Stalingrad

>Yeah because digging in and playing defensive worked great in WW2
What's the enemy going to do? Bomb you? Then bomb their city defenders. Who cares, you're losing only a fraction of what you'd suffer if you fought for the city.

And if you're successful outside the city, then guess what. The enemy has to either relinquish the city or get surrounded. There was literally no point in trying to take it.

Russians only kept the city manned enough to stall Germans while the actual victory was gained halfway across the frontier.

Stalingrad was a meme city, if it was called Niggergrade no one would have died there.

>What's the enemy going to do? Bomb you?
Oh I dunno maybe counterattack, bust through the lines, envelop and destroy the sixth army?

A lot of it had to do with the name of the city. You see, it was named after Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union. So capturing this city would have been a huge propaganda victory for the Wehrmacht!

Because Stalingrad is the most direct route to Baku, and Baku, and it's enormous oil production, is about the only thing that can conceivably knock the Soviets out of the war; it'll definitely solve your own fuel problems. It's not abut the Caucasus oil, it's about the Azerbaijani oil. The splitting of AGS and sending a group to the Caucasus was primarily to try to get oil for AGS itself to be able to continue the offensive, as even the opening phases of Case Blue were hampered by fuel issues.

Furthermore, you can't really afford to ignore it. The Germans were stretched thin enough as it was trying to take the city, which had almost 200,000 men in it at any given time. If you want to bypass it, you need to keep a garrison large enough to deflect a counterattack from every direction it could strike out of, while retaining enough force to campaign and secure whatever your ultimate goal is.

The Germans don't have enough men for that. So, the city has to be taken, clear out the threat to your rear, re-consolidate, before advancing further.

>Look at the image. Take a good look. What importance did the house actually have? A good view, yes. But of what, ruins? Fields? So if you gain the house, you control its surroundings. Hooray? Now what?

It kept clear a section of the Volga bank, which the soviets were using to re-supply and bring in reinforcements. If it falls to the Germans, they can move to stop your boats.

>And to top it off, ultimately, despite all of the German efforts to capture the city and of all the fighting that occurred, the battle was lost not due to what occurred inside the city, but by a Russian breakthrough, ironically a thousand miles away from the battle. What a waste.

What the fuck are you talking about? Mars was a terrible failure. Uranus was like 90 km away from the city at it's extreme-most flank.

Like I've heard the Germans were THIS close to capturing the entire city. Only a narrow stretch of land remained between them and Volga.

So fucking what?

They would have gotten surrounded all the same. Why not just allocate those useless resources to somewhere where they actually matter??

>bust through the lines, envelop and destroy the sixth army?
Yes because a city garrison is a force for just that. Nevermind they could barely transport shit over the river without it being bombed to shreds.

But guess what, the resources you freed from not having to attack the city aren't just going to stand idle. They're going to do shit too! Maybe envelop the city from South and have the Caucasian army join them to completely cuck the Russians from their oilfields.

But no, lets just tie our hands trying to take a worthless pile of rubble while the enemy prepares to stretch our anus with a shovel.

>Railroads were bombed to shit.

Not him, but railroads were always being bombed to shit. They could be fixed pretty damn quickly. If you want to knock out railroads and keep them from being put back in order, you need a campaign a la what the Western Allies did setting up D-Day, with thousands of 4 engined bombers pounding them for months.

Nobody did crap like that on the Eastern Front, and you can tell, because the Soviets kept sending more and more troops in and around Stalingrad.

>You could've cut Volga off from elsewhere or just keep bombing it.

And tie up how much of the Luftwaffe trying to keep it temporarily suppressed? And it would be temporary, the Soviets were great at repairing the rialroads.

>Yes because a city garrison is a force for just that
What exactly do you think "a city garrison" is?
This isn't 1066, you don't have city garrisons. Armies consisting of tens of thousands of men and thousands of large firebreathing tubes can be moved by iron horses and horseless carriages.

>tens of thousands of men and thousands of large firebreathing tubes can be moved by iron horses and horseless carriages

What be thine witchcraft that thoust speak of?

>Because Stalingrad is the most direct route to Baku, and Baku, and it's enormous oil production
Again, I highly doubt any oil transportation occurred through the city. So capturing the city wouldn't have cut off anything. Unless of course I'm wrong.

>you need to keep a garrison large enough to deflect a counterattack from every direction it could strike out of
You need less men for defense and you only need to block one side of the city. Plus it's not like they're going to march all 200 000 in one direction. And if they actually did, all the easier for you to stall them while capturing the city and encircling them with the remainder of your forces left there.

