The creation of the Stalingrad Front

On 12 July 1942 the Soviet Stavka issued Directive No. 170495, renaming the South-Western Front the Stalingrad Front. The front headquarters, headed by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko with Nikita Khrushchev as member of the military council, was moved from Kalach-on-Don to Stalingrad, today’s Volgograd. Formally it was a change of name; in reality an almost new operational formation came into being. The armies of the old front had been shattered and were retreating behind the Don, and the main strength of the new front consisted of three armies brought forward from the Stavka reserve: the 62nd Army (formerly the 7th Reserve Army), the 63rd Army (formerly the 5th Reserve) and the 64th Army (formerly the 1st Reserve). To these were added the badly mauled 21st Army, and soon also the remnants of the 28th, 38th and 57th Armies and the 8th Air Army.

War chronologies record under this date that “it becomes clear that Stalingrad is the invaders’ greatest challenge”. That statement needs qualifying. What became clear in mid-July was rather that the Germans were heading for the lower Don and the Volga, and not for Moscow, as Joseph Stalin had assumed throughout the spring. The creation of the Stalingrad Front was a response to that realisation. For the Germans, however, Stalingrad was not yet the main objective. Directive No. 41 of April had ordered only an attempt to reach the city or at least bring it under fire, and Hitler set the capture of Stalingrad as a task only on 23 July, in Directive No. 45. The battle that was to become the greatest clash of the war was in July only just beginning.

Two weeks of Case Blue

When Case Blue began on 28 June, the German command hoped to repeat the great encirclements of 1941. Colonel General Maximilian von Weichs’s army group struck from the Kursk area towards Voronezh; on 30 June General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army set off, and on 2 July the two forces met east of Stary Oskol. Only a few Soviet divisions were caught in the pocket, however. The rest managed to withdraw. On 6 July the Germans broke into the part of Voronezh on the right bank of the Voronezh river and became bogged down there, while the Soviet 5th Tank Army counter-attacked from the north-west. On 7 July the Stavka formed a new Voronezh Front from the southern wing of the Bryansk Front.

South of Voronezh the situation was much worse for the Red Army. Timoshenko’s South-Western Front, already weakened in May by the defeat at Barvenkovo and in June by Operations Wilhelm and Fridericus II, was unable to build a new defensive line. Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army swung south from Voronezh, along the Don, and by 7 July was already near Rossosh. According to Russian studies, by 11 July the German forces had penetrated 180 kilometres into the front’s sector, and Timoshenko’s headquarters had lost contact with its armies. Divisions of the 28th and 21st Armies were falling back east and south, often without orders and out of touch with their commanders.

On 9 July, in accordance with the plan, the German Army Group South was divided. Its southern wing – Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army and the 17th Army – came under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s Army Group A, destined for the Caucasus. The northern wing, with the 2nd Army, the 4th Panzer Army, the 6th Army and the Hungarians, formed Army Group B, commanded until mid-July by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. On the same day the 1st Panzer Army also went over to the attack from the Donets.

The directive of 12 July

Only in these days did Moscow accept that the main German thrust would not turn north towards the capital. The Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, who since the end of June had been travelling to threatened sectors of the front, and Stalin himself had to come to terms with the fact that the Germans were making for the great bend of the Don, and from there for the Volga and the Caucasus. On the Stalingrad axis, however, there was no ready defensive line manned by troops. Since the autumn of 1941 several rings of trenches and anti-tank ditches had indeed been built around the city on the orders of the city defence committee, chaired by the first secretary of the regional party committee, Alexei Chuyanov, but in July 1942 they were unfinished and empty.

The directive of 12 July gave the new front the task of stopping the enemy west of the Don on a frontage more than 500 kilometres wide and “under no circumstances” allowing him to reach Stalingrad and the Volga. Major General Vladimir Kolpakchi’s 62nd Army and the 64th Army, together with two naval infantry brigades, fortified-area battalions and officer cadets, were to occupy a line in the great bend of the Don, roughly from Kletskaya to the mouth of the Chir. The 63rd Army was to defend the eastern bank of the Don further north, and the 21st Army was to assemble around Serafimovich and close the junction between the two armies. For a country that since May had been losing army after army in the south, it was a clear signal: Stalingrad had become a separate strategic axis, whose defence the Stavka had carved out of a disintegrating front.

The new armies had many divisions, but they were poorly trained and had not worked together, and they were short of anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft guns, motor vehicles and ammunition. Most of them had never been in action. They moved to the Don by rail and on foot across the steppe, in the heat, under attack from the German air force, which had ruled the skies since the beginning of the offensive.

