Operation Ring

On Sunday 10 January 1943, at 8.05 a.m. Moscow time, almost seven thousand guns, mortars and rocket launchers opened fire on the western edge of the Stalingrad pocket. After an artillery preparation lasting nearly an hour, the infantry and tanks of the Soviet Don Front went over to the attack against General Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army, which had been encircled for seven weeks. So began Operation Ring (Russian: Koltso) – the final phase of the Battle of Stalingrad, intended to destroy the largest body of German troops ever to have been encircled.

Two days earlier the Soviet command had offered the Sixth Army an honourable surrender. Paulus did not reply: Adolf Hitler had forbidden any negotiations, and the army was to hold out as long as possible in order to tie down Soviet forces and cover the withdrawal of German troops from the Caucasus.

The pocket at the turn of the year

Since the encirclement of the Sixth Army on 22–23 November 1942, the pocket between the Don and the Volga had held more than a dozen German divisions, the remnants of two Romanian divisions, Croatian units and tens of thousands of auxiliaries recruited from Soviet prisoners of war (the so-called Hiwis). The strength of the force at the beginning of January is disputed: Soviet studies speak of about 250,000 men, while German historians, working from ration strengths, usually give 200,000–250,000, of whom only a part were still fit to fight. Soviet intelligence long underestimated this figure: before the operation began, the Don Front assumed that there were some 80,000–90,000 enemy soldiers in the pocket.

The situation of the encircled troops grew worse week by week. The Stalingrad airlift delivered on average only a fraction of the army’s daily needs; after the loss of the airfields at Tatsinskaya and Morozovsk at the end of December, the Luftwaffe had to fly from bases even further from the pocket. The bread ration fell to 100–200 grams a day, most of the horses had been eaten, and the frost reached minus 30 degrees. Hope of relief collapsed with the failure of Operation Winter Storm: in the second half of December Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group Don came to a halt some 50 kilometres from the pocket, and after the Soviet blow on the middle Don the German front was falling back to the west and south-west, ever further from Stalingrad.

In the meantime the Soviet side reorganised the command of the encirclement. From 1 January 1943 all the forces around the pocket came under a single commander – General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who received the 57th, 62nd and 64th Armies from the former Stalingrad Front. Together with the 21st, 24th, 65th and 66th Armies, the Don Front now comprised seven combined-arms armies, supported by General Sergei Rudenko’s 16th Air Army. As the representative of the Stavka, the preparation of the operation was supervised by the Red Army’s chief of artillery, Colonel General Nikolai Voronov. Soviet figures speak of some 212,000 soldiers (more recent tallies give as many as 280,000), nearly 7,000 guns and mortars, 257 tanks and about 300 aircraft – in other words little or no superiority in men, but crushing superiority in artillery, ammunition, fuel and food.

The plan for Ring envisaged the main blow from the west, where the line of the pocket jutted out in a wedge towards the Don around Marinovka and Karpovka; then the cutting off and destruction of this salient, an advance to the river Rossoshka and on into the depths of the pocket towards Pitomnik and Gumrak, and finally the splitting of the rest of the force into pieces to be destroyed one by one. The start date was postponed – according to Voronov’s memoirs the attack was originally planned for 6 January, but preparations fell behind, and Joseph Stalin agreed to the delay with evident displeasure.

The ultimatum of 8 January

Before the attack the Soviet command tried to persuade the Sixth Army to lay down its arms. The ultimatum, dated 8 January, was signed by Voronov and Rokossovsky. It pointed out that the army was cut off, the relief had failed and supply from the air was insufficient, and it offered surrender on terms that were, by the standards of wartime practice, generous: everyone who surrendered was guaranteed life and safety and return home after the war, and could keep their uniforms, badges of rank, decorations and personal belongings – and senior officers their swords as well; the wounded and sick were promised medical care, and everyone normal rations. A reply was to be given by 10 a.m. Moscow time on 9 January.

The letter was to be delivered by envoys: Major Aleksandr Smyslov and Captain Nikolai Dyatlenko, accompanied by a trumpeter. On 8 January, as they approached the German lines under a white flag, they were fired on and had to turn back. The next day they were received in the front line and led blindfolded to a command post, but they were told that orders forbade the acceptance of any documents and were sent back. The text of the ultimatum reached Paulus anyway – it was broadcast by radio and dropped in leaflets over the pocket. The commander of the Sixth Army forwarded it to Hitler’s headquarters, asking for freedom of action; the answer was no. The justification, which Paulus later repeated to his generals, was that every day of resistance tied down Soviet armies which would otherwise strike at the southern wing of the Eastern Front, threatened on all sides – above all at Army Group A as it withdrew from the Caucasus.

The attack on the western salient

The main blow on 10 January was delivered by General Pavel Batov’s 65th Army, supported by the neighbouring 21st and 24th Armies; the 57th and 64th Armies attacked from the south, while the 62nd and 66th Armies pinned down the Germans in the ruins of the city and on the northern sector. On a breakthrough sector a dozen or more kilometres wide, Voronov concentrated artillery in a density the Red Army had never before achieved. On the first day the attackers drove several kilometres into the defences but could not tear them open. The German divisions – the 44th and 76th Infantry Divisions and the 29th Motorised Division around Marinovka, and the 3rd Motorised Division in the south-western corner of the pocket – defended themselves fiercely, using trenches and bunkers dug into the frozen steppe and counter-attacking with the last tanks for which there was still fuel.

