Moreover, the Americans would attempt their invasion of Western Europe sooner or later, and he needed to be ready for them. His losses in men, materiel and time had been severe, however, and not until spring were his forces again up to strength. Objectives now included the destruction and round up of Soviet forces in huge, encircling pockets, while starving Stalin’s war-plants of raw materials.

On May 12, four days after the Axis thrust against the Caucasus and the valuable harbor-city of Sevastopol, the Red Army launched its own gigantic offensive south of the Kharkov industrial center. The German 6th Army reeled back across the Orel River, and another calamity was in the making. Hitler had the full weight of Operation Fredericus I thrown against General Semyon Timoshenko’s assault, which faltered, lost momentum and fell back. The Fuehrer then ordered an immediate counter-stroke, which netted 214,000 Russians, together with 1,200 of their tanks and 2,000 guns. These heavy losses could not be made up by promised Allied aid, because U.S. and British convoys to the Soviet port at Murmansk were being destroyed by u-boats and Luftwaffe bombers. A few more such successful operations such as Fredericus I, and the USSR must fall by year’s end.

Indeed, Sevastopol had already fallen by July 3rd, with the capture of nearly 100,000 more prisoners. Throughout the summer, Axis forces consistently trounced the Soviets, depriving them of more industrial cities and harbors, while capturing mineral-rich regions of the Russian southwest. The factory center of Rostov fell on July 23rd, followed by Voroshilovsk on August 5th, the Maikop oil fields four days later, and the port of Novorossisk on September 6th. By the time the Swastika banner was raised atop Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the Caucasus Mountains, on August 23rd, virtually all that was needed to end the campaign was the capture of Stalingrad.

Sitting on the Volga, it played a pivotal role in arms production and distribution, and was the collecting center and clearing house for raw materials. Without it, all that would be left to the Soviets was retreat to and long-term recuperation behind the distant Ural Mountains. As such, the city represented the last major obstacle to victory on the Eastern Front. For Hitler, the real goal of the campaign was taking the Baku oil fields in the Caucasus, as part of the Stalingrad operation. With their capture, the Red Army would have been unable to continue fighting much longer.

Keenly aware of Stalingrad’s vital role in the campaign, the Soviets threw massive resistance across the banks of the Don River, as a last-ditch effort to protect the city, 80 miles away to the south-east. In early August, from the town of Serafirmovitch, they launched a counter-attack on Italian units at the very head of the Axis advance, intending not only to stop the invaders, but turn them back. The entire Axis offensive was suddenly in jeopardy.

As Adams writes, "The outmanned and out-gunned Italians were ordered to stand and fight to the death---and they did, beating back Soviet heavy tanks with the homemade incendiary bombs that the Russians (who also used them) called Molotov cocktails. In the fighting at Serafirmovitch, the Italians lost 1,700 men, but they captured 1,600 prisoners and a huge cache of Soviet arms" (p.124). The Axis offensive was saved by Italian heroism, and the last obstacle before Stalingrad had been removed.

By the 6th, the city’s outskirts were reached by elements of the German Sixth Army. Despite stiff resistance, the capture of Stalingrad proceeded, however slowly, through the autumn. Ironically, as Axis forces invested his metropolitan namesake, Stalin came to a momentous decision. Admitting defeat, he telegraphed the German High Command with surrender terms. He was willing to sign an armistice and relinquish all Russian territories lost so far, if allowed his own state east of the Volga. The Marshall had often publicly suspected that his British and American allies might try to unpleasantly surprise him by concluding a separate peace with Germany behind his back, something he now attempted himself. He was turned down, and rightfully so. Giving him the opportunity to restore his virtually shattered armed forces so they could attack while continental Europeans were busy fighting the Americans in the West was what he obviously had in mind.

