Why No German Reinforcements at Stalingrad

By November 1942, the German units in Stalingrad are depleted. Now, many say that the reason for this is because the fighting was very attritional in nature, and that the Germans on a whole did not have the manpower to replace their combat losses. You often hear that the German manpower wasn't sufficient, and that they bled to death in the city. Therefore, conclusions are often made that the Germans shouldn't have gone into Stalingrad. That the Soviets won because they had the manpower reserves, whereas the Germans didn't. And that Paulus and Hitler are to blame for this, because they should have not gone into the city in the first place. The reality is that none of these assumptions are necessarily true. The Germans could have, and probably should have, gone into Stalingrad. The Soviet manpower is not the reason the Soviets won, and not the reason the Germans lost. And Paulus and Hitler are not the ones to blame for this. The reason for this is because of the priority of German reinforcements. When you look at German reinforcements in 1942, what you find is that the reason the Germans lose the Battle of Stalingrad is because of poor staff work. The German General Staff are the ones to blame for this disaster. Let's find out why. The assumption people have about the Eastern Front is that Germany cannot replace her manpower losses. This is actually a false assumption. Between July and mid-November 1942, the losses of all German army groups on the Eastern Front amounted to 498,786 men. That's a lot, but look at this graph. The number of replacements for this period was 509,700 men. That means the Germans did in fact replace all of their losses on the Eastern Front in these months of 1942. Now, a lot of you will already be in the comment section complaining, saying that this can't be the case because the German units in Stalingrad are severely depleted. And you're right. The units taking part in the fighting in and around Stalingrad lost in the region of about 29-57% of their combat manpower strengths. It probably averages out about 40-50% of their overall strength. So how do we explain this? How can overall losses be replenished, but individual units in Stalingrad be depleted? The reason is simple. It's because Paulus's 6th Army, fighting at Stalingrad, is part of Weichs' Army Group B. Originally in 1941, there had been three army groups. North, Centre, South. In 1942, Army Group South heads off towards the Caucasus in Operation Blau. It then splits into two. You have Army Groups A and B. Army Group A goes into the Caucasus to get the oil that Germany desperately needs in order to continue the war. And Army Group B guards the northern flank. And to put it simply, nobody cares about Army Group B. It's just a flank guarding force. It's meant to have been on the defensive, and if not for Stalingrad, it probably would have been. And as a result, it does not have priority in many respects. In Army Group B, you have the German 2nd Army in the Voronezh area, and German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army in Stalingrad. But 4th Panzer Army was actually diverted from Army Group A in the Caucasus in order to reinforce Paulus's 6th Army when it was realized that Paulus did not have sufficient strength to take on Eremenko's forces outside the city. Emphasis on outside the city, because the fighting outside the city of Stalingrad was very bitter as well, so much so that the Germans had to send in an entire Panzer Army to sort out the problem. In between the German 2nd Army at Voronezh, and 4th Panzer and 6th Armies at Stalingrad, you have the Hungarian 2nd Army, the Italian 8th Army, and the 3rd Romanian Army. So basically, Army Group B is not really a German Army Group, and nobody cares about it. At first, it doesn't even have priority of supplies. So you find that both 6th and 4th Panzer Armies are starved of fuel and ammunition. And not only is the flank it's holding completely stretched thin, with Romanian General Dumitrescu asking repeatedly to the German High Command, can I shorten my front so I can have at least some sort of reserve force, but also this entire flank is taking a lot of casualties. Here are the combat losses between July and mid-November 1942 for all four Army Groups. Clearly, Army Group B, the yellow column, has taken the most casualties. 