Endgame at Stalingrad: Book Two: December 1942 - February 1943, The Stalingrad Trilogy, Volume 3

by David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House

Overview

In Book Two of the third volume of his magisterial Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz continues and concludes his definitive history of one of the most infamous battles of World War Two, the Stalingrad campaign that signaled Germany’s failure on the Eastern Front and marked a turning point in the war. Book Two finds Germany’s most famous army—General Friedrich Paulus's Sixth—in dire straits, trapped in the Stalingrad kessel, or pocket, by a Red Army that has seized the initiative in what the Soviets now term the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army's counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, is well underway, having largely destroyed the bulk of two Romanian armies and encircled the German Sixth and half of the German Fourth Panzer Army.

Drawing on materials previously unavailable or believed lost, Glantz gives a closely observed account of the final ten weeks of Germany’s ill-fated Stalingrad campaign. In short order, the Red Army parried and then defeated two German attempts to rescue the Sixth Army, crushed the Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies, severely damaged the German Fourth Panzer and Second Armies, and finally destroyed the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad. With well over half-a-million soldiers torn from its order of battle, Hitler’s Axis could only watch in horror as its status abruptly changed from victor to vanquished. This book completes a vivid and detailed picture of the Axis defeat that would prove decisive as a catastrophe from which Germany and its Wehrmacht could never recover.

As in the preceding volumes, Glantz extensively mines newly available materials to provide a clearer and more accurate picture of what actually happened at Stalingrad at this crucial moment in World War II—a "ground truth" that gets beyond the myths and misinformation surrounding this historic confrontation. And this concluding chapter, relating events even more steeped in myth than those that came before, is especially bracing as it takes on controversial questions about why Operation Uranus succeeded and the German relief attempts failed, whether the Sixth Army could have escaped encirclement or been rescued, and who, finally was most responsible for its ultimate defeat. The answers Glantz provides, embedded in a fully-realized account of the endgame at Stalingrad, make this book the last word on one of history’s epic clashes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780700634422
Publisher:	University Press of Kansas
Publication date:	03/29/2023
Series:	Modern War Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	768
Sales rank:	850,371
File size:	51 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 Tables and Illustrations

Preface

Selected Abbreviations

Part I. Defeating German Relief Attempts, 1–19 December 1942

1. Competing German and Soviet Dilemmas

2. the Southwestern Front’s Battles along the Krivia and Chir Rivers, 1–15 December

3. The Stalingrad Front’s Defense against Operation Wintergewitter (Winter Tempest), 1–19 December

4. The Don and Stalingrad Fronts’ Battle for the Stalingrad Pocket, 1–15 December

Part II. The Expanding Soviet Offensive, 16–31 December 1942

5. Operation Little Saturn and the Tormosin Offensive, 16–31 December

6. The End of Wintergewitter and Donnerschlag and the Stalingrad Front’s Kotel’nikovo Offensive, 16–31 December

7. The Stalingrad Pocket, 16–31 December

Part III. Operation Ring: The Destruction of Sixth Army, 1 January–2February 1943

8. Sixth Army’s Situation, Preliminaries, and the Don Front’s Plan, 1–9 January

9. Destruction: The First Stage, 10–17 January

10. Destruction: The Second Stage, 18–25 January

11. Destruction: The Finale, 26 January–2 February

12. Context, Conclusions, and Summary Judgments

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