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| Barbarossa – Baltic Sea – Finland – Leningrad and Baltics – Crimea and Caucasus – Moscow – 1st Rzhev-Vyazma – 2nd Kharkov – Blue – Stalingrad – Velikiye Luki – 2nd Rzhev-Sychevka – Kursk – 2nd Smolensk – Dnieper – 2nd Kiev – Korsun – Hube's Pocket – Baltic – Bagration – Lvov-Sandomierz – Lublin-Brest – Balkans (Iaşi-Chişinău) – Budapest – Vistula-Oder – East Prussia – East Pomerania – Silesia – Berlin – Prague – Vienna |
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| Blue – Voronezh – Edelweiss – Stalingrad – Uranus – Winter Storm – Saturn – Tatsinskaya Raid – 3rd Kharkov |
Operation Uranus was the World War 2 Soviet encirclement of German forces during the Battle of Stalingrad. The double envelopment was launched on November 19, 1942, with twin attacks that met at Kalach four days later.
The Battle
Preparations for the encirclement had been very thorough. Joseph Stalin was persuaded to allow Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky to receive all the resources they wanted. Zhukov's strategy was to supply besieged Stalingrad with just enough resources to draw in, hold and exhaust Friedrich Paulus' German 6th Army, while fresh Soviet troop intakes and new equipment were used to build five new tank armies. By this time, Soviet war production far outstripped German expectations. The new armies were then 'blooded' elsewhere on the frontline. Once German forces were concentrated on Stalingrad, the Soviets decided on a wide encirclement for two main reasons: to attack the weaker fronts held by poorly equipped Romanian armies and to avoid early intervention by the 6th Army units. Secrecy was surprisingly effective, partly due to Soviet deceptive actions and partly due to deep German skepticism about the Soviet ability to carry out such an ambitious operation. Once Romanian resistance had been crushed on the first day of the operation, Soviet forces continued quickly with the encirclement. No significant German forces were in place to resist and the northern and southern pincers met at Kalach, just 4 days later. More than a quarter of a million Axis soldiers were now cut off from supplies just as the harsh winter began to take hold. The situation for the German in Stalingrad was desperate and on November 22 General Paulus sent Adolf Hitler a telegram saying that the German Sixth Army was surrounded. Hitler forbade Paulus to break out from the encirclement. So the Sixth Army slowly fell to continuous Soviet ground attacks, starvation and the freezing Russian winter. Promises by Hermann Göring to resupply the encircled Army by the Luftwaffe were never fully met, and many of the planes used to sustain at least a low level of resupply were lost. On February 2, 1943, the remnants of the 6th Army—consisting of around 90,000 soldiers—surrendered to the Soviets. The operation was conducted in rough coordination with Operation Mars near Moscow.
Outcome
The Red Army had linked up so rapidly at Kalach that it had to be re-enacted for propaganda filming several days later. Soviet forces took bridges on the march as the German defenders could not believe that the advancing tanks, with lights fully on, could be anything but their own. (German units often used captured T-34 tanks as they were highly regarded by all sides.) The morale boost of the German defeat, particularly in Russia, was significant. Germany had suffered its largest defeat in the war so far. During the siege, Paulus had been promoted to field marshal. He thus became the first German field marshal to surrender. According to some sources Hitler ordered his promotion specifically in the hope that he would commit suicide to avoid surrendering his marshal's baton.
