Stalingrad and Leningrad: The Deadliest Battles of World War II by Charles River Editors

Author:Charles River Editors [Editors, Charles River]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charles River Editors
Published: 2014-05-29T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Preparing for the Battle of Stalingrad

“If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny then I must finish this war.” – Adolf Hitler

By the spring of 1942, Germany no longer had the strength to launch a massive offensive as they had done a year earlier, but Hitler nevertheless ordered the German armies forward in an attempt to access oil from the Caucasus and grain from Ukraine to continue their war effort. Meanwhile, Hitler targeted Stalingrad as the site of a potential German attack, since it was both an important industrial center and held symbolic importance as the namesake city of the Soviet leader.

Hitler’s plan for his 1942 offensive was to target the Russian south by attacking Stalingrad, which he would use “as a fulcrum, while the main armies wheeled south to occupy the Caucasus.” (Hoyt, p. 86) As Field Marshal Kleist would later recall, “The capture of Stalingrad was subsidiary to the main aim. It was only of importance as a convenient place, in the bottleneck between the Don and the Volga [rivers], where we could block an attack by Russian forces coming from the East. At the start Stalingrad was no more than a name on a map to us.” (Hoyt, p. 87)

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