Stalingrad 1942

After the failure of Barbarossa, Germany found herself at war with not only the USSR, which, despite the damage inflicted on it the previous year, still had the largest army in the world, but also with Great Britain, which had the largest empire in the world, and the United States, which was the greatest economic power in the world. Hitler knew that this was a coalition that Germany did not have the manpower or economic resources to defeat in a prolonged war and so it was vital that Germany knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1942, gaining her agricultural and industrial assets with which to meet the Western Allies head on.
In Führer Directive No. 41 of 5 April 1942, Hitler laid out how this was to be accomplished. The target for the new offensive would be the Soviet forces in the south and the Soviet oilfields in the southern Caucasus, around Maykop, Grozny and Baku. Given Germany's remaining stocks of oil, it could not sustain another offensive on the scale of Barbarossa, let alone a prolonged war of attrition against the Allied coalition. Whatever they might have thought privately, publicly few German generals (with the exception of Halder) questioned the designation of oil as the main objective for the 1942 summer offensive, although their main concern was still the destruction of the Red Army. After the war, many blamed Hitler for the failure of the 1942 offensive but this was more to do with the German approach to war, rather than just Hitler's approach to it. Like the plan for Barbarossa (Directive 21), Directive 41 was a statement of German strategy, rather than a detailed planning document and covered just the first phase of operations that saw the destruction of the Red Army south of the Don river through a series of encirclements.
At this point, Stalingrad was a secondary objective to the capture of the Caucasus oilfields and the destruction of the Red Army in the south. Operation Blau, as it was conceived, was to have four stages. The first stage would see a powerful drive eastwards from the area around Kursk by the 4th Panzer and 2nd Armies under von Weichs. The second stage would see the 6th Army advance to reach the banks of the Don river in the vicinity of Voronezh and encircle the Red Army to the west of the river. The third stage would see 4th Panzer Army moving south–east following the Don to trap and eliminate those Red Army formations that had been driven east by the 17th Army advancing east from Rostov. German forces would then cut the Volga river north of Stalingrad and then receive orders for the Caucasus campaign, the objectives being Maykop, Grozny and a rapid advance down the Volga south of Stalingrad to Baku. As a prelude to Operation Blau, Army Group South were to undertake some preparatory movements to secure jumping-off points, including the elimination of the Soviet forces remaining in the Crimea and that of the Barvenkovo salient.
It seemed, however, that German planning for the 1942 offensive bore some ominous similarities to that of Barbarossa the year before. In the initial attack upon the Soviet Union, the Germans fielded over three million men, looking for a strategic military victory in a single campaign (Vernichtungsschlacht). Due to the lack of an operational campaign plan, squandered time and resources in tactical encounters (brilliantly executed though they were), the overall goal of winning the war in the east in a single blow remained elusive. While it was doubtful if the Germans had really had the means to achieve their ends in 1941, it was even more questionable now. The Germans just managed to hold their lines together during the Soviet winter counteroffensive but now, with fewer troops, Hitler envisaged the conquest and occupation of another massive area. Additionally, the roads leading south to the Caucasus would be inferior to even the poor roads found in the western USSR and the Germans were for the moment still heavily dependent on movement and supply over the road network as the railways consisted only of a few single lines running east and south. The 1942 campaign would be continually hindered by the problem of supply. Also, as in 1941, the objective of the campaign was to acquire the resources to fight a long war in the west but this in effect undermined the German chances of winning the war in the east quickly. If it was to have succeeded, the Wehrmacht should have gone for an objective that would have achieved this — either the destruction of the Red Army or the capture of Moscow. Even if the Wehrmacht had executed its campaign perfectly and achieved the objectives set out for Operation Blau, the Soviets would have suffered a massive blow, but given there were oilfields near the Ural Mountains and to the east of the Caspian Sea, and the will of the Soviets to continue the fight, it is doubtful whether this would have achieved the complete defeat of the Soviet Union.
The chief priority for the USSR at the beginning of 1942 was to take advantage of its new strategic alliance with Great Britain and the United States and to repair its shattered war economy. Amazingly, the Soviets had managed to move around 1,500 of its most vital war industries, in the face of the German advance, to locations near the Ural Mountains and in the eastern Soviet Union. These industries, however, would have to be unloaded and put back together before any new production could be undertaken. It was glaringly obvious that the devastated Red Army would need to be re–trained and re–equipped under new commanders if it was even to hold its own against the Wehrmacht, let alone consider taking the offensive and liberating those lands under German control. The Red Army had substantial manpower reserves but they were not infinite and could not cope with further losses and defeats on the scale of 1941.
Strategy was planned by the Soviet High Command (otherwise known as the Stavka) but Stalin played an overarching, dictatorial role — once his mind was made up, that was that. Not even Zhukov could change it. On 5 January 1942 following the successful defence of Moscow, Zhukov was summoned to a meeting at Stavka during which future operations were being discussed. Stalin put forward a plan for a general offensive from Leningrad to the Black Sea. Aware that, while Army Group Centre had been given a bruising, Army Groups North and South were still relatively unaffected and that the Wehrmacht remained a strong and capable enemy, Zhukov argued for a single offensive directed at Army Group Centre, which was still off–balance and in disarray. Stalin's mind, however, was made up. The offensive was launched a few days later and, while it achieved some local successes, it was not strong enough to break through at any point. The Red Army was therefore left much weaker to face the German summer offensive and the shaky morale of the Wehrmacht was restored as it fought its first major defensive action.
At the end of March 1942, Stavka met to discuss strategy in relation to the coming summer campaign. Zhukov and the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Vasilevsky, advocated a defensive posture. Stalin, however, insisted on carrying out a series of localized offensives to effect the relief of the besieged cities of Leningrad in the north and Sebastopol in the Crimea, along with Marshal Timoshenko's proposal for a major attack aimed at recapturing Kharkov, out of the Barvenkovo Salient, which lay to the southeast of Kharkov. The city was the fourth biggest in the Soviet Union and a major road and rail junction and it would be the scene of several battles during the campaign on the Eastern Front. The offensive was to be conducted mainly by the Southwest Front (Timoshenko), with elements from the South Front (Malinovsky) providing support. The offensive would take the form of a pincer movement, with the Soviet 6th Army (Gorodnyanskov) forming the southern pincer, while a force under MajGen L.V. Bobkin moved towards Krasnograd to provide flank protection. In the area of Volchansk, the Soviet 28th Army (Ryabishev) with the adjacent 21st (Gordov) and 38th (Moskalenko) Armies would form the northern pincer. The two pincers would meet west of Kharkov and trap the German 6th Army. The 57th (Podlas) and 9th (Kharitonov) Armies from the Southern Front would protect the southern flank of the operation. While not hugely imaginative, its fatal flaw would be that it would commence just before the Germans were to begin Operation Fridericus, an attack aimed at eliminating the Barvenkovo salient.