>And tie up how much of the Luftwaffe trying to keep it temporarily suppressed?
Probably less than what was tied trying to take the city and keep it from being supplied via Volga.

By garrison I mean any forces that were in the city.

>Again, I highly doubt any oil transportation occurred through the city. So capturing the city wouldn't have cut off anything. Unless of course I'm wrong.

It's not about oil transportation being through Stalingrad. It's that you can't get to Baku without getting through Stalingrad or going thousands of miles out of your way breaking through somewhere further north and then swinging south, or trying to push your way through a couple hundred miles of mountains going south to near the turkish border and then swinging east.

>You need less men for defense and you only need to block one side of the city.

You want to bypass the city, remember? Then you will need the entire stretch you're heading around it from.

>Plus it's not like they're going to march all 200 000 in one direction. And if they actually did, all the easier for you to stall them while capturing the city and encircling them with the remainder of your forces left there.

No, probably just half to 2/3 of them supplemented by whatever forces are in the north (Most likely bypass route would be to the south if you're still heading for Baku) also joining in this counterattack.

>Probably less than what was tied trying to take the city and keep it from being supplied via Volga.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Joel Hayward, in Too Little, Too Late, gives the Luftwaffe strength for all of Case Blue at around 1,600 aircraft. And that's everything. Fighters, bombers, scout planes, air transports, the works.

The Transport Plan, where the Allies were wrecking communications networks in France, committed over 2,000 bombers, most of them big heavy 4 engined beasts that the Luftwaffe didn't even have, never-mind escorts and CAP units and reconaissance flights. No, it would have taken a metric fuckton more aipower to put the communication network of action and keep them out of action.

You need to factor in also the shitty makeshift airfields the Luftwaffles were flying out of, and their poor quality fuel that was always running out.
On top of not having the numbers, they could not maintain a decent sortie rate.

>It's that you can't get to Baku without getting through Stalingrad
Nigger have you seen the map?

>You want to bypass the city, remember?
Not necessarily. I'm not familiar with the exact strategic situation of that scenario so I can't say for sure. What if I only wanted to go south towards Caucasus?

Besides if I wanted to bypass the city then defending the other side wouldn't be a problem because Volga.

>No, probably just half to 2/3 of them supplemented by whatever forces are in the north
So essentially the same battle except that now you have men you would've lost inside the city streets and this time you're the one doing the defending. Seems like a good trade.

>No, it would have taken a metric fuckton more aipower to put the communication network of action and keep them out of action.
What the fuck faggot stop moving the goalpost. The initial goal was to block Volga. It's a river so you only need one place to severe it. No need to cover it in its entirety. More than doable.

>Nigger have you seen the map?

Yes, I have. I've also seen a railroad map, which is more pertinent.

>Not necessarily. I'm not familiar with the exact strategic situation of that scenario so I can't say for sure. What if I only wanted to go south towards Caucasus?

Then at best, you cripple about 10% of Soviet oil production, and have to wait 6 months before you can get a fraction of it used for yourself. It won't be enough to materially slow them down.

>Besides if I wanted to bypass the city then defending the other side wouldn't be a problem because Volga.

The Soviets have combat engineers you know. They can make bridges. Operation Uranus crossed the Volga at 14 separate points. The river isn't much of a barrier unless you have men right at the point of crossing.

>So essentially the same battle except that now you have men you would've lost inside the city streets and this time you're the one doing the defending. Seems like a good trade.

The men "lost in the city streets" weren't that much, not in comparison to the overall losses of the offensive (blue) and counter-offensive (Uranus). You will lose a hell of a lot more having to spread out over a vastly huger perimeter, which will make wherever the Soviets try to punch through a hell of a lot weaker.

>What the fuck faggot stop moving the goalpost. The initial goal was to block Volga. It's a river so you only need one place to severe it. No need to cover it in its entirety. More than doable.

No, it isn't, you utter retard, because the Soviets are using both rail and river to keep their communication lines open. And if you "pick one point and bomb the hell out of it", they'll concentrate their air forces, especially flak, at that point. Which is going to be well away from your own lines, so enjoy having all the fuel disparity and unequal recovery of human losses that were so devastating in the Battle of Britain, now only at about 3 times the scale.

>I've also seen a railroad map, which is more pertinent.
So there goes a railroad bridge over Volga? Good, bomb it and save yourself hundreds of thousands of men because now you've gained just as much as from taking the city.

>Then at best, you cripple about 10% of Soviet oil production
Look at the map. It's 500 miles from Stalingrad to Baku. Are you honestly implying the absolutely only point to sever that railroad was at Stalingrad?

