Endgame at Stalingrad: Book One: November 1942, The Stalingrad Trilogy, Volume 3

by David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House

Overview

The campaign intended to secure the Wehrmacht’s flanks had proven one front too many for the German Army. And now the offensive at Stalingrad, the epic clash that marked Germany’s failure on the Eastern Front, was entering its grim final phase. In Book One of the third volume of his acclaimed Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz offers the definitive account—the “ground truth” to counter a half-century’s worth of myth and misinformation—of the beginning of the end of one of the most infamous battles of the Second World War, and one of the most costly in lives and treasure in the annals of history.

When Volume Two left off, Germany’s vaunted Sixth Army, already deflected from its original goal—the Caucasus oil fields—had been drawn into a desperate war of attrition within the ravaged city of Stalingrad. In Volume Three, Book One, we see the ultimate consequences of the Germans’ overreach and the gathering force of the Red Army’s massive manpower and increasingly sophisticated command. After failing repeatedly to find and exploit the weaknesses in Axis defenses, Stalin and the Stavka (High Command) finally seized their chance in mid-November of 1942 by launching a bold and devastating counteroffensive, Operation Uranus.

Glantz draws a detailed and vivid account of how, in Operation Uranus, the Red Army's three fronts defeated and largely destroyed two Romanian armies and encircled the German Sixth Army and half of the German Fourth Panzer Army in the Stalingrad pocket—turning the Germans’ world on its head. Like its predecessor volumes, this one makes extensive use of sources previously out of reach or presumed lost, such as reports from the Sixth Army’s combat journal and newly released Soviet and Russian records. These materials (many cited at length or printed in their entirety in a companion volume) lend themselves to a strikingly new interpretation of the campaign's planning and execution on both sides—a version of events that once and for all gets at the ground truth of this historic confrontation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780700634415
Publisher:	University Press of Kansas
Publication date:	03/29/2023
Series:	Modern War Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	680
Sales rank:	550,035
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House have collaborated on all three volumes of the Stalingrad Trilogy, as well as on the books When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler and The Battle of Kursk. A retired U. S. Army colonel fluent in Russian, Glantz is the author of numerous books, including The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944; Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, and Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania. House is the author of Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Selected Abbreviations

Part I: Soviet Strategic Planning

1. Framework for Disaster

2. Soviet Strategic Planning: The Genesis of Plan Uranus

3. Gathering the Troops: Soviet Order of Battle and the Uranus Plan

4. The Balance of Opposing Forces on 15 November

Part II: The Uranus Counteroffensive

5. The Penetration Battle, 19-20 November

6. The Encirclement Closes, 21-23 November

7. Reducing the Stalingrad Pocket and Forming the Outer Encirclement Front, 24-27 November

8. Reducing the Stalingrad Pocket, the Outer Encirclement Front, and Plan Saturn, 28-30 November

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"A top-down treatment of battle planning and maneuvering of forces by high-level staff and commanders, with the detailed order of battle and statistical information one has come to expect from David Glantz and Jonathan House."—The Historian

"The team of Glantz and House has once again collaborated and has successfully completed the superb trilogy on Stalingrad."—Army History

"Fifteen years ago the late John Erickson wrote that the research of Glantz and house reflected an ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’ of the Nazi-Soviet war and constituted a benchmark for excellence in the field. The Stalingrad trilogy reflects the fact that they maintain that standard, while bringing to light a new understanding of many old questions."—War in History

"After providing us with the magisterial When Titans Clashed, Glantz and House have now supplemented this account with a masterful documentation of Stalingrad."—The Russian Review

"Glantz is the world’s top scholar of the Soviet-German War."—Journal of Military History

"David Glantz has done something very few historians achieve. He has redefined an entire major subject: the Russo-German War of 1941-1945."—World War II

"Glantz and House are writing the definitive history of the Stalingrad campaign. Their trilogy, backed by meticulous scholarship and refreshingly fair minded, significantly alters long-accepted views of several important aspects of the campaign. . . . A monumental work that is unlikely to be surpassed as an account of the most important single campaign of the Second World War."—Evan Mawdsley, author of Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945

"A magisterial study that draws on a wealth of previously inaccessible Red Army records and will be indispensable reading for all serious students of the battle."—Michael K. Jones, author of Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed

From the Publisher