History Spotlight, 2/1

On this day in 1943, the encircled and beleaguered German 6th Army surrender to the Soviets, ending the Battle of Stalingrad. As most people know by now, the whole idea of invading Russia was a bad one. Germany's technological advantage only held up as long as they could keep the supplies flowing. Across the vast Russian steppes it was nearly impossible to keep the great German war machine gassed up and the feared German infantry well-fed. Couple that to the brutal Russian winter and you have a recipe for disaster.
It was never supposed to be that way. The German invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, started on June 22, 1941, was supposed to take six months, tops. Hitler figured that the Russians, badly led and poorly supplied, would go down like field mice under a thresher. At the beginning, they did. But Stalin had two things Hitler didn't: an almost infinite supply of cannon fodder and an almost infinite supply of land on which to retreat. Stalin kept the pressure up on the Germans (if you've ever seen the first 10 minutes of Enemy at the Gates, that's not too far off from reality) while destroying anything of use to the Germans on the way.
That's where things ended up: the Germans were stalled at the Siege of Leningrad in the north, they were stalled at the gates of Moscow in the middle and they were mired in some of the worst city warfare in history at Stalingrad in the south. The three-pronged strategy of invasion was working out to be a bust.
There was actually a method to Hitler's madness. Moscow was the capitol of the Soviet Union - a must-capture, especially if Stalin came with it. Leningrad (which has reverted to its pre-revolution name of St. Petersburg these days) had a valuable rail infrastructure and coastline. And Stalingrad (Volgagrad today) was at the tail end of the massive Baku oil fields. Controlling Stalingrad would control these fields.
The German army was hampered in the field by Hitler's micromanagement and unwillingness to be flexible. For example, the commander of the 6th Army, Friederich Paulus, wanted to withdraw from Stalingrad to get out of that impossible hellhole and attempt to draw the Russian army out onto more favorable land. Blitzkrieg works fine for huge set piece battles on a vast open plain but it's much less effective in brutal house-to-house fighting. Hitler said no. The Wehrmacht had never retreated before and he wasn't about to let them start now, even for a strategically sound reason. This is a good indicator of the gaps in Hitler's knowledge (apart from being crazy that is). Hitler had served in the military, but only as a corporal, and he lacked the training or vision to understand the risky strategic moves that his generals were proposing. Hitler knew: going back bad, going forward good. Feints, double-feints, false retreats, these all went above him.
So, in the end, the 6th Army was trapped in Stalingrad. The city was soon encircled by the Red Army, making Paulus's plan moot. Hitler had Paulus promoted to Field Marshall but not for meritorius service. No German Field Marshall had ever surrendered and what Hitler was saying to Paulus was, "Commit suicide first." Paulus surrendered anyway.
A coda to this battle is that most of the German soldiers captured died in the gulags after the war.
Here's my not-really-all-that-accurate approximation of the Eastern Front. The line runs from Leningrad through Moscow and down to Stalingrad. Notice, for starters, that that's a front nearly a thousand miles long! Also notice all that Russia stretching out to the east of the line.


View Larger Map