When Titans Clashed - Stalingrad Pt. 3

Excerpts from Theophile Durand,When*** Titans Clashed: How the Comintern Stopped Hitler (University of Paris, 1995)(1)**
_
From Pallas to Zitadelle_

Hitler’s ambitions were at their zenith on 16 December 1942. In two and a half years of protracted struggle, the Axis alliance stretched from Lusitania in the west to the Volga River in the east, and from Scandinavia in the north all the way into the heart of West Africa. It was a seemingly invincible phalanx of totalitarian fascist states, advancing on all fronts.

In truth, Hitler’s dream of a thousand year reich was already nearing its end. The Entente was recovering from the battering it had received the previous year. The Luftwaffe terror campaigns had done nothing but steel the resolve of the British public. Bomber Command continued to intensify its air war against the Reich, joined by contingents of the Revolutionary Army Air Forces. The battle lines were already beginning to reverse in the Near East.

These events mattered little to Hitler and the OKW; it had always been known that the war would be won or lost in the East, in the vastness of the Soviet Union. German military forces would reach peak total strength in 1943: 6,920,000 Heer and Waffen-SS, 3,540,000 Luftwaffe, and 710,000 Kriegsmarine. 70 percent of the Heer/Waffen-SS and 60 percent of the Luftwaffe would be deployed to the East. Traitor French forces in the East reached nearly 500,000 by Operation Zitadelle, with a comparable Italian presence. Minor Axis rounded out the Axis presence on the Eastern Front, including considerable contributions by Sweden and Finland in the North.

But on the eve of the Operation Pallas counterattack, Axis readiness had been worn down to a nub by a six-month campaign of fierce fighting in nearly every sector. The Caucasus campaign had stalled before reaching its objectives: Baku, Stalingrad and Astrakhan still remained firmly in Comintern hands.

[…]

The short undeclared war with Japan had disrupted, but failed to stop Stavka’s counterattack preparations. With the Iran route secure, and the Murmansk/Archangelsk routes still holding, men and materiel continued to flow into the Soviet Union, including the vanguard of the UASR’s “Victory Program” divisions. As battle began to wind down in the Far East, a dozen Central Asian divisions, fresh and well-trained, were transferred to the Stalingrad Front. Observing strict camouflage discipline, Stavka concealed the movement of nearly five hundred thousand combat and support troops, three thousand tanks and AFVs, four hundred combat aircraft, and five thousand artillery pieces. Trucks and trains moved only at night, without lights, and put up camouflage in the day. Well-rehearsed deception plans concealed the rotation of battered divisions to rear for recovery and retraining, and their replacement by fresh troops.

When the first elements of the 22nd Army began pushing across the Volga River on 17 December, the Army Group Volga headquarters still believed they were fighting the battered veterans of the past campaign. The seemingly quixotic counterattack developing along the flanks of German positions in Stalingrad was ignored as diversionary until after the bulk of Soviet and American mobile forces had begun breaking out of the bridgeheads.

Ground attacks and interdictions increased in tempo as the operation developed. Field Marshal Manstein began evacuating the Twelfth Army from the city when the threat became apparent, but by then the damage had been done. Twelfth Army’s retreat from the city was orderly and disciplined, but fuel shortages necessitated the abandonment and destruction of significant artillery and armored assets, including many damaged vehicles that might have returned to service in time. Exposed on the cold, open steps, the damage caused by air attack, and the sickle cuts of [Lt. General Maurice] Rose’s mechanized troops mounted.

Many would not escape, trapped between the 22nd Army’s vanguard, the 8th Guards Mechanized Corps. Rose’s execution of the encirclement was masterful. 8th Guards Mech. linked up with the 3rd Cavalry-Mechanized Group near Kalach-na-Don. The trapped echelons of the Twelfth Army, pressed between the 51st and 66th Army breaking out of the city, and the encircling 22nd Army, were already cold and starving. Surrender was inevitable; Operation Pallas killed or captured fifty-seven thousand German troops, including most of the 1st Panzer Division and the 101st Infanterie. Twelfth Army escaped, but was obliterated as an effective fighting force.

