of an imminent attack. Because the call came in after five and false alarms were common, the duty officer decided not to wake General Arthur Schmidt, the Army Chief of Staff.

  At 07:30 the Katyusha rocket-launchers fired their first salvos. Although thick fog prevented Soviet gunners from seeing their targets, weeks of careful preparation and pre-ranging meant the fire was accurate. Communication lines were cut, ammunition dumps destroyed, and forward observation posts shattered. Romanian soldiers who survived the bombardment fled toward the rear, and the retreating columns were caught by Soviet heavy artillery targeting second-echelon formations.

  The first two infantry assaults against the Third Romanian Army were actually repulsed; the bombardment had torn up the terrain so badly that Soviet armor struggled to navigate through the minefields. But the absence of adequate anti-tank artillery meant the Romanian line could not hold once Soviet tanks found a gap. By noon, the 4th Tank Corps and the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps had broken through. The 5th Tank Army then punched through the Second Romanian Corps.

  By the end of the day, the Soviet 21st Army and 5th Tank Army had captured 27,000 Romanians, representing the bulk of three divisions. As tank crews pushed south in a worsening blizzard, some lost traction and crew members broke their arms being thrown against the walls of their hulls. The blizzard was punishing, but it also disrupted German coordination just as badly. Sixth Army headquarters, informed of the breakthrough, did not order the 16th and 24th Panzer Divisions to disengage from Stalingrad and move to shore up the Romanian collapse. That task was handed to the 48th Panzer Corps, which entered the fighting with fewer than 100 serviceable modern tanks and had already run short of fuel.

• 5. Day Two: The Southern Jaw Closes

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  Stavka telephoned Stalingrad Front commander Andrei Yeremenko in the early morning of the 20th of November to ask whether his portion of the offensive would begin on schedule at 08:00. Yeremenko said he would proceed only if the fog lifted. The 51st Army opened its artillery barrage on time, but contact with other divisions was lost and the remaining forces received orders to hold until 10:00. Those two hours of delay created confusion that rippled through the opening hours of the southern attack.

  When the 57th Army joined the assault at 10:00, the Romanian 6th Corps began to collapse, handing the Stalingrad Front an opportunity to commit its armored corps. The German 297th Infantry Division watched its Romanian support simply fail to resist. Germany's sole reserve in the area, the 29th Panzergrenadier Division, was rushed in and scored initial successes, destroying around fifty Soviet tanks and raising Soviet concerns about the security of their left flank. But the continued Romanian collapse forced the 29th Panzergrenadier to shift again, pulling it away from the positions it had just secured. By the end of the day, only the 6th Romanian Cavalry Regiment stood between the advancing Soviet columns and the Don River.

  On that same day, General Friedrich Paulus, commanding the Sixth Army, received reports that Soviet forces were less than 40 km from his headquarters. He had no remaining units capable of contesting their advance. Hitler's response was to designate the forces between the Don and Volga rivers as "Fortress Stalingrad" and to order an all-around defensive position, ruling out a breakout. Only the 16th Panzergrenadier Division attempted to fight its way out. Poor coordination between Soviet tank and infantry units along the southern axis allowed much of the Fourth Romanian Army to escape destruction entirely.

• 6. The Ring Closes at Kalach

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  On the 22nd of November, the task of seizing the bridge at Kalach-on-the-Don was given to the Soviet 26th Tank Corps. Its commanders chose an audacious approach: two captured German tanks and a reconnaissance vehicle drove toward the bridge and opened fire on the guards, seizing it intact. Soviet forces broke into Kalach by mid-morning, allowing the 4th Tank Corps and the 4th Mechanized Corps approaching from the south to link up on the western bank.

  The formal closing of the encirclement came on the 23rd of November, around 16:00, near the village of Sovetsky. The forward detachments of the 36th Mechanized Brigade from the Stalingrad Front's 4th Mechanized Corps spotted tanks from the Southwestern Front's 4th Tank Corps approaching. In the fog and confusion of battle, the crews did not fire the agreed green recognition flares. Both sides briefly exchanged fire, damaging several tanks, before the mistake was sorted out. The linkup was confirmed, and it was later re-enacted for newsreels.

  What the encirclement contained surprised even the Stavka. The initial Soviet estimate of trapped enemy personnel was only a quarter of the actual number. Inside the pocket were 22 divisions and 150 separate regiments or battalions, along with vast quantities of materiel: around 100 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and 10,000 trucks. The pocket measured roughly 50 km from east to west and 40 km from north to south. The Stavka had never before in the war managed to surround so many German troops together. Beyond the fighting units, the encirclement caught Luftwaffe ground staff, engineer sections, and a huge number of support and specialist personnel.

• 7. Inside the Pocket

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  The retreating columns that fell back toward Stalingrad left the roads littered with helmets, discarded weapons, and burned-out heavy equipment. Bridges over the Don were choked with traffic as surviving Axis soldiers moved west in bitter cold, trying to reach the German lines before Soviet armor cut them off. Wounded personnel were trampled in the chaos. Some soldiers who tried to cross the river on foot, walking across the ice, broke through and drowned. Hungry troops looted Russian villages and raided supply dumps for canned food. The last stragglers crossed the Don by the 24th of November; German engineers then demolished the bridges.

  Hitler, overruling his military commanders who advocated a breakout, chose instead to hold and resupply the trapped force by air. The daily supply requirement for the encircled personnel was at least 680 tonnes. The Luftwaffe could not meet that figure. Even after assembling a fleet of around 500 aircraft by December, the airlift still fell far short. During the first half of December, the Sixth Army received less than 20% of its daily supply requirements.

  The Soviet outer encirclement extended roughly 320 km in total, though only about three-quarters of that perimeter was actually covered by Soviet troops. The gap between the inner and outer encirclements was approximately 16 km. Soviet armies began planning to split the trapped German formations into smaller groups, with those orders taking effect on the 24th of November. The Stavka simultaneously began planning Operation Saturn, aimed at destroying the Italian Eighth Army and severing German forces in the Caucasus, with a start date of around the 10th of December. German general Erich von Manstein was placed in command of the newly created Army Group Don, comprising the Fourth Panzer and Sixth Armies and the Third and Fourth Romanian Armies, with the task of relieving the pocket that Operation Uranus had created.