What was Operation Uranus?
Operation Uranus was the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad that began on 19 November 1942. Instead of attacking the Germans in the city, it struck the weak Romanian armies on the flanks to the north and south. Late on 23 November the two Soviet pincers met at Sovetskiy near Kalach and the German Sixth Army was surrounded.1
By November 1942 the German Sixth Army had spent the autumn fighting its way through Stalingrad, block by block, toward the Volga. On 17 November Hitler still urged its commander, Friedrich Paulus, to reach the river at the gun factory, arguing that the drift ice on the Volga made things even harder for the Russians. Two days later the battle turned the other way.2
A blow at the flanks
While the Germans were drawn into the ruins of the city, their long flanks on the open steppe were held mostly by allied armies: the Romanian Third Army along the Don to the northwest, the Romanian Fourth Army to the south, and further up the Don Italian and Hungarian troops. These were the weak points the Soviet plan aimed at. Mark Cartwright of World History Encyclopedia writes that Georgy Zhukov drew up the plan, code-named Uranus, but left its execution to General Aleksandr Vasilevsky; the National WWII Museum's Keith Huxen credits Zhukov with the command. Three Soviet fronts took part: Southwestern, Don and Stalingrad.3
Sirena on the Don
In the night of 18 November it snowed so heavily along the Don that visibility at times fell to zero. At 7:20 on the 19th, the artillery of the Fifth Tank Army in the Serafimovich bridgehead and of the Twenty-first Army west of Kletskaya received the alert code word Sirena; ten minutes later came the order ogon, fire, and 3,500 guns and mortars opened up on the Romanian Third Army. Rossiyskaya Gazeta also dates the start to half past seven and describes an artillery preparation of 80 minutes. The first infantry went in at 8:50.4
By noon the Fifth Tank and Twenty-first Armies had broken the Romanian line, and their tank corps were moving through. The Romanians had no antitank weapons heavier than 47 mm, and the official US Army history describes the Romanian Third Army as practically collapsing under the first assault. At 10 that night the Sixth Army was ordered to halt all offensive operations in Stalingrad and send three panzer divisions and an infantry division to its threatened flank.5
The southern pincer
On 20 November the Stalingrad Front attacked south of the city, after a delay of several hours for fog. The Fifty-seventh and Fifty-first Armies broke through the Romanian VI Corps along the chain of lakes south of Beketovka. The German Fourth Panzer Army recorded that the corps fell apart so fast that every measure to stop the fleeing troops was useless before it could be carried out, and its commander, Hermann Hoth, said the work of weeks had been ruined in a day. By evening the Fourth Panzer Army was split in two.6
The bridge at Kalach
Behind the front lay the whole rear of the Sixth Army: staffs, depots, hospitals and workshops in the angle of the Don and the Chir, all now rolling south in a wave of men, horses and trucks. On 21 November Paulus left his forward command post at Golubinskiy as Soviet tanks came into sight on the steppe. Hitler, at the Berghof, ordered the Sixth Army to stand where it was regardless of the danger of a temporary encirclement.7
Before dawn on 22 November a battalion of the XXVI Tank Corps seized the Don bridge at Kalach in a daring raid. Late on 23 November, after an exchange of green recognition flares, the IV Tank Corps from the north met the IV Mechanized Corps from the south at Sovetskiy, and the ring was closed. Cartwright, too, dates the encirclement to 23 November, as the pincers closed near Kalach.8
No film exists of that meeting. Huxen notes that the Soviets later staged it for the cameras, and that a diorama in Moscow's museum of the Great Patriotic War echoes the staged version.9
Inside the ring
Cartwright puts the trapped force at about 250,000 men, in a pocket some 60 by 45 km. Paulus asked for freedom to break out to the southwest; Hitler refused and promised to supply the army by air. Cartwright writes that Göring had promised 300 tons of supplies a day, but the airlift brought about 90 tons a day in December, against the 750 to 800 tons Paulus said he needed. A relief attack under Manstein and Hoth failed in December.10
The Sixth Army held out into the new year. Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943, and the last pocket in the north of the city gave up on 2 February. The full story of the battle is told in our article on the Battle of Stalingrad.11