Behind this decision lay a great effort that was beginning to drain the Soviet reserves. The Stavka’s reserve armies had been formed since the spring chiefly with the defence of Moscow and the Red Army’s own offensives in mind. Now, in a few weeks of July, six such armies had to be thrown simultaneously onto the southern axis, three of which became part of the Stalingrad Front. Russian historians point out that they were committed piecemeal, straight from the trains, and that it was at this point that a large part of the reserves built up in the first half of 1942 was used up. For Stalin, who until the end of June had regarded the attack on Voronezh as a prelude to a march on Moscow, moving these armies to the Don meant admitting that the spring assumptions of Soviet planning had been wrong.

The Millerovo pocket and the turn towards Rostov

In the days when the new front was being organised in Stalingrad, the Germans tried once again to trap Soviet forces in a pocket, this time on the steppe between the Donets and the Don. Hoth’s tanks drove from the north down the Don, while the 1st Panzer Army broke through the defences on the Donets between Izium and Sloviansk on 11 July and attacked from the west. In mid-July, around Millerovo, the pincers closed. Those encircled were mainly units of the Soviet 9th and 38th Armies. Russian studies speak of some 40,000 soldiers surrounded, some of whom broke out to the east. The Germans took the town on 16 July, and on 18 July Kleist’s tanks entered Kamensk-Shakhtinsky. It was, however, a much smaller pocket than those at Białystok, Kiev or Vyazma in 1941. The Red Army, learning from its defeats, increasingly fell back before the pincers closed – often in disorder, but without being encircled.

Hitler, unwilling to let the Soviet forces escape across the Don, ordered on 13 July that the 4th Panzer Army be turned south towards the lower Don and Rostov to help Kleist trap Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky’s Southern Front. The dispute over the pace of the advance and the fighting in Voronezh cost Bock his post: Hitler dismissed him on 13 July, and Weichs took over Army Group B. On 16 July Hitler moved to his new field headquarters, Werwolf, near Vinnytsia in Ukraine, to direct the offensive from there. The decision of 13 July had far-reaching consequences. Two panzer armies jammed the roads around the lower Don, while the 6th Army, advancing towards the great bend of the Don and Stalingrad, was left without the promised armoured support, with few tanks and even smaller stocks of fuel.

First clashes on the Chir

On 17 July, on the Chir and Tsimla rivers, the forward detachments of the 62nd and 64th Armies ran into the spearheads of the 6th Army. Soviet and Russian historiography regards this day as the beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad. The fighting of the forward detachments lasted several days and forced Paulus to deploy part of his main forces. According to Soviet studies, on 22 July the 6th Army numbered 18 divisions. These figures should be treated with caution, however, since many German divisions were by then under strength, and fuel was reaching the spearheads with long delays.

Stalin was dissatisfied with Timoshenko, whom he blamed for the defeats from Kharkiv to the Don. On 22 July he summoned to Moscow Lieutenant General Vasily Gordov, until then commander of the 21st Army, and from 23 July entrusted him with command of the Stalingrad Front. Khrushchev remained a member of the military council. On the same day the 6th Army struck the right wing of the 62nd Army in the great bend of the Don and over the following days broke through its front north of Kalach. Meanwhile the Stalingrad Front grew rapidly: by the end of July it had eight armies under its command, including two tank armies hastily formed from the remnants of the 28th and 38th Armies, and from 30 July also the 51st Army.

Place in the war

The creation of the Stalingrad Front was the Soviet command’s first step in the direction that was to decide the fate of the 1942 campaign. In July, however, it was a defensive gesture in the face of an offensive whose scale Moscow still did not fully understand, not the choice of the field of a decisive battle. The Germans still regarded the Caucasus as the main objective and Stalingrad as a secondary task that the 6th Army was to carry out along the way. Hitler began to treat Stalingrad as an objective in its own right only in Directive No. 45 of 23 July, when he ordered both army groups to advance simultaneously, into the Caucasus and to the Volga. On 28 July Stalin answered the latest defeats with Order No. 227, “Not a step back!”.

The front in its original form did not last long. When its defensive sector had stretched to some 800 kilometres, the South-Eastern Front was carved out of its southern wing on 7 August, and on 13 August Gordov was replaced by Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko. On 23 August German tanks reached the Volga north of the city, and the Luftwaffe reduced much of Stalingrad to rubble. From September the fighting was in the streets of the city. On 30 September the front was renamed the Don Front, and the name “Stalingrad” passed to Yeremenko’s South-Eastern Front, which was defending the city itself. The two fronts, together with a re-formed South-Western Front, carried out Operation Uranus in November, encircling the 6th Army. The surrender of its remnants at the beginning of February 1943 was the Wehrmacht’s greatest defeat up to that time and the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front. The city that the directive of 12 July had ordered to be defended far to the west of its limits, on the Don, finally became the symbol of the whole war in the east.