Manstein attempted to wheel the III Panzer Corps in action to disrupt the Comintern advance, but continued supply issues ensured this would be abortive. After four days of inconclusive fighting, Manstein paused offensive operations to prepare a more substantive operation. This seed could not germinate in the cold Russian winter, but would serve as the nucleus of the spring’s Operation Zitadelle.

At the conclusion of Operation Pallas, the Saratov Front began offensive operations in the adjacent sector. Using similar maskirovka, General Eisenhower concealed the movement of the 3rd Army—nine full strength American divisions—from the Stavka reserve in Moscow. While Pallas was winding down, probing action by air power and commandos determined points of enemy weakness and strength.

Having been stripped of a full German corps to contain the Stalingrad breakout, Army Group Centre’s Second Army had been tasked to hold the line in what was assumed to be a quiet sector with predominantly Rumanian and Hungarian troops. These troops, relatively green conscripts, were effectively ruined by 16 January 1943. 3rd Army pressed through in a series of rapid dagger thrusts, bowling the Axis minor troops out of the way to begin striking at the flanks of the Fifth Army.

By this time, the news of the defeats on the frontier had percolated up to Hitler. With his typical fury, Hitler excoriated SS-Obergruppenführer Eicke, commanding officer of the Fifth Army, to contain the situation. When it became apparent that Eicke’s exhausted force was too overextended, Hitler intervened in the OKH’s planning directly.

The OKH leadership was shaken up, and General Georg-Wilhelm Postel was elevated to titular head of their staff. But the net result was a continued increase in the Waffen-SS’s grip over the German military. Generalfeldmarschall Guderian was dispatched to immediately replace Jodl as head of Army Group Centre.

[…]

The winter battles of 1943 had consistently bloodied the German’s noses along the entirety of the Eastern Front. As the treacherous mud of the spring Rasputitsa began to set in late February, the battle lines temporarily paused. The Comintern accepted the halt in operations to fully exploit the open sea lanes, and build up forces for the summer campaign. The Germans judged this fortunate, believing they could make better use of the time to prepare for the next campaign season.

Manstein had believed Case Blue to be a failure, and had recommended reorienting forces to try for Moscow again. With Baku and Astrakhan so temptingly close, Hitler could not accept this. Nevertheless, he was quite aware of the precarious situation that two of his Army Groups had been placed in. The frontline had been pushed back from the Volga near Saratov, and in spite of the defensible west bank of the Khopyor River, the Comintern had seized some precarious bridgeheads..

The Stalingrad salient pointed like a dagger towards Rostov. A powerful attack, now not outside of the realm of possibility in Hitler’s mind, could cut off the bulk of two army groups. Hitler wished to reduce the Stalingrad salient, and take the city. This plan, Operation Zitadelle, would be the first step in renewing efforts to take Baku and Astrakhan.

[…]

The realities of coalitional warfare hindered large-scale Axis operations. While even the French State had been rendered a de facto German puppet in strategic terms, Petain had remained stubbornly independent wherever possible. Wherever the defaced tricolor flew, Traitor French forces operated with operational independence, utilizing French manufactured war materiel, only haphazardly standardised with the Germans. While the scale of attrition after three years of war had made the so-called French State’s ability to marshal men with a reasonable level of esprit de corps (no doubt aided by the feeling of betrayal that the Republic, however legitimate it had been, had sacrificed French honor and sovereignty to the British), the general nationalist mood of the Axis régimes hindered cooperation.

Traitor French forces, which would contribute a full field army, had their own incompatible logistical tail. While they continued to put the cheap and effective CA Lorraine tank destroyer/assault gun to good effect, the tank forces had numerous conversions of obsolete Char B1 and S35s complicating their supply lines.

The Canon d’Assaut Lorraine was one the most successful crash program of the war, successfully mating the German long 8.8 cm Pak 43 to the pneumatic road-wheeled tracked prototype and rapidly pressing the resulting project into production. Despite the heavy armament, it was a lightly armored and agile ambuster, with an especially useful neutral steering capability.