But by mid-November, the same unseen virus that had poisoned Rommel’s chances of victory at El Alamein was now at Stalin’s disposal. From Abwehr traitors, he learned everything about the Axis forces arrayed against him---their strongest and weakest points, dispositions, supplies and plans. On November 19, his artillery concentrated a massive barrage on the under-strength Rumanians along the Don Front. Although their initial resistance was strong enough to slow the Soviet advance, they soon broke under the sheer weight of numbers and heavy bombardment; had they stood their ground to the last soldier, the outcome would not have been much different. The Rumanian Third Army was, in fact, destroyed and the Fourth badly mauled.

The Red avalanche caught Axis forces by complete surprise at their most vulnerable point. Hitler had placed the 48th Panzer Corps behind the Russians in reserve. It should have been able to smash the Soviet pincher, but only 35 Czech tanks were able to start their engines in the sub-zero temperatures, and these were brushed aside by hordes of T-34s. Within 24 hours, the Soviets penetrated 25 miles. And on the 23rd, the entire German 6th Army, comprising 22 divisions, together with a Croatian regiment, was surrounded.

Based on Luftwaffe assurances that it could keep the 330,000 encircled men at least temporarily supplied, and von Manstein’s proposed relief attack, "Winter Storm", Hitler ordered General Paulus, commanding the Sixth Army, to refrain from attempting a break-out until preparations were completed. Stalin’s commanders learned of von Manstein’s up-coming assault, and forced him to postpone it in more than a week of intense engagements, during which the Reds consistently failed to split the Axis pocket at Stalingrad, suffering very heavy casualties.

The German attempt to rescue their surrounded comrades finally got under way on December 12. By then, Russian re-enforcements in the form of the 5th Shock Army were deployed along the River Myshkova. General Hermann Hoth spear-headed the attack, the desperate ferocity of which carved a path of blood and broken vehicles through the thick Soviet defenses for four days. The salvation of the trapped 6th Army and its Croatian regiment seemed imminent.

Meanwhile, Soviet intelligence conveyed information about von Manstein’s Achilles heel to commanders in the field. On December 16, they annihilated the Italian 8th Army with a colossal assault, then over-ran Tatsinskaya, the most important airfield from which the Germans and Croats in Stalingrad were being supplied with parachuted food and munitions. Both Hoth and the Luftwaffe re-doubled their efforts, and by the 19th he reached the Myshkova, on the outskirts Stalingrad. That same day, Ju-52s dropped 250 tons of supplies---up from the previous 90 daily tons---to comrades under siege in the city.

Both the Fuehrer and von Manstein informed Paulus that the moment had come for him to break out. Hoth was waiting to link up with him just 16 miles away. But Paulus offered only a feeble attempt, sending a few tanks unsupported by infantry. They made no head-way. For the next five days, Hitler and von Manstein continued to exhort Paulus; but he made no more efforts to break out even though his troops were now better supplied and equipped, thanks to Goering’s air-drops.

On Christmas Eve, the inevitable happened, when the Soviet counter-offensive broke through the 4th Rumanian Army (again because Soviet intelligence picked out the weakest link in the chain of "Winter Storm"), pommeling German forces on the lower Don, just where they were best put off balance, and compelling General Hoth to withdraw his advance, which had come so painfully close to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers pinned inside Stalingrad. They lost their best chance at escape, as the Axis armies retreated 125 miles away.

Their only hope now lay in continued air-lifts. If the Luftwaffe supplied them properly (and if Paulus held out for another two or three weeks), a serious break-out could be attempted, and von Manstein would launch another relief operation. On January 10, 1943, Stavka, the Soviet Army’s High Command, sent its 65th Army against the Axis troops in Stalingrad with the single purpose of steam-rolling over the Axis troops.

