Operation 150 Uranus

Luo Shuai Brother still left, Yelena also prepared a homemade pill, although she reported that if she was discharged from the hospital at this time, it would have a great impact on his body, but Yelena's pill can basically solve this problem to a large extent. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info Especially now for the Soviet Union, if such a very talented military general is desolate in the future because he has not cultivated well, it will also be a very regrettable thing. Yelena's Buddha Treasure Pill is not easy to give, and it is impossible to give a large handful, a total of seven pills, so that he can eat one pill a week. Rokossov didn't know the value of this elixir, but the dean who sent him away warned him that Yelena's medicine was not available to everyone, and in China, Yelena's elixir was comparable to a diamond, so it should be kept carefully. Rokossov has never been a careless person, but fortunately, he listened to the advice of the dean, which allowed him to recover very well. He was able to fully devote himself to the fierce battle, and he was an indispensable person on the battlefield of Stalingrad.

Stalingrad has always been engaged in fierce street fighting. The Germans fought house by house, finding their way through the ruins on the ground and underground, so it was also called the "rat war", and even joked that "even if we occupy the kitchen, we still need to fight in the living room." "For Stalin, the city that bears his name must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Germans. He personally gave an order to Admiral Yeremenko to hold the city under any circumstances. Every house, as long as there are Soviet soldiers, even if there is only one person, must become an impenetrable fortress for the enemy. For Hitler, the spiritual value of Stalingrad had outweighed its strategic value, and it was imperative to capture it, and when the new Chief of the Army General Staff, General Zeitzler, carefully pointed out to him that the long Don front on the northern flank of the 6th Army was in danger and suggested that the 6th Army should be withdrawn to the Don Meander, Hitler replied sternly: "Wherever the German soldiers go, they must be defended!"

After three months of bloody fighting until early November 1942, the Germans finally advanced slowly to the banks of the Volga River and occupied 80% of the city, splitting the remaining Soviet troops into two narrow pockets, and the Germans were never able to completely occupy Stalingrad. In addition, the Volga River began to freeze, making it impossible for the Soviets to ship supplies to the defenders of the city. Despite this, the fighting near the Mamayev Heights and in the factory strip in the northern city remained fierce. Among them, the battles of the Red October Factory, the Tractor Factory and the Barricade Factory became known to the whole world. While Soviet soldiers engaged in gunfights with German troops, factory workers were on the sidelines repairing damaged tanks and other weapons, sometimes even directly on the battlefield. The tank was driven by volunteer workers of the plant. These tanks were often driven directly from the production lines of the arsenal to the front lines of the battles, and there was no time to even paint and install shooting sights.

On November 11, 1942, the Germans launched a strong attack on a frontage 5 km wide with 5 infantry divisions, 2 panzer divisions and 2 engineer battalions. The battle formation is highly dense. Within a day, the Soviets and Germans fought an unusually fierce battle for every inch of land and every house, and both sides suffered heavy casualties. Although the Germans had reached the banks of the Volga south of the barricades, their troops were exhausted and their offensive was at the end of their strength, and Paulus was forced to halt the offensive the next day and reorganize his troops. The losses of the Soviet Red Army were no less serious, with two divisions of the 62nd Army losing 75% of its men.

As far away as Volkov in Stalingrad, he began to prepare the plan he developed with Vasilev, and Stalin gave this counteroffensive plan a very loud name, 'Operation Uranus', and the basic strategy of the operation was to keep the German army in the city, and then to encircle the German army in the city of Stalingrad by striking at the weakened outer side of the German army. This echoed the "Operation Mars" against the German Army Group Center. The plan stipulated: The Southwestern Front carried out the main attack from the bridgehead positions in the area of Sheramofevich and Klitskaya on the west bank of the Don River, broke through the defenses of the 3rd Army in Romania, and penetrated directly into Karachi on the east bank of the Don River; the Stalingrad Front attacked from the south of Stalingrad to the northwest, broke through the defenses of the 4th Army in Romania, and joined forces with the Southwestern Front in Karachi to complete the encirclement of the German 6th Army; and the Don Front was commanded by Lieutenant General Rokossov, and its task was to carry out an auxiliary assault from the northwest of Stalingrad to the southeast to cover the main offensive of the Southwestern Front。