The resistance, however, did not last long. Ammunition was short, and above all there were no warm shelters in the rear: when the Germans had to abandon their fortified positions, they fell back onto the open, snow-covered steppe, where there was no firewood, no dugouts and no trenches. By 13 January Soviet troops had eliminated the Marinovka salient and reached the Rossoshka, and the 3rd Motorised Division, threatened with encirclement, withdrew eastwards. Thousands of wounded and frostbitten soldiers trudged towards the airfield at Pitomnik in the hope of evacuation.

On 16 January Soviet units took Pitomnik – the only airfield in the pocket capable of handling traffic on any scale. A day later the encircled area was roughly half the size it had been before the attack, and the Germans had fallen back to an inner line running from Bolshaya Rossoshka past Gonchary to Voroponovo. In these days one of the pocket’s most energetic commanders left it. General Hans-Valentin Hube, commander of XIV Panzer Corps, who had returned to the pocket from Hitler’s headquarters on 8 January with the promise of a new relief effort, flew out again on 18 January on the Führer’s orders to help organise air supply from outside.

The loss of Pitomnik and the last airfields

The fall of Pitomnik was a blow from which the encircled troops could no longer recover. Aircraft, equipment and stores were abandoned on the airfield, and transport traffic moved to Gumrak, where Paulus also had his headquarters. That airfield was small, cratered and littered with wrecks; heavy aircraft landed there with difficulty, and many crews preferred to drop supply containers from the air, some of which fell on Soviet positions. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, sent by Hitler in mid-January to improve the airlift, could no longer change anything. Crowds of wounded gathered around the landing grounds, and there were scenes of despair by the aircraft – military police had to make sure that only those entitled to evacuation got on board.

After a short pause to regroup, the Soviet troops resumed their attack. On 20 and 21 January they advanced towards Gumrak, and on 22 January they broke through the defences on a sector several kilometres wide on both sides of Voroponovo. That day Paulus reported to the Army High Command that the breach could not be closed, ammunition and food had run out, more than 12,000 wounded were lying in the pocket without care, and in places units had begun to disintegrate; he asked what orders he was to give to troops who no longer had anything to fight with. Hitler replied on 22 January that surrender was out of the question: the army was to defend itself to the end, because it was fulfilling a “historic task” – allowing the front in the south to be rebuilt.

Gumrak fell on the night of 21 to 22 January. The last aircraft took off from it under fire, and army headquarters moved into the ruins of central Stalingrad. Until 23 January the odd aircraft could still land on a makeshift strip by the flying school on the edge of the city; after that the only supplies were containers dropped by parachute, which increasingly fell into Soviet hands. The pocket shrank to a strip of ruins along the Volga, packed with hungry, sick and frostbitten soldiers.

What happened on 21 January

It is often stated that on 21 January the Red Army captured the last airfield at Stalingrad and that Hitler, demanding further resistance, promoted Paulus to field marshal. Both claims need correcting. Gumrak was taken on the night of 21 to 22 January, and even after that a makeshift airstrip in the city remained in use for a day or two. Paulus’s promotion to field marshal, on the other hand, came only on 30 January, on the eve of the surrender – on 22 January Hitler merely forbade surrender once again.

An offensive along the whole front

One also comes across the claim that on 10 January the Red Army resumed operations “in the north and in the Caucasus”. No new offensive began in those regions that day, however. In the Caucasus the pursuit of the First Panzer Army withdrawing from the Terek had been under way since the beginning of January, and at Leningrad the attack by the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts – Operation Iskra – began two days later, on 12 January. On 13 January the Voronezh Front struck on the upper Don at the Hungarian Second Army and the remnants of the Italian Eighth Army. January 1943 was thus the month in which, for the first time in this war, the Red Army was conducting major offensive operations simultaneously along the entire length of the front – from Lake Ladoga to the Caucasus.

Place in the war

Operation Ring was the last act of the counter-offensive that had begun on 19 November 1942 with Operation Uranus. In its first two weeks it stripped the Sixth Army of its airfields, its supplies and most of the ground on which the army could still survive. What followed was a foregone conclusion: on 26 January Soviet troops split the pocket in two; on 30 January Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal, expecting that he would not let himself be taken alive; and on 31 January Paulus, with his staff and the southern group, surrendered in the basement of a department store in the city centre. On 2 February General Karl Strecker’s northern group laid down its arms. Some 91,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, including twenty-odd generals; only about 5,000–6,000 of them returned to Germany after the war.

The price on the Soviet side was also high – the fighting on the frozen steppe and in the ruins of the city cost the Don Front tens of thousands killed and wounded. But the outcome was unprecedented: for the first time in this war an entire German field army had been encircled and destroyed. The Sixth Army’s survival into early February did indeed tie down seven Soviet armies and ease Army Group A’s withdrawal from the Caucasus, but the price was the sacrifice of almost the whole army. From then on Stalingrad became a symbol of defeat in Germany, and, for the world, proof that the Wehrmacht could be beaten in a great battle.