The new Char G2 medium tank was a modern design, as well armored as the Panzer 25, and using a gun that was ammunition compatible with the 8.8 cm KwK 36, but this accounted for only a quarter of the French tank inventory on the Eastern Front. The rest used older G1s and S40s. With such a long supply line, supply complications were maddeningly frequent.

At least for the Germans, Fordism had come into full swing, diffused into every aspect of the quasi national religion of “totaler Krieg”. The standardized Entwicklung series of armored fighting vehicles had become that backbone of the Panzertruppen, with older designs relegated to an auxiliary role or similarly Fordized, as in the case of the long serving Jagdpanther.

The elite troops of the Waffen-SS had closed the infantry firepower gap; the MKb 42 automatic rifle, chambered in 7.92 x 33mm, had overcome teething problems in manufacturing, and by January 1943 the monthly production figures exceeded the Kar 98 bolt-action for the first time. The ‘grandfather of the European automatic rifle’, the MKb 42 gave the German infantry squad the ability to lay down powerful suppressive fire during the vulnerable periods when the machine gun team relocated.

[…]

The Luftwaffe believed it could wrest control of the skies still, and continued to keep pace with the Comintern air forces in terms of equipment. Ta 190Ds could fight on even terms with new marks of the F-35 Yeoman and the latest F-34K Belladonna, and were superior in speed and climb rate to the Il-3 and MiG-5s of the VVS. Both sides improved their ground attack inventory with shape-charge bomblets, and flying tank busters.

However, they had lost ground in pilot performance. The Luftwaffe was slow and haphazard in reacting to the high attrition rates among combat pilots. Veteran aces were rarely rotated out to train new pilots, and many continued to fly with their units until they succumbed, taking all of their experience with them to the grave. With kill counts inflated for propaganda purposes, and dubious record-keeping, the myth of the legendary Luftwaffe ace continues to endure.

[…]

The German plan in Zitadelle committed most of the Axis forces in the East to engaging in or supporting the offensive. Germany was scraping the bottom of the barrel in manpower, and remobilized a number of divisions to support the operation, sending green infantry units haphazardly to other fronts to pull more veteran divisions to support the attack. War production was maintained by intensifying forced labor in occupied territories. The annihilationism of the 1940 campaign, suspended in 41 to keep the war economy intact, would return in an even more ghastly form.

Population transfers in occupied Soviet territory and the Balkans became much more common. The Polish people, though, were hardest hit. Industrial labor camps in Poland supported the extraction of raw materials in increasingly brutal conditions, an adjunct to the death camps of the final solution. Over a million others would be relocated to other areas of the Reich, where they along with Comintern POWs would be worked to death to support the Reich’s war machine.

Nazi directives made it abundantly clear that the forced labor program served a dual purpose of eliminating undesirable populations as well as supporting the war effort. In 1943, this translated into a barely adequately equipped military presiding over the intended genocide of one hundred million people, a program stopped only by the deliberate and forceful action of the Armed Forces of the Communist International.

[…]

The OKH’s final plan for Zitadelle was approved in early May 1943. Hitler was hesitant to commit, but found ultimately that anything but continued offensive was politically unfeasible. The plan called for Guderian’s Army Group Centre to begin a diversionary attack along the Voronezh-Saratov axis. A deception campaign, including the leaking of falsified orders through partisans, would attempt to convince Stavka that another attempt to take Moscow would be beginning. This campaign would begin at the earliest possible opportunity in late May, late enough to be credible but still preserving the summer campaign season for the main attack.

Once Stavka took the bait, Army Group Volga would begin a double pincer attack on the edges of the Stalingrad salient. It would be here that the Germans would commit their best troops, guarded on the flanks by Army Group Caucasus and the veteran French 1st Field Army.