When the German High Command received news of the launch of a counteroffensive by the Soviet Red Army, the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Zeitzler, urged Hitler to order Paulus to withdraw from Stalingrad. However, the commander of the Air Force, Field Marshal Goering, assured Hitler that he could guarantee the ability of the Air Force to supply the 6th Army by air through the "air bridge". It turned out that the Luftwaffe simply did not have the transport capacity to provide the supply of such a large number of troops, and its transport ceiling of 300 tons per day could not meet the demand of 700 tons per day. However, Hitler still supported Goering's plan, and Hitler ordered Paulus to hold his ground, and the 6th Army must remain in Stalingrad, and ordered him to change the name of this army group to the "Stalin Bastion" Army in the future. Due to bad weather and anti-aircraft fire of the Soviet Red Army, the airdrop program soon suffered failure. According to statistics, the Germans received only about 10% of their supplies, and the 6th Army gradually felt the threat of starvation. On the other hand, the Soviet Red Army was constantly strengthening the encirclement of Stalingrad and began operations to reduce it.

On December 12, 1942, Marshal Manstein, with a heavy heart, launched a counteroffensive codenamed "Winter Storm". The Germans, led by Hort's 4th Panzer Army, broke through the defensive line of the 51st Army of the Soviet Red Army on the Aksai River on December 16, 1942. By 19 December 1942, the 57th Panzer Corps, which was part of the 4th Panzer Army, had advanced to within 30 miles of the southern encirclement. At this time, Manstein found himself also in danger of being surrounded by the Soviet Red Army, which was several times his size. So, he decided to ignore Hitler's orders and ordered Paulus to immediately break south to join the 4th Panzer Army. Paulus, however, had no intention of breaking through without receiving a direct order from Hitler, and he rejected Manstein's order on the grounds of lack of fuel, giving up this last chance.

Manstein's "Winter Storm" was declared a failure. At that time, the temperature had dropped to minus 45 degrees Celsius. The ice on the Volga gradually thickened, so that the Soviet Red Army could more easily replenish its own troops. And the German 6th Army in the encirclement had less and less air supplies, averaging less than 100 tons per day. The German 6th Army was on the verge of running out of ammunition and food. The distribution of food rations had been reduced to a subsistence standard, the artillery had begun to feel short of ammunition, medicine and fuel had run out, thousands of people had contracted typhoid fever and dysentery, and even more so from frostbite, and thousands of soldiers died every day from starvation, cold and malnutrition. Some officers tried to persuade Paulus to quickly break out of the siege despite Hitler's orders. But Paulus, fearing the charge of disobeying military orders, insisted on standing still.

On January 8, 1943, the commander of the Suton Front, Lieutenant General Rokossov, issued an ultimatum to the commander of the German 6th Army, Colonel-General Paulus, urging him to surrender. Paulus telegraphed to Hitler asking for permission to act on camera, which was denied. On the 10th, Rokossovsky's Don Front launched an offensive codenamed "Ring" against the besieged German 6th Army, and the encircled German army began to shrink its defense from the outskirts of Stalingrad to the city. Hitler awarded Paulus the German Field Marshal a Scepter to encourage him to continue resisting. He said to Jodl: "In the history of Germany, there has never been a marshal who has been taken prisoner alive. Hitler also hoped that Paulus would fight to the end or commit suicide.

Paulus did not let him get his wish, and he chose to surrender. Operation Uranus encircled between 200,000 and 250,000 German soldiers in an encirclement 50 kilometers (31 miles) from east to west and 40 kilometers (25 miles) from south to north. The forces in the encirclement included four infantry corps belonging to the German 6th Army Corps, one Panzer Corps under the 4th Panzer Corps, the remnants of two Romanian divisions, one Croatian infantry regiment and other special units, and the besieged forces were armed with approximately 140 tanks, 2,000 artillery pieces or mortars, and 10,000 military vehicles. The retreat to Stalingrad was littered with steel helmets, weapons and other equipment, and the destroyed heavy equipment was abandoned on the roadside. The bridge across the Don River was congested, and the surviving Axis soldiers hurriedly retreated east in the cold winter to avoid being stopped outside Stalingrad by Soviet tanks and infantry. Many wounded Axis soldiers were trampled on, and many soldiers who tried to cross the ice also fell into the river and drowned. Hungry soldiers swept Soviet villages in search of supplies, and military logistics posts were often looted.

