Eastern Front · Germany and Axis allies vs Soviet Union

Case Blue

Name: Case Blue
Start: 1942-06-28
End: 1942-11-24
Location: Case Blue

28 June 1942 – 24 November 1942

The German summer offensive of 1942 struck south-east towards the Don, the Volga and the Caucasus oilfields. Splitting Army Group South into two diverging groups, it reached Stalingrad and the Caucasus foothills but overextended, and ended when the Soviet Operation Uranus encircled 6th Army.

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Day by day

28 June 1942 — Blau

Army Group South attacks from the Kursk area towards Voronezh with Fourth Panzer Army, the first of four staggered blows that are meant to roll south-east down the Don to Stalingrad and the Caucasus. The Soviets, who captured the plan on 19 June, still expect the main effort at Moscow.

23 July 1942 — Rostov

Voronezh was reached on 6 July and Sevastopol fell on the 4th. Hitler has split the offensive: Army Group B is to take Stalingrad, Army Group A the Caucasus, at the same time rather than in turn. Today First Panzer Army takes Rostov, and Directive 45 sends Kleist south over the Don towards Maikop, Grozny and Baku.

9 August 1942 — Maikop

Army Group A has covered 300 kilometres in a fortnight across the empty steppe: Stavropol on the 3rd, Armavir on the 7th, Krasnodar and Maikop today. The Maikop wells are found wrecked and burning. On the Don, Sixth Army has destroyed the 62nd Army's forward corps in the bend at Kalach.

23 August 1942 — The Volga

XIV Panzer Corps crosses the Don at Vertyachy at dawn and reaches the Volga at Rynok, north of Stalingrad, by evening, while Luftflotte 4 burns the city. In the Caucasus the flag went up on Elbrus on the 21st, but Kleist is 800 kilometres from Baku and every litre of fuel comes by lorry from Rostov.

19 November 1942 — Uranus

Sixth Army holds nine tenths of Stalingrad and has stopped. Its flanks on the Don and the lakes to the south are held by Romanian armies, and at 07:30 the Southwestern and Stalingrad Fronts attack both of them with a million men. In the Caucasus the line has been on the Terek since September.

24 November 1942 — The trap

The pincers met at Kalach on the 23rd. Sixth Army, some 290,000 men, is inside a pocket fifty kilometres across; Paulus asks to break out and Hitler orders him to hold. Blau has taken no oil and put the best army in the east into a cauldron, while Army Group A sits 600 kilometres away in the Caucasus with a single railway behind it.