The German Army's huge losses and frightful hardships in Russia since the beginning of 'Operation Barbarossa' in June 1941 did not dismay Hitler. On the contrary, he initiated a major summer offensive in 1942 that was designed to destroy the Soviets' ability to resist. The Fuhrer, supreme operational commander of the 1,6oo-km/1,000-ml Eastern Front, erroneously believed that the Red Army had used up much of its manpower and materiel in the winter fighting, so he hurried reinforcements eastward. By drawing on Romania, Hungary and Italy, he managed to field a numerically strong force; it was well equipped but contained elements whose fighting prowess was highly suspect.

The main German thrust was to be delivered against the industrial and oil-producing regions in the south; in the north, efforts to take Leningrad were to continue; the central front was to hold fast. The offensive opened in June, took the Russians by surprise, and began to record successes in the old blitzkrieg style, which made Hitler overly optimistic. On 23 July, the Fuhrer issued Directive 49 abandoning the step-by-step conquest of the south, starting with Stalingrad. He now intended to carry out two simultaneous and diverging attacks on Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Hitler was unmoved by his generals' warnings that their forces were not strong enough to carry both objectives at the same time.

Stalingrad was the ultimate goal of the Sixth Army, led by Colonel-General Friedrich Paulus, and the Fourth Panzer Army, under Colonel-General Hermann Hoth, as they pushed southeastward in June and early July. And, but for the Fuhrer's interference, it might have been taken without a fight. By detaching Goth's armor and sending it south to the Caucasus, Hitler let slip the opportunity to enter the city before the Soviets could organize its defence.

A fortnight later, Hitler ordered the Fourth Panzer Army to turn northeast and drive again for Stalingrad. But he had lost his chance, and, by 9 August, Hoth was halted by lack of supplies i6okm/ioomls from the city. In the meantime, Paulus's Sixth Army had fought its way across the River Don and, on 23 August, was on the right bank of the Volga north of Stalingrad and moving into the suburbs. While opposition from the Russian Sixty-second and Sixty-fourth Armies in Stalingrad stiffened, Paulus gained control of the gap between the Don and the Volga, established air and supply bases there and, on 2 September, made contact with Hoth.

Despite several days of heavy fighting and many bombing raids, the Russians, under Lieutenant-General Vassal Chuikov, clung on to the battered city. The German Army High Command, concerned about the inadequacy of the forces supposedly protecting the Sixth Army's left flank along the Don, advised withdrawal from Stalingrad to consolidate the line and prevent any chance of Paulus's being cut off by an enemy breakthrough. Instead Hitler transferred units from the weak Don sector to the Sixth Army and ordered it to capture the city.

Backed by bombers of Luftflotte 4, German infantry and armour commenced a mass assault through the fast-crumbling streets. Every metre of the way was contested by the Russians in fierce close-quarter fighting, from house to house, cellar to cellar, and even through the sewers; this determination was to characterize the prolonged and bloody struggle. The infantry dominated the battle because mountains of rubble made it difficult for tanks to operate effectively. After a week of intense fighting, the Germans managed to reach the city centre. A few days later, Paulus's troops fought their way into the industrial sector in the north also, but on 29 September Chuikov threw them out.

Regrouped, reinforced and supported by tanks and dive-bombers, the Germans tried again on 14 October and for ten days hammered at the Russian defences. Though the Russians were at first greatly outnumbered and obliged to give ground, they were able to ferry fresh troops and much-needed supplies across the wide Volga under cover of darkness.

By 24 October, the Sixth Army had fought itself to a standstill in the north of Stalingrad without ejecting its stubborn enemy. Not much was now left of this city which had once housed nearly half a million people. Hitler had deprived the Russians of its industrial out south-north communications been severed because a railway the Volga was still operating had degenerated into a conflict of egos: Stalin insisted on holding the city named after him; Hitler wanted to seize it for its symbolism and propaganda value. Germans prepared to launch in the southern district.

Then came news which obliged Hitler to send reinforcements south, 5 November, Rommel had been defeated at El Alamein and on the 8th , the Allies had landed in Morocco and Algeria, threatening the Axis forces in a dangerous pincer grip. This setback came as a bonus for Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who had been preparing a Russian counter-offensive against the Germans in the south. Having secretly built up vast reserves, he was poised to unleash them with the arrival of Russia's traditional ally: winter.

