Some time ago i watched a documentary about the battle of Stalingrad in WWII. And in the Documentary the explained how the red army kept flooding troops into the city, to keep the German Army occupied in house to house fightings. While they were preparing there mass assault to encircel the german army in Stalingrad. So my question is why didnt the German Army do the same way earlier? It would have made sense since the casualties in house to house fighting were extremely high. Why didnt the germans cut the city off so the soviets wouldn't be able to keep pouring troops into the city.
The Germans did attempt to do that, to an extent. General Maximilian von Weichs' plan for Army Group B's assault on the city called for a simultaneous envelopment from the north and the south, using 6th Army as the northern pincer and 4th Panzer Army as the southern pincer. They hoped to avoid the desperate city fighting which had already cost them heavy casualties in sieges like Sevastopol. On August 23rd, at the very outset of the battle, General Hans Hube's 16th Panzer Division (the spearhead of 4th Panzer Army's XIV Panzer Corps) actually reached the Volga. However, XIV Panzer Corps' narrow corridor through the northern suburbs of the city was vulnerable and Hube's division was briefly encircled before being relieved by LI Corps. XXXXVIII Panzer Corps formed the mirror-image spearhead in the southern wing of the city, achieving similar results but without suffering the same hair-raising counterattacks as XIV Corps.
Why go through the city at all, though? Why not just go around it entirely and starve the city out? Let's look at a map. Stalingrad was a long built-up strip of a city, bordered entirely on one side by the Volga river. Surrounding the city for a siege would have required crossing the Volga, which would have been a significant operation under the best of circumstances. The Germans had forded many rivers earlier in the Barbarossa and Blau campaigns, but the Volga would be different. It's up to 3 miles wide in the Stalingrad/Volgograd region, and the preparations for the crossing would be vulnerable to Soviet artillery on the other side as well as, potentially, Soviet bridgeheads at Serafimovich, Kremenskaya, and elsewhere on the River Don. These bridgeheads held down significant Italian and Hungarian forces, as left unchecked they were a dagger aimed at Army Group B's rear.
Crossing the Volga would also have meant an opposed river crossing directly into the teeth of significant reserve forces. Boevoi sostav Sovetskoi armii (The Combat Composition of the Soviet Army, the official order of battle throughout the entire war as published by the Voroshilov Academy of the General Staff after the war) gives the forces of Stalingrad front on September 1st as:
I haven't yet looked deeper into manning numbers for those formations, so I don't know if they were paper tigers or if they were actually close to their shtat-mandated strength. However, each formation is at least at its appropriate outfit of rifle divisions, engineering support elements, artillery, etc., even though I do not know if those subunits had their full allocation of manpower. The artillery alone would have posed a significant challenge for an opposed crossing, and a successful counterattack by Stalingrad front could have had severe consequences. Most importantly, though, and unlike previous river crossings in Barbarossa and Blau, the Soviet forces on the Volga had a major riverine flotilla at their disposal. Despite interdiction by the Luftwaffe, the gunboats and cutters of the Volga Flotilla would have been a thorn in the side of any river crossing. Even if they did not stop the crossing outright, they would likely have retreated to their camouflaged shelters on the east bank of the river and remained a persistent threat to Wehrmacht efforts to resupply their beachheads.
Crossing the Volga was also likely beyond the realistic abilities of the overextended Army Group B. The drive to Stalingrad had exhausted their logistics; 6th Army had to temporarily resort to air resupply even of hazardous items like fuel and ammunition during the summer, and neither 6th nor 4th Army ever fully resolved their supply shortages during the course of the battle. A bold drive onto the opposing bank of the Volga would have stretched these lines even further, and as I mentioned already, it would have put a wide and hostile river between the Wehrmacht's beachheads and their supply lines.
Sources and Recommended Reading:
Boevoi sostav Sovetskoi armii, chast' 2 (ianvar'-dekabr' 1942 goda) [The combat composition of the Soviet Army, part 2 (January-December 1942)], Moscow: Voenizdat, 1966.
Citino, Robert. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Glantz, David M and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
Lester W. Grau (2016) "River Flotillas in Support of Defensive Ground Operations: The Soviet Experience," The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 29:1, 73-98, DOI: 10.1080/13518046.2016.1129875
Hill, Alexander. The Red Army and the Second World War. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Hey there,
Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.
If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!
