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The traffic jam is thought to have delayed the advance by at least one week. With the advance now slowed, Hitler changed his mind and reassigned the 4th Panzer Army back to the attack on Stalingrad. By the end of July, Soviet forces were pushed back across the Don River. At this point, the Don and Volga Rivers are only 65 km (40 mi) apart, and ...
[91] [92] The disaster at Stalingrad was the end of Case Blue and the territorial gains had been reversed by the end of 1943, except for the Kuban bridgehead on the Taman peninsula, retained for a possible second offensive to the Caucasus, which was held until 19 October 1943. [93] [94]
A total of 2.8 million Wehrmacht personnel were held as POWs by the Soviet Union at the end of the war, according to Soviet records. A large number of German POWs had been released by the end of 1946, [9] when the Soviet Union held fewer POWs than the United Kingdom and France between them [citation needed].
At the end of August Romanian mountain troops joined the Caucasian spearhead, while the Romanian 3rd and 4th armies were redeployed from their successful task of clearing the Azov littoral. They took up position on either side of Stalingrad to free German troops for the main offensive.
Paulus did not request to evacuate the city when the counter-offensive began. [11] Paulus (right) with General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach in Stalingrad, November 1942. Paulus followed Adolf Hitler's orders to hold his positions in Stalingrad under all circumstances, despite the fact that he was completely surrounded by strong Soviet forces.
Accordingly, while almost all of the original 5 million men of the Soviet army had been wiped out by the end of 1941, the Soviet military had swelled to 8 million members by the end of that year. [149] Despite substantial losses in 1942 far in excess of German losses, Red Army size grew even further, to 11 million. [149]
The 3rd (Motorised) Infantry Division, deployed on the southwestern corner of the cauldron since the end of Nov. 1942, was ordered to retreat to new defensive positions to avoid encirclement. [6] In the first three days, the Soviets lost 26,000 men and over half their tanks. [11] The western half of the Stalingrad pocket had been lost by 17 ...
By the end of 1942, the distance between the German 6th Army and forces outside of the encirclement was over 65 km (40 mi), and most of the German formations in the area were extremely weak. [96] Hitler's insistence in holding Stalingrad to the last risked the existence of the 6th Army. [97]