Just get to the Caspian coast and there, you've cut them off. Without having to slow yourself down for taking a useless city.

> They can make bridges.
Yes because building a bridge while under fire is an easy feat.

Especially considering you're in a surrounded city.

Uh huh.

>You will lose a hell of a lot more having to spread out over a vastly huger perimete
No you see if you didn't attack Stalingrad you would have more men at your disposal than if you did. A million Germans were stationed in Stalingrad when it got encircled. Imagine if you didn't go for the city and freed the forces to hold the frontier and keep the enemy from breaching.

>they'll concentrate their air forces, especially flak, at that point
Yes because they have the resources to cover all of the river with flaks.

You just start raiding the river and what are they gonna do? They won't be able to secure all of the river and neither could they predict your next point of attack.

Both strategic and ideological reasons.

the main goal of Case Blue was secure the oil fields of the Caucasus region, but a region that immense needed to be secured from flanking maneuvers from the Soviets.

The Volga river is a pretty alright natural barrier to use to defend the flank of an occupied Caucasus region. but you need to secure the entire Western bank of the Volga to deny the Soviets a crossing in which to stage an offensive.

Stalingrad sits on the western bank of the Volga, meaning as long as the Soviets had it, they had a beachhead of sorts to cross the Volga with and threaten German positions in the Caucasus.

what changed the importance of the city from a beachhead to a symbol of the entire war effort was the ideological significance of Stalin's city. The line was indeed drawn between the Soviets and Germans. Where Stalin declared "not a step backward" and to defend their last bastion on the western volga, and Hitler demanded that the city named after his rival must fall at any cost, resulting in both sides just throwing men into the meat grinder until Germany's defenses on other areas of the volga were stretched paper thin, setting up for Soviet encirclement movements in Operation Uranus.

>You just start raiding the river and what are they gonna do?
They'll cross it and envelop your army.

Of fucking course I meant raid the river with planes. Are you really this daft? What did you think I meant having Nazis sail Viking boats on the Volga and raid trade ships?

This is making sense.

But really, how well defended was the Caucasus region, anyway? Couldn't they have shaved just a little off their force sent on Stalingrad and send it south to cut Caucasia off?

>Couldn't they have shaved just a little off their force sent on Stalingrad and send it south to cut Caucasia off?
Literally five Nazis could've taken all of the Caucasus, with five more watching Stalingrad garrison to make sure no one breaks out.
If Hitler wasn't obsessed with the city because of its name, Germans would've won.

Thank you for finally giving an explanation.

yeah this, he let it get personal. It doesn't help that the luftwaffle bombed the city into a defender's paradise. Close fire support is much harder in a damn maze.

You either haven't actually read my posts, or are too stupid to understand them. In the very part I brought up that you claimed was 'Moving the goalposts" I showed you why bombing a bridge or a railroad wouldn't have been enough and was beyond the capacity of air resources the Luftwaffe had available at that time.I never said that there was only one point to sever the connection to Baku, I said that it was the best route the Germans had to occupy Baku. (And by the way, controlling a bit of the coast wouldn't be enough given that the Soviets have shipping in the Caspian and can route the oil out to almost any port on it).

They don't need to build bridges out of Stalingrad, because it's on the other side of the Volga. They will build bridges on the parts further north to reinforce the counterattacks from Stalingrad.

But this, this is the last point I'm going to deal with you at, since I'm half-convinced you're a troll.

>Especially considering you're in a surrounded city.
>No you see if you didn't attack Stalingrad you would have more men at your disposal than if you did. A million Germans were stationed in Stalingrad when it got encircled. Imagine if you didn't go for the city and freed the forces to hold the frontier and keep the enemy from breaching.

You have no sense of scale. First off, the majority of the forces trapped in the Sixth Army weren't even in Stalingrad. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Operation_Uranus.svg The Sixth Army was not a million men. That casualty figure comes from the ENTIRETY of Blue, which is Stalingrad the city, plus the Don basin offensives, plus the fighting in the Caucasus, plus Uranus, plus the sixth army getting swallowed up.
1/2

2/2

The losses sustained in the street to street fighting were minuscule next to the losses sustained in open areas. Meanwhile, surrounding the city and bypassing it is a fucking colossal undertaking. Remember, you not only have to keep the city penned up, but you have to be able to move your own troops and supplies past it without being damaged by the forces bottled up inside on your way to "more important areas".