The Red juggernaut advanced five miles on the first day, but it began to slow in the north and south of the "pocket" due to fanatical German counter-attacks. After only two days of the most savage fighting, the Soviet offensive lost 26,000 men and half its tanks. Even for the apparently inexhaustible numbers of men and weapons available to the Russians, these losses drained their strength, and only through the terror inflicted on the masses of common soldiers by incensed Jew commissars was the offensive maintained. Through espionage-intelligence, Stavka commanders learned the exact positions of the Luftwaffe airfields, and sent their Communist hordes after them. On the 13th, Karpovka, the most westerly and vital landing area held by the surrounded Germans, was taken.

Three days later, they over-ran Pitomik, the only pocket airfield with night-flying facilities. Gumrak airfield fell on the 22nd, as the 6th Army was cut into two small pockets in the north and south of Stalingrad. The next day, the last Luftwaffe plane flew out of the city carrying 19 wounded men and 7 bags of mail. Nonetheless, air-lifts increased their drops from 40 to 60 tons per day. The heroic pilots continued to fly their desperate missions through blinding snow storms and against Red Air Force interceptors. Throughout the night of the 29th, 124 Ju-52s, one of the largest relief flights of the siege, succeeded in parachuting food, medicine, and ammunition to the Axis troops. Alas, even these supplies were inadequate to save all the German, Rumanian and Croatian soldiers from starvation and frost-bite. 30,000 of them were sick and wounded.

On January 30, the tenth anniversary of his election as German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler received a last message from Paulus: "The Swastika flag is still flying over Stalingrad. May our battle be an example to the present and coming generations, that they must never capitulate, even in a hopeless situation."

Nevertheless, Paulus surrendered the next day, as the enemy surrounded his headquarters. Axis soldiers in the northern pocket refused to lay down their arms, however. They were confined to a small area around a tractor factory, which they defended beyond all hope. In a colossal artillery barrage on February 2, most of them were killed. Only the wounded and shell-shocked survived. The battle had cost 110,00 German dead, with another 91,000 made prisoner.

Some months after his capitulation, Paulus and other Army officers began making anti-Hitler radio broadcasts. Their previous loyalty seems to have been beyond reproach. But they fell into the hands of the world’s most skilled behavior-modification torturers. A favorite technique was to deprive the victim of sleep, while making him witness some physical abomination day after day. Prisoners would be literally skinned alive like butchered animals, a sight the high-ranking officers were forced to observe for hours at a time, while being alternatively threatened with the same treatment and offered generous promises of survival. Every man has his breaking-point under such satanic conditioning, and Paulus was subjected to the same kind of "brain-washing" American P.O.W.s experienced later at the hands of the Communist Chinese, North Koreans and Viet Cong.

Hitler’s strategy now demanded the disciplined fighting withdrawal of Axis forces aimed at extracting the highest possible cost from the Soviets, while waiting for an opportunity to counter-attack. Many of the cities and much of the territories conquered by the Germans and their allies during 1942 were relinquished. Despite continuing appalling losses in men and materiel, the Soviets rolled onward in victorious euphoria, and were so confident of a quick triumph they forgot to consult the spies and traitors who had made Stalingrad possible. Less than three weeks after that catastrophe, they were taken utterly by surprise when the SS Panzer Corps smashed their right flank south of Krasnograd, while the XL Panzer Corps exterminated three Red tank corps.

By March 18, Kharkov and Belgorod were re-taken. The Axis counter-offensive continued to press on inexorably through spring and into summer, stampeding the Soviets northward to Kursk, where their exposed salient threatened to bring about a second Stalingrad, one in which the Reds would be surrounded and cut off. Both sides geared up for maximum effort, because each realized that the up-coming confrontation would probably determine the outcome of the struggle on the Eastern Front, if not of the entire war. Axis forces comprised 900,000 men, 2,500 tanks and assault guns, plus an air armada which, for size and the excellence of its crews and planes, was unprecedented. The Panzerkampfwagen V Panther and VI Tiger---World War II’s best tanks---would make their debut, along with the new Ferdinand tank-destroyer. Opposing them were 1,300,000 Red Army troops and 3,000 tanks.

