Operation Wintergewitter (Stalingrad)

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3rd Kharkov

Operation Winter Storm (German Unternehmen Wintergewitter) was the German Fourth
Panzer Army's attempt to relieve the German Sixth Army from encirclement during the Battle
of Stalingrad during World War II.

On 12 December 1942, Operation Winter Storm commenced and was able to advance just
halfway to its objective before a Soviet outflanking move further to the north forced the relief
force of the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) to break off and withdraw, condemning the
Sixth Army to defeat and capture.

Contents
[hide]

1 Background
2 The plan
3 Thrust and counter-thrust

4 Popular Culture
[edit] Background

Operation Uranus resulted in the German Sixth Army being surrounded by Soviet forces. The
operation had also pushed back the main body of Army Group South (Heeresgruppe Süd) by
sixty to eighty miles. While Fourth Panzer Army's XLVIII Panzer Corps established a line on
the Chir River, its southern wing had been shattered and only skeleton forces managed to
prevent the 51st Army (Soviet Union) from breaking into Kotelnikovo, a railhead eighty miles
south of Stalingrad, by turning them away at Pakhlebin a couple of miles to the north of that
town. Therefore any relief attempt depended on gathering armored forces from elsewhere. The
freshest of the troops chosen was the 6th Panzer Division, then refitting in France after nine
months on the Eastern Front. From Army Group Center came the 17th Panzer Division from
the Zhizdra front, and from Army Group A (Heeresgruppe A) in the Caucasus came the 23rd
Panzer Division, recovering from the narrowly averted disaster before Orzhonikidze. These
three divisions constituted the LVII Panzer Corps.

[edit] The plan

Where to launch the relief attempt was key. The bridgehead over the Don at Verkhne-
Chirskaya was physically closest to Stalingrad, but the Russians saw this coming and made
sure this bridgehead was knocked out before the anticipated German reinforcements could be
assembled. In any case the Don was insufficiently frozen for troops to cross safely — the
weather in late November and early December 1942 ranged intermittently from snow to heavy
rain.

Instead, LVII Panzer Corps was assembled at Kotelnikovo. With 6th Panzer in the middle,
17th Panzer to its left and 23rd Panzer to its right, plus the remnants of the Romanian Fourth
Army holding the thinly-manned flanks facing the Kalmyk steppes, the offensive began on 12
December. Two rivers lay in the force's path — the Aksai River and the Myshkova River. The
force made good progress at first, reaching and crossing the Aksai by the end of the first day
but being drawn into heavy fighting at The 8th of March collective farm at Verkhne-Kumsky,
and around the railway ganger's hut immediately to the north of the Aksai's banks. The relief
force ground towards the Myshkova, using up precious time, but could not cross. In Stalingrad
itself, General Friedrich Paulus dithered as to whether to instruct his exhausted and freezing
troops to break out to the south, where they would join with Hoth's panzer force at Abganerovo
and together withdraw to Kotelnikovo. Without a direct order from Adolf Hitler, he could not
make the decision. Obsessed with not withdrawing from where his forces had set foot, Hitler
did not give that order, and Paulus stayed put. Whether his fuel- and food-lacking forces could
have gotten themselves out of Stalingrad at all, by then is open to question.

[edit] Thrust and counter-thrust

As the relief force made its thrust, Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov hit the Axis front line
further to the north. The Italian Eighth Army on the middle Don was suffering the same effects
of the cold weather, and its initially stubborn resistance was eventually overcome by the T-34s
that came crashing through their positions on 16 December. Having brushed aside the Italian
forces, the 24th Tank Corps added insult to injury by making for Tatsinskaya, the air base
closest to Stalingrad and from which the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) had been embarking on
the hopelessly ambitious task of supplying half a million fighting men in uncertain weather.
On Christmas Day the Soviet tanks drove through snowstorms to the airfield and roamed about
for hours, blowing away the German transport planes at their leisure.

Seeing that this force was swinging to the left in order to come down behind the German relief
army, Erich von Manstein had to detach the 6th Panzer Division from the Myshkova and
rushed it to the Italians' aid, saving the position there for the moment but dooming the relief
attempt. Accordingly, the Soviet 51st Army then attacked the relief force anew, driving it back
to and beyond Kotelnikovo by 29 December and now threatening both Rostov and the entire
Army Group A of 400,000 men still bottled up on the Terek River in the Caucasus. Hitler
made the decision to pull this Army Group out altogether, consigning the 6th Army at
Stalingrad to its fate.

[edit] Popular Culture

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