A Soviet 122mm howitzer, of which they had quite a few in the city, can fire a bit under 12 kilometers. So, to surround the city, you need to secure some means of transport, a road or a rail line, about 12 km away in the direction you're going. The positions themselves occupied about 10 square km, so we're talking a 22km sphere you have to surround, which has a perimeter of roughly 69.12 km. If you want to guard it with more than just a platoon per kilometer, (the pathetically thin defense that the Soviets so easily brushed aside in Uranus), it will take a lot more men deployed than were lost in the city fighting. ANd you can't afford that kind of commitment.

Siege of Leningrad was digging in and we saw how well that worked for the Germans

to use modern terms;

>YOLO
>ROIDRAGE

German artillery could maul the river traffic from positions south and north of the city. Volga as a transport way was effectively under German shelling.
Local economic production became zero due to fighting.

Yet both sides decided that they would not give in, so they kept bleeding each other to death for a relatively minor city. Sure, it bore Stalins name, which made it a big red target for Hitler who was getting progressively more insane as we get closer to 45.

Germans had harder times to supply the city, as it was so far away from Germany itself. Soviets meanwhile had lesser supply range and had rest of Volga more or less under control.

Eventually it just turned into another Verdun, yet Soviets won the "bleed-eachother-to-death" competition by flanking the entire 6th German army.

Capturing the entire city would have made little difference for Germans. Meanwhile keeping the Germans from taking the entire city presented a promising opportunity for Soviets to keep Germans bleeding in urban combat.
It was one big bait in the end, and because of the city name and "mystic Volga" association (Germany cheering their achievement of reaching Volga), Hitler couldn't resist the target and kept pouring in material into the meatgrinder.

>I showed you why bombing a bridge or a railroad wouldn't have been enough
That's why you keep bombing it. And don't even try to convince me that keeping a bridge and a railroad under check was too much to ask from the Luftwaffe.

>(And by the way, controlling a bit of the coast wouldn't be enough given that the Soviets have shipping in the Caspian and can route the oil out to almost any port on it).
That's the conclusion I hoped you'd reach. Because it contradicts what you said earlier, that capturing Stalingrad was needed to cut off Caucasus, but in fact it was irrelevant.

>You have no sense of scale.
Okay I give you that. Apparently I overestimated the amount of resources that actually went on the city itself.

The entire front was falling back or risking with getting encircled. That's not how gauge the effectiveness of something - by seeing how it performs in absolutely shitty impossible conditions.

This is the exact meme answer I was expecting.

>hurr hitler was insane
>durr STALINgrad
>lol they both just fought for the city because it became a meme

>That's the conclusion I hoped you'd reach. Because it contradicts what you said earlier, that capturing Stalingrad was needed to cut off Caucasus, but in fact it was irrelevant.

Except I never said that. Learn to read, retard.

>Because Stalingrad is the most direct route to Baku, and Baku, and it's enormous oil production, is about the only thing that can conceivably knock the Soviets out of the war; it'll definitely solve your own fuel problems.

The Germans need to SECURE Baku, not just cut it off. That means securing a line of communication capable of sustaining them on the way to Baku. . Which I have been arguing the entire thread and you are patently incapable of grasping. The German priorities are very different from the Soviet priorities.

Then, there's this post where you asked

>What if I only wanted to go south towards Caucasus?

To which I replied

>Then at best, you cripple about 10% of Soviet oil production, and have to wait 6 months before you can get a fraction of it used for yourself. It won't be enough to materially slow them down.

Because as I said in my first post,

>The splitting of AGS and sending a group to the Caucasus was primarily to try to get oil for AGS itself to be able to continue the offensive, as even the opening phases of Case Blue were hampered by fuel issues.

>Preparations_for_Operation_Uranus

It`s a convenient positions to protect the flank of the german army from attacks by soviet troops returning from the east.
They needed to take it sooner or later anyway, and Hitler thought that they would be able to take it quick.

Stalingrad was a consolation prize for not being able to get Moscow

Geography

Realistically, if you could secure Stalingrad and Astrakhan there is no real place to regroup and mount an offensive to the south, there's literally nothing but the steppes. Nowhere to supply from, nowhere of any strategic value except from what are then small cities in Kazakhstan (AKA not significant). The major accomplishment would be that the Germans have effectively secured the south from any southern or western approach, Army Group South could turn northwest and advance Kazan which is a fuckhuge deal.

>What was the battle of Stalingrad about, really?

Oil. Black Gold. Caucasus Tea.

If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny then I must finish [liquidieren; "kill off", "liquidate"] this war.

—Adolf Hitler[17]:p.514

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad#Prelude