The pincers would close on Stalingrad, rapidly rushing to seize the city, and trap six armies: the bulk of the Stalingrad Front. Luftwaffe airborne troops would paradrop or glide into the city and the far bank to disrupt the demolition of the mighty Red Banner Bridge to enable further exploit operations.

The final disposition of forces did not depend on the intact seizure of the bridge. Post Zitadelle, the Axis would shift south to Astrakhan, and Army Group Caucasus would renew efforts to take Baku.

Unbeknownst to the Germans, Enigma intercepts and the Rote Kappelle intelligence network had thoroughly penetrated German operational planning. Eisenhower, in coordination with Smolensk Front commanding officer General Arkady Tartakovsky*, organized a counter-deception. Utilizing a full suite of techniques, including convincing inflatable rubber tanks and artillery pieces, and fake comm chatter, they would convince German aerial reconnaissance that they had taken the bait while mechanized forces relocated to the south.

[…]

German operational planning had, at least in this case, accurately assessed the quality of the formations opposing them in Zitadelle. They did not underestimate Soviet formations as Slavic subhumans unable to react or adapt, and they did not underrate, as they so often had in the previous campaigns, the willingness of American troops to fight to the death. In spite of this, the outcome was more lopsided than any previous military campaign, and it left German commanders puzzling for months.

The Germans encountered more men, more guns and more tanks than they thought possible at Stalingrad. The answer is simple: the strategic scale of the war had already been decided. A suite of multiple factors came together in 1943 to give the Comintern the utter preponderance of military force.

The first was that the relocation of Soviet industry and populations had essentially been completed. Military production more than doubled in 1943. New formations raised and recovering formations had ample time to train and coordinate, and would not be haphazardly rushed into battle. Logistical networks had been improved, and the Luftwaffe could not achieve sufficient air superiority to disrupt them like they had in previous years.

Similarly, the Americans were nearing full mobilization in 1943. The U-boat threat had been largely conquered, and the French and Italian navies were content to stay bottled up in the Mediterranean, having lost too many cruisers in attempts at commerce raiding. The allied navies had taken mastery of the Atlantic, and filled it with a massive merchant marine to move troops and supplies through virtually unhindered. The disruptive war in the Far East had wrapped up, allowing the unhindered transport of materiel across the Trans-Siberian railway.

This contributed to a powerful surge of well-trained and competently led American troops to the Soviet theater alongside the Soviet’s own efforts. The WFRA had reached a mobilized strength of over ten million by year end 1942, and twelve million by year end 1943. By the beginning of Zitadelle, this translated into 207 active ground divisions out of a planned 300, and 227 active air regiments.

Since under the terms of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of December 1942, no American forces could be stationed east of the Ural Mountains, these forces were focused entirely on directly engaging in or supporting combat operations against the Axis by Summer 1943. During Zitadelle, 42 percent of combat troops in the TVD(2) were American or IVA volunteers. Many of these divisions had been training in country since 1941, guarding Central Asia or the Far East. The forces that crushed the Kwantung Army would now face the Germans in earnest.

[…]

The Comintern planned for defense in depth around Stalingrad. The planned defense and counteroffensive, now called Operation Mars, would slow German armored spearheads with rings of fortifications. Beyond the echelons of mines, trenches, pillboxes, artillery bunkers and antitank pakfronts, highly mobile tank destroyer battalions, equipped with 90mm armed TD-7 Sabocat tank destroyers, waited to blunt spearheads in preparation for tank counterattack. Once the Germans were fully-engaged in a slow attritional struggle, forces in adjacent sectors would reposition for counteroffensive operations.

When Guderian’s diversion began on 7 June, Comintern forces followed the script well. Operational security was extremely disciplined; many troops were unaware of the true nature of operations until just before they began. The attack on the Saratov Front seemed to proceed smoothly; the Soviet troops were stubborn but outmatched, and Luftwaffe aerial recon watched the intricate ballet of troop movements.

