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us to avoid squandering our prepared and half-prepared reserves on isolated operations.… After discussing all the possible options we decided to offer Stalin the following plan of action: first continue to wear down the enemy by an active defence; second prepare for a counteroffensive that would hit the enemy in the Stalingrad area hard enough to radically change the strategic situation in the south of the country in our favour.
    When Zhukov and Vasilevsky returned to Stalin’s office that evening, the dictator was skeptical but prepared to discuss their proposals further. In the meantime the idea of a major counteroffensive was to be kept secret. Zhukov returned to Stalingrad that night but was recalled to Moscow at the end of September for a more detailed discussion of his and Vasilevsky’s draft. At this point Stalin endorsed their plan. 19
    Like so many of Zhukov’s stories, this one founders on the evidentiary rock of Stalin’s appointments diary, which shows no meetings with Zhukov between August 31 and September 26. Stalin did meet Vasilevsky during this period but not on any date between September 9 and 21. It is possible the meetings on September 12 and 13 that Zhukov describes went unrecorded in the diary or took place elsewhere or that Zhukov got the dates wrong. But the evidence suggests strongly that Zhukov imagined or invented this whole episode. The reasons why are not hard to fathom. After the war the parentage of Operation Uranus was a source of considerable controversy. When Zhukov was demoted in 1946 one charge against him was that he had falsely claimed credit for the Stalingrad counteroffensive. The same accusation was repeated by Khrushchev and his supporters when Zhukovwas dismissed as minister of defense in 1957. After Zhukov’s dismissal Yeremenko and Khrushchev (who had been chief political commissar at Stalingrad) claimed authorship of the counteroffensive plan and Zhukov was denied the right to comment on their claim until after Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964. There was, in fact, no foundation for the Yeremenko-Khrushchev version of events and Zhukov (and Vasilevsky) had every right to feel aggrieved. The plan may not have originated at the precise time or in the exact way Zhukov so colorfully described in his memoirs, but there is no doubt that he and Vasilevsky were the driving force behind it.
    According to the Soviet General Staff’s contemporaneous account of the battle for Stalingrad, planning for the counteroffensive started in the second half of September. Then, on October 4, Zhukov had a meeting with Front commanders in which he outlined the plan. 20 From other documentary evidence we know that after this meeting the three Fronts involved in the counteroffensive—the Don, the Stalingrad, and the Southwestern—submitted to Zhukov and Vasilevsky their proposals for implementation. There is abundant evidence, too, that both men played an extensive role in the preparation of the counteroffensive. 21
    Another controversy concerning Operation Uranus is its relationship to the parallel offensive in the Rzhev-Viazma area—Operation Mars. In his memoirs Zhukov presented Operation Mars as a diversionary offensive designed to make sure that troops from Army Group Center were not redeployed to the south when Uranus was launched. 22 Zhukov’s characterization of Mars as a diversionary operation has been accepted by most Russian military historians but in
Zhukov’s Greatest Defeat: The Red Army’s Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942
American historian David Glantz claimed that Mars was an independent operation considered by Zhukov to be equally if not more important than Uranus. As Glantz pointed out, Zhukov spent more time on the preparation of Operation Mars than he did on Operation Uranus and when the two operations were launched, Zhukov took charge of the coordination of the two Fronts involved in Mars (the Kalinin and the Western)