On 19 November, a massive Russian attack surprised and overran the Romanian Third Army northwest of Stalingrad, exposing the left flank of the Sixth Army as the German generals had foreseen in the summer. Twenty-four hours later, i6okm/ioomls to the south, the Soviets routed a mixed German and Romanian force guarding Paulus's other flank; the two Russian assault groups joined up within four days. General Paulus and his Sixth Army, comprising 200,000 fighting men and some 70,000 non-combatants, were cut off.

The Army High Command begged Hitler to permit the Sixth Army to make a break westward while the Russian ring was still not firmly established. But the Luftwaffe chief, Herman Goering, although he had absolutely no foundation for doing so, claimed his aircraft could fly in 500 tons of supplies a day to the surrounded Sixth Army, sufficient to keep it going as a fighting force. Hitler grabbed at this offer of a lifeline to Paulus and on 24 November ordered him to fortify his positions and await a relief column.

Three days later Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was placed at the head of a hodge-podge of units, Army Group Don, arid briefed to relieve Stalingrad. He was not, however, to create a situation which would allow Paulus to withdraw; he was to go in and stabilize the German front line in the beleaguered city. Manstein set out on his unenviable mission on 12 December and arrived 48km/30mls outside Stalingrad on the 21st. Knowing that the Russians were closing in on him and that he would be unable to hold his advanced position for long, Manstein took it upon himself to order Paulus to break out and link up with him before it was too late. But Paulus decided that in the absence of a direct order from Hitler to evacuate Stalingrad he must stay where he was.

The relieving force fell back, fighting, and the last tragic phase of the Battle of Stalingrad began for the doomed Sixth Army. Squeezed in an ever-tightening vice by the surrounding Russian armies, deprived of proper clothing to withstand sub-zero temperatures and running low on all essentials due to the inadequacy of Goering's promised daily airlift, Paulus's rapidly dwindling command continued its grim struggle. At the end of December, when Paulus saw that some of his starving men were reduced to devouring raw horse brains, he flew out a personal emissary to give the Fuhrer a first-hand account of the deplorable condition of the Sixth Army. Hitler merely ordered him to hold out.

On 8 January, Lieutenant-General Konstantin Rokossovsky issued an ultimatum to Paulus, but he refused to surrender, and two days later the Soviets commenced a full-scale assault on his positions. As the enemy closed around his exhausted and dispirited troops, Paulus radioed to Hitler that his situation was hopeless. In testimony given after the war, Paulus said the Fuhrer replied, 'Capitulation is impossible. The Sixth Army will do its historic duty at Stalingrad until the last man ...'.

The end was not long in coming. By 25 January the Russians had overrun the last German airfield, preventing any supplies getting in and ending mercy flights out of the sick and wounded. Over the radio, which was the survivors' only link with the outside world, news came on 31 January that Hitler had been pleased to promote Colonel-General Paulus to Field Marshal. Later that day, the Sixth Army made its final broadcast, announcing the arrival of the enemy outside the headquarters command post.

The new Field Marshal, himself exhausted, had been obliged to surrender most of what remained of his command to General Mikhail Shumilov of the Soviet Sixty-fourth Army. Two days later, the German IIth Corps, which had been holding out in pockets in the north of the stricken city, also capitulated. As nearly a million men marched off to harsh captivity (from which it is estimate as 5,000 returned after the war), Hitler raved about the disaster and threatened to court-martial Paulus. Ultimately, however, he accepted responsibility for the sacrifice of the Sixth Army. Nearly 150,000 Germans had died - three times as many as the Russians admitted they lost ? all Paulus's guns, motor vehicles and equipment had been captured and the Luftwaffe had lost 500 transport aircraft.

The German Army, though far from being a broken force in early 1943, never recovered from the loss of an entire army, on top of casualties in excess of a million already sustained on the Eastern Front. All its great blitzkrieg victories were behind it. Hitler had overstretched Germany before the full might of the Allies could be assembled against him, and he would pay the price for such folly.