But the Soviets did more than outnumber their enemies. Spies in a Swiss-based espionage-ring, code-named "Lucy", obtained the Wehrmacht’s complete set of field plans, including time-tables and troop dispositions down to the regimental level, for Operation Citadel, Hitler’s attack at Kursk, from traitors in the Abwehr. Days before the fighting began, Russian commanders spread out exact copies all his orders and strategy for the battle on their desks. Also, the Soviets had been receiving huge quantities of arms and supplies from America, since the defeat of the u-boats, in March. Until then, they were running desperately short of war materiel. Now, they were fully re-equipped with everything from tank-busting P-39 Aircobras to canteens.

Even so, they were bludgeoned by the Luftwaffe’s gigantic air raid, in conjunction with a no less devastating artillery barrage on the afternoon of July 4. The U.S. rushed in hundreds of Grant tanks. Nick-named "A Coffin for Seven Brothers" by the Soviets, every Grant, together with a whole regiment of Churchill tanks, were wiped out by Axis forces at Kursk.

Leading the attack the next day, General Walther Model’s 9th Army penetrated six miles, breaching the Russians’ first defensive line, while General Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army routed the 6th Guards Army in the south. Despite advance warning, the Red Air Force was virtually wiped out over the battle zone. However, continuing espionage reports monitoring secret orders of the German General Staff relayed vital information about the Panzers’ least firmly held positions, upon which the Soviet counter-assault fell with all its weight on July 12. Hoth’s advance stalled to a halt, while the rear of Model’s army was the victim of a surprise attack. Hitler called off Operation Citadel, because casualties were too high and mounting; its forward movement was slowing, and troops were needed to oppose Allied landings in Sicily.

Although Axis warriors had been victorious on land and in the air above Kursk, their losses, while substantially lesser than those they inflicted on the Russians, were excessive. Despite the loss of 30,000 men captured, a Red tidal-wave surged westward after the retreating Germans and their allies. The entire Eastern Front began to collapse, and the Fuehrer’s strategy of a fighting retreat once again came into play. He needed time to rebuild his armies and make operational his new, superior weapons technology, while looking for opportunities to counter-attack.

They presented themselves in October and November, when Soviet attempts to enlarge the Burkin bridgehead on the Dnieper were destroyed, followed by the XLVII Panzer Corps’ victory at another major bridgehead, this one at Kiev, which allowed the Germans to recapture Zhitomir. But these successes could not regain the initiative, due to massive U.S. aid to Stalin and his advance knowledge of all German plans.

While Axis forces continued to fall back since Kursk, they were still in tact by the close of 1943, despite all efforts by the Reds to trap them at Cherkassy and Sevastopol. By July 20, 1944, Soviet troops reached the former Polish border on the Bug River. This date was more than remarkable for the German General Staff’s attempt on Hitler’s life. Ignorant of the failed assassination, Stalin sent him, via Japan, a top secret message, in which he once again offered the Fuehrer a separate armistice.

Germany would be allowed to maintain her pre-Barbarossa frontiers, if only she agreed to a mutual cessation of hostilities. To show his good faith and allow Hitler time to consider the offer, the Marshal halted all military operations against the Reich for 48 hours. Stalin had paused at the old Polish border, because he recognized that invading Eastern Europe could very well cost him most of his armed forces.

He knew that in the post-war world divided between Communism and Capitalism the USSR needed parity, at least, with the Americans. Axis resistance had already severely drained the Soviet economy, and an invasion of Germany might leave it crippled for years. But Hitler guessed what motivated Stalin. The Russians faced being bled white as soon as they stepped across the Bug River.

Even their vaunted man-power had already begun to face shortages, as boys, women and ever-increasing numbers of Asians began to fill the depleted ranks of the Red Army. Time and the eventual introduction of advanced National Socialist arms technology might yet save the day. The Fuehrer and his men steeled themselves for the defense of Europe against the Mongol hordes, just as their ancestors had done for centuries before them.

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