156,265 men for Army Group B. But we know that the Germans were in fact replacing their losses overall across the entire front. So what is the distribution of replacements? Oh, that's a bit different isn't it. Army Group B takes 150,000 casualties and receives just 100,000 replacements. This is the least amount of replacements for all four Army Groups. But look at the red bar. That's Army Group Centre. If we look at the first graph, again, Army Group Centre takes 146,000 casualties. But the second shows that it receives 192,000 replacements. That's a lot more replacements than casualties sustained. So at a time when Army Groups A and B should have priority, since the main effort is always in the south, Army Group Centre is given a much bigger proportion of the replacements. This new graph shows it better. The blue bars are Army Group Centre's losses and replacements. The first bar being losses, the second being replacements. You can see that they get more replacements than losses. And Army Group Centre is the red bars. Again, losses and then replacements. So again, it shows more replacements than losses. Then we get to the yellow bars. Army Group B. The first bar is clearly much higher than the second, meaning it took a lot more casualties, and didn't receive as many replacements. And then finally we get to the green bars. These are Army Group A. Again, more replacements than losses. So as you can see, Army Group B not only takes the most casualties, it also receives the least amount of replacements, and is the only Army Group not to receive enough reinforcements to cover its own losses. Why? Why is this the case? If the priority is in the south, why would you deprioritise the southern forces? Something doesn't add up here, and we'll come back to it. All we need to know for now is that Army Group B, and 6th Army, should have, and could have, received more reinforcements during the Battle of Stalingrad. Now, there is an argument that says that they shouldn't have gone into Stalingrad. Paulus and Hitler take the blame, right? Let's look at this graph. This is the combat losses of Army Group B from July to early November 1942. Blue is July, red is August, yellow is September, green is October, and purple is the beginning of November. Okay, the majority of the casualties Army Group B takes occur in August and September. This is probably because of the Battle of Stalingrad, right? Okay, fine. What happened in October then? The Battle of Stalingrad is still going on, and yet we have fewer casualties in October than we do in July. And this is before German units have even entered the city of Stalingrad yet. By October, the fighting in Stalingrad had actually degenerated into small-scale offensives and skirmishes between depleted units. And while I don't actually have a complete month-by-month set of figures for the losses of the 6th Army, according to David Glantz, 6th Army's losses from Blau to the Uranus counter-offensive, so this period, are more than 100,000 men, and 4th Panzer Army is 30,000 men. So that's most of the losses in these charts. Considering total losses for Army Group B is 156,000, 130,000 are from these two armies. So these graphs are roughly what the Stalingrad monthly losses are. Obviously with some room for error, but this is the closest we're going to get at the minute, in a chart at least. What we can surmise from this is two things. That 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army took more casualties before the battle in the city than they did in October, which shows that the fighting in Stalingrad had died down by that point at least. And then the second point is that the majority of the casualties occurred in August and September, which shows us that the majority of the fighting in Stalingrad had already been done. When you consider that something like 90% of the city was in German hands by late October, and that they're still attacking and gaining ground at this point, admittedly we're talking metres, but they're still taking ground, they really wouldn't have needed a massive amount of reinforcements to take the final portion. Chuikov's army at this point is severely depleted as well, and barely holding on. Perhaps the injection of a couple more German divisions, or reinforcements that the divisions already in the city should have had, may have been enough for the Germans to actually win it. That is how close the fighting is. That a few thousand extra soldiers on either side could have made the entire difference. Now we've seen the losses. Let's see Army Group B's replacements. Oh dear. At the height of the fighting in August, which is when they really needed the most, Army Group B received the least reinforcements out of all of these months. In September, casualties were similar, but again, only 20,000 replacements. It gets a lot better in October and the first half of November, and it's almost as if someone at the top realised that Army Group B could do with more replacements. So you actually see an increase in October especially. But this barely covers the losses taken in October. Let's look at this graph, which combines losses to reinforcements. The blues are July 30,000 losses to 19,500 reinforcements. So straight away, Army Group B has a deficit of 10,000 men. By yellow August, we have 49,000 losses to just 13,000 reinforcements. So no matter which way you look at it, that's a terrible deficit which they never recover from. A 36,000 man deficit, which brings the total since July to 46,000 men deficit. In red September, 43,000 losses to just 20,000 