"The fascination of war is the story of violent death and the game like movements of men by their leaders. It is the ultimate competition. In modern war, the leaders follow. Were this not so, Adolf Hitler would have been marching out in front of the 230,000 men of the German Sixth Army which attacked Stalingrad. He would have died in battle or in captivity, as did all but a handful of these men, because the operation was the single greatest strategic blunder in modern military history. It was the blunder of mad genius; a mistake of such magnitude and obviousness that it has to be laid to Hitler's insane willingness to let any number of men die in an attempt to satisfy his lust for power. No other army in the world could have accomplished its own destruction so thoroughly, because none but German soldiers would have failed to revolt against an order to march into Hell."

The above opinion was penned by Andy Rooney of TV's Sixty Minutes, formerly a reporter for The Stars and Stripes during World War II. Whether or not you agree with Rooney's fiery rhetoric, it does appear that Hitler developed a single-minded focus on taking "Stalin's City" in late 1942, and this attempt led to a smashing defeat for the Wehrmacht and irrevocably turned the tide of war on the East Front.

The Soviet winter counteroffensive had ground to a standstill by the spring of 1942. The German Army patched up the north and center, and readied its southern wing to pursue Hitler's economic objective, the capture of the Caucasus oil fields. After clearing the Crimean peninsula, Army Group South, largely up to strength and better equipped than in 1941, jumped off on 28 June 1942. Army Group B, consisting of the German Second, Fourth Panzer, and Sixth Armies, along with a number of Axis-allied divisions, was to clear Voronezh and the Don River basin, drive on to the Volga River, and capture Stalingrad and Astrakhan, thus securing the left flank of the drive into the Caucasus by the rest of AGS.

The German 1942 offensive was initially a showy success. Although the Soviets had captured a detailed copy of the German plans about 10 days prior to the start of the offensive, it is still largely unclear to what extent the Soviet retreat was by design or by dint of Axis arms.

In any event, the Germans drove relentlessly forward and by mid-July reached the easternmost bend of the Don River. Hitler became confident that Soviet resistance on the Stalingrad axis was collapsing, and diverted 4th Panzer Army south to aid in the fall of Rostov. This event has invariably been described by postwar German military writers as "the single most tragic error in the Battle of Stalingrad."

This departure from the original plan confused the whole campaign, costing the Germans two weeks of precious time, and also prodigious amounts of fuel in an Army Group already short of gasoline. During the delay, the disorganized Russians regrouped around Stalingrad, and under the command of Georgi Zhukov, fortified the city against a renewed advance by the Axis forces.

It is at this point in the campaign, Aug I 42, that our scenario begins ...

During early August, the Sixth Army, reinforced by the Italian 2nd Army on its left and 4th Panzer Army (reduced through transfers to little more than a panzer corps in strength) on its right, cleared the Donbass and prepared for a lunge to Stalingrad. At 0310 on the morning of August 21, Sixth Army crossed the Don River in force, pushing hard towards Stalingrad, now only a scant 36 miles to the east.

The spearheads of the German forces reached the city around September 1. Stalin had forbidden the evacuation of civilians or production facilities, ruthlessly reckoning that his soldiers would more stoutly defend a living city than one that was an empty shell. Over the next two weeks, dozens of German infantry and panzer prongs infiltrated the city, only to stall in savage street-to- street fighting. This degenerated into house-to-house and room-to- room brawling, with quarter neither asked for nor given. In the rubble of this city of 445,000 warfare reached a crescendo seldom seen before or since. During the remainder of September and October both sides poured in more and more men to fight and die in the seesaw battle that has come to symbolize the brutality of the conflict on the Eastern Front.

Although compressed into a smaller and smaller enclave along the west bank of the Volga River, the Russians never completely lost Stalingrad. And while the life blood drained from the German Army, Stalin made preparations to launch the counterattack against the Axis flanks that would forever seal the fate of the Sixth Army and Hitler's Third Reich.

Lunge to Stalingrad August-October 1942

Historical Background
Rules, Chart, and City Display Map
Designer's Notes
Order of Battle: Axis (Aug I 42)
Order of Battle: USSR (Aug I 42)
Order of Battle: Axis (Jul II 42)
Order of Battle: USSR (Jul II 42)
LtS: Large Area Map (slow: 127K)
LtS: Jumbo Area Map (very slow: 345K)