Manstein’s attack began on 22 June amid overcast skies. Close air support was hindered on both sides, a net advantage for the Germans. In the north, the First Panzer Army under Generaloberst Rommel fought tenaciously. While intelligence had expected fierce Soviet resistance from the 50th and 52nd Armies, Rommel’s forces were not prepared for the true mass of anti-tank guns, mines, and artillery. Every centimeter of ground was hard fought, even with the local preponderance of force.

The Ninth Panzer Army under Hausser in the south encountered similarly fierce defense, and bogged down quickly. After two days, the skies cleared, and Manstein brought Luftflotte 2 in full force at the problem.

Aerial fighting was nearly as savage as the ground fighting, and the new advances in mobile AA guns increased attrition in ground attack units on both sides.

[…]

After a week of costly progress in the north and slow advance in the south, Manstein was at a crossroads. His own correspondence indicated he had at least briefly contemplated suspending offensive operations at this point, but did not ever communicate this to the OKH, let alone to Hitler. Manstein began committing forces intended for exploit operations to his main attack, a risk he felt justified given how seemingly close a breakthrough seemed.

On 1 July, Manstein seemingly got his breakthrough in the north. The I SS Panzerkorps had broken through the
final defensive belt in the early morning hours, and was now pushing towards the city of Stalingrad. The most prestigious divisions of the SS, and perhaps the only ones deserving of their crack reputation, had not let him down, while the mixed Wehrmacht/SS forces in the southern spearhead continued to disappoint.

The battle was far from over. The 3rd SS Panzer “Totenkopf” ran headlong into Lieutenant General Oliver Law’s 2nd Guards Mechanized Army(3) outside the town of Grachi. Sabocat skirmishers forced a temporary halt to the whole I SS Panzerkorps. By 1300, the well camouflaged and highly mobile Sabocat tank destroyers knocked out thirty-six Gepards and sixteen Jaguars at a cost of twenty-four of their own, a highly favorable trade. The tank destroyer men, already well informed on the new adversaries abilities by intelligence efforts, gave the Waffen-SS a bloody nose they would not forget, contributing to the TD’s fearsome reputation.

That afternoon, the VT fuze(4) made its first operational use in field artillery, as a steel rain of artillery and Katyusha fire hammered the SS with devastating effect. The whole of the Stalingrad Front’s frontal artillery rained down on the I SS Panzerkorps, a level of fire coordination that had not been achievable until now. These “gridfire” barrages would characterize the brutality of war in the East: a sudden, inescapable blanketing of intense, accurate artillery bombardment, arriving without warning and ending just as suddenly.

In the haze of dust and smoke, the 2nd Guards began its counterattack. The Jaguars and Gepards of the I SS Panzerkorps grappled with the T-9 John Browns of 2nd Guards Mechanized Army in the largest mass tank battle of the war yet. 1600 Comintern tanks met nearly 1000 German tanks in three days of fierce fighting.

Tanks of the 5th SS Panzer “Silberne Legion” division tried to push through to relieve their fellows. Their arrival on 4 July did nothing but increase the ferocity of the predominantly American tank crews facing the Traitor American volunteers. Major fighting ended just after dusk, just as Lt. Colonel Creighton Abrams’ 37th Tank Regiment succeeded in overrunning Silberne Legion’s headquarters. Having amassed a record of brutality that stood out even from the rest of the SS, the Legion was afforded little mercy. In reprisal for Silberne Legion’s actions at Kharkov and indiscriminate enforcement of the infamous “Commissar Order”, the trapped battalions died to a man, drowning in a river of blood.

The Battle of Grachi left the 2nd Guards Mechanized battered. But I SS Panzerkorps was practically annihilated as a fighting force. When it withdrew back to German lines on the 5th, it was a shell with perhaps seventy tanks still operational. Many damaged tanks had been captured, and still others were destroyed when it became clear they couldn’t be recovered before they were overrun. Its six divisions had taken thirty thousand casualties, most irretrievable.

