February 1943: Soviet victory at Stalingrad

The Battle of Stalingrad ended on 2 February 1943 with the surrender of the German 6th Army to Soviet forces. The battle had lasted for over 5 months and resulted in over 2 million casualties. The decisive change in the battle had occurred on 23 November 1942, when, after losing Stalingrad itself to Axis forces earlier that month, the Soviet army cut off the German 6th Army in Stalingrad from the rest of the Axis lines, beginning the Siege of Stalingrad. After over two months of deprivation and constant attack, the 6th Army surrendered the city to the USSR and its 91,000 remaining soldiers became POWs.

Initially, the Axis armies had been successful in taking Stalingrad by early November 1942, but Soviet Generals Georgiy Jukov and Aleksandr Vasilevskiy noticed that the flanks supporting the German 6th Army were thinly spread and drawn from the relatively weak armies of Italy, Romania, and Hungary. Thus, they decided to encircle Axis forces in Stalingrad by destroying these supporting armies holding the flanks, a maneuver designated Operation Uranus.

The leadership of the German 6th Army was not unaware of the danger that encircle posed to their forces nor would they have been unable to react to Operation Uranus, but Hitler had given specific orders not to retreat and that Stalingrad must be held at all costs. Therefore, despite their capability, the 6th Army did not attempt to retreat in November 1942 and never attempted to break out of the siege. It thus stayed encircled and cut off from necessary supplies except by air drops.

Soviet victory at Stalingrad marks a turning point in the Eastern Front of the Second World War, as the Germans now begin to be pushed back by the Soviets. The Battle of Stalingrad was immensely costly to both sides, but the Germans did not have manpower reserves on the scale of the USSR and thus had difficulty replacing their losses at Stalingrad. German tried to replace the soldiers lost at Stalingrad by transferring soldiers from western Europe, weakening its defenses there. Even then, this transfer of troops was not sufficient to restart the German advance; the Axis will not move beyond the Leningrad-Stalingrad line. The end of the Battle of Stalingrad also ends the Axis threat to Baku and the Soviet oil supply. This outcome guarantees continued Soviet access to oil, the loss of which would have been devastating for the Soviet war effort.