reinforcements. Again, a massive 23,000 man deficit, bringing the total since July to 69,000 men. That's five divisions worth of manpower. Clearly, July to September 1942, Army Group B and the forces fighting in the Stalingrad are taking big casualties and are receiving little in the way of reinforcements. This at a time when they're fighting desperately outside and then inside the city of Stalingrad. And if you bear in mind that Chuikov's 62nd Army never exceeds 54,000 men, Army Group B has a manpower deficit of more than Chuikov's entire army. And most of this is taken by 6th Army. And it's not all of 6th Army's units taking these casualties. Those guarding the flanks outside the city aren't hit quite as hard, meaning that the units that enter the city are suffering massively. By the time we get to October, they are barely skeletons of what they used to be. By green October… yeah, I probably should have coloured this month red so I could say Red October, but never mind. In October, there were 22,000 casualties to 30,000 reinforcements. This is the first time since the Battle of Stalingrad began that replacements have actually outnumbered losses. As it currently stands, my view is that the fighting that really begins the Battle of Stalingrad begins on the 24th of July 1942. This is the first time 6th Army grapples with 64th and 62nd Armies outside the city, along with 1st and 4th Tank Armies. So you can see right from the beginning that this was a tough fight, even before we get to the city itself. And, as I said, most of these casualties are 6th Army. Beginning on November, 11,000 casualties to 18,000 replacements. Again, reinforcements outnumber losses here as well, but only slightly. And the small amount of replacements is not enough to recover the losses sustained in August and September, although it is at least better than it has been. The overall deficit in this period for Army Group B is 56,000 men, which is more than Chuikov's entire army at any one point in Stalingrad. Clearly, if Paulus had received the reinforcements he was entitled to, or even just half of them, this would have been enough to get his forces to the Volga at Stalingrad. The issue isn't the attritional nature of the fighting, so much as the lack of priority given to Army Groups B, and then Paulus's army, compared to the other army groups. Therefore, Paulus and Hitler were not wrong in going into Stalingrad, and could have won the city if replacements had actually arrived, which they were entitled to, and really should have arrived. So what is going on here? Why is Army Group B taking the most casualties, but receiving the least replacements? In fact, in July 1942, Army Group B received just 19,000 men. That's 11% of the replacements sent to the army groups on the Eastern Front. This is at a time when it took 32% of the casualties across the entire front. In August, they received just 14% of the replacements. Yes, the percentage is still low, even at the height of the Battle of Stalingrad. In September, they still only received 24% of the replacements. It's getting better, but still not on par with the losses already sustained. Then it climbs to 31% in October, and then 30% in early November. These barely meet the needs of Army Group B's entire losses in these months. And obviously, not all of the replacements went to the 6th Army. In fact, 31% of the replacements between September and November went to German 2nd Army, as well as the German divisions assigned to the Italian 8th Army. So even at this point, 6th Army is making a loss. Overall, going back to the Army Group replacements chart, Army Group B received just 19% of the replacements sent to the Eastern Front. Army Group A received 21%. So if the Southern Front is the priority and the main effort in 1942, why are Army Groups A and B only receiving 40% of the replacements? And why is Army Group Centre receiving a full 38% of the replacements? And to complete this picture, forces are actually stripped from Army Groups A and B, and sent to Army Group Centre as well. This is something not often mentioned in the narrative, but 11 of the German divisions, which is 15% of the original 72 deployed for Operation Blau, were withdrawn by mid-August. Four were sent to Army Group North. The 24th, 132nd and 170th Infantry, plus the 28th Jäger Division, were sent to Army Group North. Four were sent to Army Group Centre. The Großdeutschland Motorized Infantry Division, 9th and 11th Panzer Divisions, and the 72nd Infantry Division. And three were sent to France or the Balkans. Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler Motorized Division. The 22nd and 257th Infantry Divisions. These were all sent to the west as well. In their place, of all 11 of these divisions, came three Italian and four Romanian divisions, and another eight were due to arrive by early September. Clearly, these are not adequate replacements for the German divisions. Effectively, four elite German mobile divisions, plus a load of infantry units, had been taken away from Blau. That's 25% of its mobile formations. This is at a time when Blau was meant to be the principal Axis effort. This was the main summer offensive of 1942, and we are taking units away from it. We are sending reinforcements elsewhere. We are depriving the main offensive of the means to fight. I mean, there are two elements to this. The first is a simple one. The German High Command messed up. This is either very poor staff work, and enduring the whirlwind comes to that conclusion as well. The priority was not given to the south, maybe, and this is what I'm thinking. Somebody is thinking that the Moscow Axis is the right place to go. Calder. The second is relatively easy to understand, but needs a lot more explanation to make it make sense. If you look at the scale of this operation, Blau was a colossal task which was a logistical nightmare. This was even more ambitious than Barbarossa had been the year before. We're talking hundreds of kilometers across ground with little infrastructure, at a time when your army is already at the end of its logistical capabilities. This army is now thrust even further away from its supply base and stripped of 25% of its mobile elements. Effectively, Operation Blau is a complete disaster. And there are many factors in this, as Citino points out in his book, Death of the Wehrmacht, which you'll see in the pinned comment below. Check him out for sources. But logistics is definitely a big one of these factors. 1st Panzer and 17th Armies in Army Group A in the Caucasus run out of fuel in the first days of August, and Paulus' 6th Army plus 4th Panzer Army also do the same at a similar time. Paulus has to wait a couple of weeks just to get fuel, and the Germans simply cannot get the supplies of fuel and ammunition to them. If they're struggling to supply their forces, what's the point of having as many forces? There is no point. This is perhaps why they stripped 11 German divisions, mainly mobile divisions as well, away from the southern front. This is perhaps part of the reason they're not able to send as many reinforcements to the area, and perhaps why this front isn't a priority in terms of reinforcements. Perhaps they simply can't supply the soldiers sufficiently, so there's no point having more there. It may even be a case of, we can either ship guns and butter, or replacements, but we can't do both. And yet, in the narrative, logistics is barely mentioned, and in the narrative, the reinforcement rate isn't even considered. You would think that scholars would be pondering over this, trying to figure out what happened and why. Trying to find the answers as to why Army Group B, especially, was deprioritized. I mean, it's only one of the big turning points in World War Two, and probably one of the biggest turning points in world history, so it's not as if it's not important. But no, apparently, in the narrative, no real explanation is given as to why Army Group B was deprioritized and received the least reinforcements. Except, during the whirlwind, nobody seems to care, and even Liedtke shies away from making a definite conclusion to this. But here's something we can conclude. 6th Army may have been bled to death in Stalingrad, but the Germans, as a whole, were not bleeding to death. They had enough manpower to replenish their losses, but they chose not to send that manpower to 6th Army. Currently, we can understand this to be a combination of very poor staff work by the German High Command, Halder, a shift of priorities, Halder, with a guy called Halder probably to blame for this, another reason to sack him on the 24th of September 1942, and because of logistics. I will also conclude this. If 6th Army had received the manpower replacements it was entitled to, and should have received in the first place, along with sufficient supplies, it could have won the Battle of Stalingrad. And it wouldn't have been as depleted as it was, at least, meaning that Operation Uranus may have been parried as well. We're therefore left with the question, why didn't they get their replacements? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments section below. I just want to say thank you to my Patrons for your continuing support. You guys are awesome as always. Thank you very much. Now a great follow-up to this video is Citino's lecture entitled, Death of the Wehrmacht, the German Campaigns of 1942. He also has a book entitled similar, where he goes basically into the Blau Campaign, and he does that in the video anyway, so go and watch it. The Blau Campaign is where they ultimately end up in Stalingrad. So you can find the link to that video in both the pinned comment below, and also on the screen here. The pinned comment below also has sources to go and check it out on other notes and whatever else. So thank you very much guys for watching. Let me know what you think about this, because I'm interested. Bye for now.