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The late spring and summer of 1942 would be a black time for the Soviet Union. An attempt to retake the Kerch peninsula in the Crimea failed. In May three Russian armies, the vanguard of a planned counteroffensive in Ukraine, were routed by German mechanized units in Kharkov. The Germans claimed to have captured 200,000 prisoners.
Those defeats were followed by two other stunning losses. On June 7 German forces supplemented by troops from Romania began a monthlong final offensive against the great Crimean port of Sevastopol, pounding it with Luftwaffe raids before sending infantry units to wage bloody street battles. By the beginning of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing to cut off the Soviet supply line along the Volga, Stalin issued a stern "not a step back" decree to the Red Army. Deserters were to be shot on sight.
Stalingrad, a great sprawl of a city on the Volga, became the focal point of the struggle. It had originally been named Tsaritsyn, and during the bloody civil war it was successfully defended against the rightist White Army by Stalin himself, who gave it his name. The Russians knew that if they did not tie down the Germans at Stalingrad, the war would virtually be lost. Not only would the huge cities of the north be bereft of supplies from the fertile south, but the oil fields of Baku that fueled the Russian war machine would fall to the Wehrmacht.
From mid-July 1942 onward, the fighting intensified as the Germans advanced along the great bend of the Don River. Hitler ordered the German Sixth Army to conquer Stalingrad by Aug. 25. Stalin ordered the city to prepare for siege.
On Aug. 23 the Luftwaffe sent 600 bombers against the city, killing 40,000 civilians. On the same day, the Germans established a five-mile front to the north. Wrote the Soviet General Vassili Chuikov: "The enormous city, stretching for 30 miles along the Volga, was enveloped in flames. Everything around was burning and collapsing." Less than two weeks later the Germans rumbled into the western suburbs, and two months of the most ferocious street fighting of the war ensued. "Fierce actions had to be fought for every house, workshop, water tower, raised railway track, wall or cellar, and even for every heap of rubble," wrote the German General Hans Dorr. "The no- man's-land between us and the Russians was reduced to an absolute minimum."
The Germans, however, could never quite take all of Stalingrad. While they held air superiority, they were unable to knock out the powerful batteries of Russian artillery across the Volga. And beyond the Stalingrad cauldron, the Red Army was on the move. In late November 1942 the Russians encircled the city, trapping thousands of German and Romanian troops. Hitler had committed a strategic mistake. He had dissipated his military strength and caused tremendous logistical confusion by splitting up the offensive -- sending a huge strike force toward the Caucasus simultaneously with the drive toward Stalingrad.