Orders of battle

Red Army

Main article: Soviet order of battle for the Battle of Stalingrad

During the defence of Stalingrad, the Red Army deployed five armies (28th, 51st, 57th, 62nd and 64th Armies) in and around the city and an additional nine armies in the encirclement counter offensive.[40]:435–438 The nine armies amassed for the counter offensive were the 24th Army, 65th Army, 66th Army and 16th Air Army from the north as part of the Don Front offensive and 1st Guards Army, 5th Tank, 21st Army, 2nd Air Army and 17th Air Army from the south as part of the Southwestern Front.

Axis

The Axis order of battle at Stalingrad is a list of the significant land units that fought in the Battle of Stalingrad on the side of the Axis Powers between September 1942 and February 1943.

Apart from the twenty divisions of the German Wehrmacht, eighteen Romanian divisions and one Croatian regiment took part in the battle on the Axis side as well.

ATTACK OF STALINGGRAD

David Glantz indicated that four hard-fought battles – collectively known as the Kotluban Operations – north of Stalingrad, where the Soviets made their greatest stand, decided Germany's fate before the Nazis ever set foot in the city itself, and were a turning point in the war. Beginning in late August, continuing in September and into October, the Soviets committed between two and four armies in hastily coordinated and poorly controlled attacks against the Germans' northern flank. The actions resulted in more than 200,000 Soviet Army casualties but did slow the German assault.

On 23 August the 6th Army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad in pursuit of the 62nd and 64th Armies, which had fallen back into the city. Kleist later said after the war.

The capture of Stalingrad was subsidiary to the main aim. It was only of importance as a convenient place, in the bottleneck between Don and the Volga, where we could block an attack on our flank by Russian forces coming from the east. At the start, Stalingrad was no more than a name on the map to us.

The Soviets had enough warning of the German advance to ship grain, cattle, and railway cars across the Volga and out of harm's way, but most civilian residents were not evacuated. This "harvest victory" left the city short of food even before the German attack began. Before the Heer reached the city itself, the Luftwaffe had rendered the River Volga, vital for bringing supplies into the city, unusable to Soviet shipping. Between 25 and 31 July, 32 Soviet ships were sunk, with another nine crippled.

The battle began with the heavy bombing of the city by Generaloberst Wolfram von Richthofen's Luftflotte 4, which in the summer and autumn of 1942 was the single most powerful air formation in the world. Some 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped in 48 hours, more than in London at the height of the Blitz.122 Stalin refused to evacuate civilian population from the city, so when bombing began 400,000 civilians were trapped within city boundaries. The exact number of civilians killed during the course of the battle is unknown but was most likely very high. Around 40,000 civilians were moved to Germany as slave workers, some fled the city during battle and a small number were evacuated by the Soviets. In February 1943 only between 10,000 to 60,000 civilians were still alive in Stalingrad. Much of the city was quickly turned to rubble, although some factories continued production while workers joined in the fighting. The Stalingrad Tractor Factory continued to turn out T-34 tanks literally until German troops burst into the plant. The 369th (Croatian) Reinforced Infantry Regiment was the only non-German unit selected by the Wehrmacht to enter Stalingrad city during assault operations. It fought as part of the 100th Jäger Division.

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