With Operation Mars fulfilled, Operation Jupiter began. On the 7th of July, General Rokossovsky’s Saratov Front began pushing southwest towards the Don River, straight towards Voroshilovgrad. It sliced into the Italian Eighth Army guarding the north flank of Army Group South. The 9th Tank Army under Chuikov led the assault, cleaving in between Army Group Centre and Army Group Volga. The fury of artillery and air attack was a portent that could not be ignored, as Rokossovsky steadily rolled up the front lines of the Italian and German troops. The relocation of the German XXXVI Corps, already moving south to reinforce the barrier around Stalingrad, was reversed, and the troops began marching northward to meet the Soviet attack.

Simultaneously, the Comintern 7th Army began the Astrakhan Front’s counterattack against the French First Army, which had also been detaching units to reinforce its German allies. Again, those orders were hastily reversed. The Astrakhan Front steadily drove westward towards Rostov, its own modest tank contingents spearheading the charge.

Two days later, the powerful Steppe Front, held in reserve on the far side of the Volga, was moved into play. Fresh mechanized forces, including the veteran 1st Army, began attacking south from Stalingrad. The exhausted Ninth Panzerarmee was pummeled, and could not prevent a breakout of the Stalingrad Front.

The Saratov Front pulled its extensive reserve into action, and began offensive operations the next day, supporting the Steppe Front’s actions. Driving west-by-southwest, the Saratov Front engaged the bulk of Army Group Centre’s strength in its drive towards Donetsk. Three German army groups were under heavy offensive action, and communications between the three headquarters broke down in the chaos. Without a coordinated battle plan, defense was haphazard. Eisenhower exploited this by focusing operational initiative along the boundaries between army groups.

As Army Group Caucasus shrank away from its objectives to meet the divisions seeking to cleave it from Army Group South, the battered Baku and Transcaucasian Fronts moved forward to exploit, nipping on Volksmarschall Dietrich’s heels as he gave ground.

The German defense began to stiffen initially on 18 July, as some semblance of command order was re-established, but the Comintern forces pressed on even with the mounting combat losses. But the logistical situation could not sustain such intense operations. German equipment failure rates, the depletion of ammunition and fuel reserves exceeded all tolerable limits. By 22 July, the Comintern tank spearheads began breaking into rear areas. Army Group Volga took the brunt of this battering, under constant attack from three Fronts (Saratov, Stalingrad, Steppe).

The calamity in the East had reverberated up the chain of command. The news pouring in of Entente troops securing Portugal, returning to the continent after over a year of absence had left Hitler cursing “that swine Sanjurjo”. Now he faced a constant stream of news from the East, all of it bad. While in truth there was little that he could do, the lack of resolute guidance from above contributed to the shock in the command elements in the East.

Manstein fought hard to turn back the tide, but the weight of the engine of world production was now focused on him. 4 August, he attempted to secure a new defensive line on the Don River. But the focused attacks of three Fronts had already broken the back of Army Group Volga. Army Group Caucasus’ retreat was fast turning into a rout. Soviet forces had already liberated Novorossisk, Maikop and Grozny, and continued to press forward in spite of their exhaustion.

On 18 August, the lead elements of the Steppe Front reached Rostov, cutting off land-based lines of communication. In an uncharacteristic show of humility, Hitler appealed directly to Mussolini to aid the cut off troops of Army Group Caucasus. Braving the advancing umbrella of Comintern air power, ships of the Regia Marina began evacuating troops across the Sea of Azov, an action that saved some one hundred twelve thousand troops from capture, at the cost of seven destroyers and two cruisers, and the exhaustion of a significant portion of the Italian merchant marine.

After breaching the Donets, the Saratov Front paused to recuperate on 7 September, eighty kilometers from Denepropetrovsk. The Voronezh Front had liberated Kursk and was breaching into the Ukraine at this time. Operation Jupiter had exceeded all of Stavka’s expectations; Eisenhower and his staff had spent the last week of July busily preparing a succeeding operation to solidify their gains. Preparations for Operation Saturn commenced on 9 September with the dissolution of the Steppe and Astrakhan Fronts, and the transfer of their assets to reinforce the Voronezh, Saratov and Stalingrad Fronts. It was an incredible logistical feat, rapidly moving both combat units and supply dumps to in a week of furious activity. Losses to Luftwaffe air attack were considerable, but overall air superiority was maintained. Both the Comintern Army Air Forces and the Luftwaffe experienced significant attrition in personnel and equipment due to the furious tempo of operations, but the Germans were simply unable to sustain such losses. Chased from the skies, the Luftwaffe could not bail out the disorganized frontline Axis troops.