This time the Soviets won a great victory. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the most tragic battles in World War II and even in the history of human warfare. The entire campaign lasted 199 days. Due to the scale of the campaign, the number of casualties could not be accurately counted. In the final phase of the campaign, the Germans still dealt a heavy blow to the Soviet Red Army, and at the same time, the Soviet Red Army almost wiped out all of the German 6th Army and part of the 4th Panzer Army, 21 German divisions were removed from the list, and a large number of direct units were eliminated.

Western scholars estimate that the Axis forces suffered 850,000 casualties in the battle, of which 750,000 were killed or wounded and 91,000 were captured. The Soviet estimates were to wipe out 1.5 million Axis troops. Either way, the claim that the Germans lost 1/4 of the southern flank of the Eastern Front in the Battle of Stalingrad is shared by most people. The defeat of the Battle of Stalingrad made the German army launch the later Battle of Kursk as the last hope to regain the initiative on the Soviet-German battlefield, but as a result, it completely lost the strategic initiative on the Soviet-German battlefield, as the chief of the General Staff of the German Army, General Zeitzler, said: "Our loss of 250,000 officers and soldiers in Stalingrad is equivalent to breaking our backbone on the entire Eastern Front." At the same time, the Soviet Union also paid a heavy price, the specific casualties of the Soviet Red Army were: 474871 killed, 650878 wounded or captured, a total of 1129619 casualties. More than 40,000 Soviet citizens were killed in just one week of the German invasion of the city, and the number of civilians killed in the entire campaign is not accurately counted, but it can be said that it is far more than that. In this battle, the losses of the Soviet Red Army still surpassed those of the German army, but the difference was that the German army was wiped out by the whole organization, its combat effectiveness no longer existed, and the new units could not form combat effectiveness without a period of training; while the remaining units of the Soviet Red Army supplemented with new recruits and brought in the new with the old and the new, so that they could quickly form up their combat effectiveness. Moreover, it was difficult to replenish the personnel and materials of the German army, and the speed and quantity of the replenishment of the Soviet Red Army far exceeded that of Germany. Germany's strength weakened as a result.

Paulus, who had just been awarded the rank of marshal by Hitler, and his subordinates, Lieutenant General Pfefer, commander of the 4th Infantry Army, Lieutenant General Kurzbach, commander of the 51st Army, and Major General Kolfess, commander of the 295th Division, were forced to surrender. Along with Paulus, 23 generals, 2,000 officers below the rank of colonel, and 90,000 soldiers were taken prisoner. The Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad was of great political and military significance. This victory made a decisive contribution to the fundamental turning point in the Great Patriotic War for the Soviet Union and even in the entire Second World War. The outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad enabled the Soviet army to seize the strategic initiative from the Germans, which it maintained until the end of the war, and at the same time it inspired the peoples of all countries to wage a more resolute struggle against the fascist occupiers.

The Battle of Stalingrad, arguably the most brutal war in human history, is not unfounded, and the Battle of Stalingrad began. In the face of the continuous onslaught launched by the German army, the Soviet high command ordered the defenders of the city to take all measures to hold their positions, in order to prevent the troops from retreating, the Soviet Union used the war supervision force to strictly control the battlefield, many recruits were forced to charge under their own machine guns, and the average survival time of the recruits who had just arrived from the rear did not exceed 24 hours. In the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviets repelled more than 700 German charges, making it impossible for the Germans to capture the entire city.

The investment and casualties of both sides are unprecedented. During this period, the number of participants on both sides reached an unprecedented scale: the Germans committed a total of 1.01 million men, 10,250 artillery pieces, 675 tanks, and 732 aircraft. The Soviets had more than 1.1 million troops, 15,501 artillery pieces, 1,463 tanks, and 1,115 aircraft, surpassing Germany in terms of military power. This tragic war ended on February 2, 1943, and lasted 199 days. Due to the scale of the campaign, the number of casualties could not be accurately counted, and one German soldier noted that they lost about 2,000 soldiers a day.

In the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet army suffered a total of 1.13 million casualties. As for Nazi Germany, Western countries estimate that the Nazis had 750,000 killed or wounded and 90,000 captured, accounting for one-quarter of its total strength in the Soviet-German battlefield. The Battle of Stalingrad directly caused a fundamental change in the balance of power between the Soviet Union and Germany, and became a turning point not only in the Soviet-German war, but also on the Eastern Front in World War II.