Operation Saturn began on 21 September. The Voronezh front wheeled south towards Kharkov, slamming into the disorganized troops of Army Group Volga. The following morning, the Saratov Front hooked northward. The Stalingrad Front resumed its drive westward, continuing to savage Manstein’s forces as they rolled through the Azov coastal low country towards the Dnieper.

[…]

Amidst the fanfare of hundreds of captured Nazi standards cast into a heap on the steps of the Palace of the Soviets, Operation Saturn achieved what had eluded Marshal Frunze for nearly three years: complete operational superiority against the invader.

However measured, the battles of Stalingrad are titanic in scale. For our purposes, the overall Second Battle of Stalingrad and the subsequent exploitation operations Jupiter and Saturn constitute a single logical unit. This massive battle was fought along a frontier stretching from Voronezh to Baku, nearly fifteen hundred kilometers of frontier, though most of the fighting was focused in the Volga, Don and Donets river basins.

The Axis committed three army groups under overall German command. At the beginning of Zitadelle, these three army groups had 2,275,000 soldiers engaged between them in 132 divisions, of which 35 were armored or mechanized. Axis forces committed some 8,450 tanks and armored fighting vehicles, 4,472 aircraft, and 18,182 guns and mortars. By comparison, with the exception of aircraft this is comparable to the entire strength of the Franco-British Army in June 1943.

The Comintern fielded a total of 4,078,000 (1,762,000 American, 2,209,000 Soviet, 112,000 IVA) troops in seven fronts, constituted out of 221 division equivalents. With a nearly 2:1 preponderance of force achieved, the Comintern had already seized the strategic initiative prior to the battle. Including operational reserves, Comintern forces had 13,712 tanks and armored fighting vehicles, 7,918 aircraft, and 49,015 guns and mortars.

Losses were similarly staggering. Methodologically comparing Axis and Comintern loss and kill claims produces reliable aggregate figures. On the Axis side, we arrive at a staggering figure of ~909,000 casualties, of which approximately 579,000 were irretrievable. Comintern sources meticulously log the taking of 412,301 prisoners.

Comintern casualties were similarly high. 1,550,000 total casualties, including 412,000 killed or missing. But even this number is misleading, as many prisoners taken would be subsequently liberated by the relentless pace of the advance, but official record keeping still record them as irretrievable casualties.

Evaluating the loss of equipment is more difficult due to different accounting standards. German tank losses ultimately totaled ~2500 units, with a further 1,198 recorded as non-operational by 1 September 1943. By comparison, Comintern tank losses as recorded in the Stavka archives were 6,521, of which 3,512 would be considered total losses. But this too is misleading, as there is a lack of data concerning the details of battle damage, and at least in the Comintern case, some units were recorded as a loss multiple times, repaired and returned to action relatively quickly.

Losses in guns and aircraft were similarly staggering, though Comintern record keeping was more meticulous given the level of chaos sewn in Axis forces: 4,012 guns, and 1,180 aircraft lost. Combat records indicate achieving near complete air superiority by August, indicating the inflicting of disproportionate losses on the Luftwaffe. Manstein’s own estimates are not rosy: 5,000 guns and mortars lost, and 1,400 aircraft.

On a purely quantitative level, Stalingrad was a decisive Soviet victory, completely evicting the Axis from the Caucasus, and pressing onward into Ukraine after two months of heavy fighting. But the qualitative loss is much more difficult to measure. For the Comintern, the three planetary operations were instrumental in separating the wheat from the chaff, building a strong institutional core of divisional, corps and army level leaders that would lead the army to victory, and temper the soldiers and junior officers in the fires of battle.

But for the Axis, so much of the institutional memory of the military was killed, maimed or captured, and it became increasingly impossible to recover from the loss. The loss of divisional, corps and even army level leaders was completely unprecedented, with nearly a quarter of flag officers in Army Group Volga killed or captured. The backbone of the Wehrmacht and SS, the steely core of NCOs, many of with over a decade of service, was being progressively decimated.

Army Group Volga had its back broken. Army Group Caucasus had practically disintegrated, and even mighty Centre had been severely mauled. Army Group South would be reconstituted from the remnants of Army Groups Volga and Caucasus, and stiffened by hastily repurposed occupation security troops. In Germany, the age of conscription would be lowered to 16, and the Reich’s previous policies on pushing women out of the labour force were quietly relaxed. The manpower gap would be made up with by the increased use of collaborators, including from some groups within the Soviet Union, throughout Nazi occupied territories.

[…]

The scale of the Comintern victory was so astounding that reports of it were first dismissed as embellished propaganda in the West. But the corroboration of Franco-British journalists’ own accounts forced the General Staff to reassess its analysis. With now Volksmarschall Rommel arriving in the Peninsula in the fall to direct the Axis war effort in the Peninsular Campaign, and the arrival of Franco-German reinforcements to the beleaguered Falangist Army, General Montgomery’s efforts were stalling. Morale was still fragile, and the Germans still seemed invincible. Attlee’s government quickly seized upon Stalingrad in a series of news reels and animated propaganda shorts. Victory was now within sight, they contended, and the mighty colossus was not invincible.

The heads of the three powers met starting 12 October in the momentous Tehran Conference. Attlee, Blum, Molotov and Reed staged a historic photo-op, sitting together relaxed, drinking tea. The real substance of the talks were continued efforts to improve Entente-American cooperation, and the first plans for the post-war situation.

The United Nations iterated its first demand of unconditional surrender to the leadership of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Traitor France, backed by a promise of lenient treatment to enemy leadership if promptly accepted. No one expected it to be seriously entertained.

In recognition of the immense role the Comintern was playing in the war effort, certain concessions were granted. The accession of the Spanish Free Soviet Republic as an associate republic of the UASR was recognized, pending a final agreement on status of occupied Spain. Similarly, the FBU agreed that the final disposition of Eritrea and Somaliland, including the French and British sectors, would be decided by postwar plebiscite. A similar agreement was made for Mesopotamia, Armenia, and the Baltic states, which amounted to a de facto ceding of the Comintern.

Comintern military control of the Bosporus was guaranteed, though the final fate of Turkey was yet undecided. Similarly, the United Nations was entirely at an impasse with what to do with the minor Axis powers, especially Scandinavia, with Attlee putting a hard red line on their accession to the Soviet sphere. Dropping the matter for a later date was a necessary price; Reed needed the capital to instead broker universal amnesty for British and French subjects who had joined the IVA, an offence that carried significant punishment including the loss of citizenship if convicted. Franco-British IVA veterans would be repatriated and integrated into the Franco-British Army to support the fight in the West.

The first arrangements for judicial measures against the leadership and war criminals in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were also made. Reed summarized this agreement by stating that “DeNazification can only occur at the gallows.”

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1. The title is a reference to David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House’s book When Titans Clashed , one of the first popular history books to be written with the benefit of Soviet archive access. Our fictional author here has a similar bio: an officer in the Entente Army and academic, previously contributing technical work to military doctrine based on assessing military history, and now a full time academic with the occasional popular focused book.

2. A Russian acronym that is jargonized in American English. Teatr Voennykh Deistvii , “theatre of military operations”

3. Previously the Separate Mechanized Army.

4. Like OTL, it’s the nominative camouflage for radar proximity fuzes. While first developed as an anti-air weapon, in a field artillery role they greatly enhance lethality by causing shells to air burst over targets rather than bury into the dirt and explode. This more efficiently spreads shrapnel and blast effects, and negates much of the protection foxholes and trenches provide. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation