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allies whose task was to guard Paulus’s flanks. Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Axis alliance. The first country to defect from the Axis was Italy, which deposed Mussolini in July 1943, followed a year later by Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Finland.
    Hitler responded to the encirclement of Paulus’s forces by attempting to keep the 6th Army supplied by air but to do so the Luftwaffe needed to fly in 300 tons of supplies a day and it did not have enough planes to do that. One reason for the shortage of planes was that the British and Americans had just invaded North Africa and transport was also needed to evacuate Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The Germans mounted a breakthrough operation to Stalingrad but were stopped by the Soviets twenty-five to thirty miles short of the city. The operation did, however, disrupt Soviet plans for Operation Saturn. This was an ambitious follow-up to Uranus that aimedto recapture Rostov and isolate Army Group A in the Caucasus. Its counterpart in the central sector was Operation Jupiter—a grand plan to encircle Army Group Center should Operation Mars succeed. Mars failed and Operation Jupiter was shelved. Saturn succeeded but because its execution was delayed by the time the Soviets recaptured Rostov in February 1943 Army Group A had made good its escape. (See Map 17
: Operations Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus
.)

    When the Soviets realized the full extent of the force they had trapped in Stalingrad they prepared a major operation to tighten the encirclement ring. Seven Soviet armies commanded by Rokossovsky attacked on January 10, 1943. By the end of the month the unequal battle was won and only 90,000 Germans remained alive to surrender. Among them was Paulus, one of twenty-four German generals at Stalingrad who went into Soviet captivity.
    It is worth dwelling for a moment on the audacity of Stavka’s grand strategic design in autumn 1942. The aim was not only substantial encirclements in the Rzhev-Viazma and Stalingrad areas but even more gigantic encirclements of both Army Group Center and Army Group South. As the planetary nomenclature suggested—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus—it was a breathtakingly cosmic strategic design. Stalin, Zhukov, and Vasilevsky intended not only to turn the tide of battle in autumn 1942 but to win the entire war. Such ambition was way beyond the capabilities of the Red Army at that time but the breadth of strategic vision was an augury of the massive offensives of 1943–1944 that were to drive the Wehrmacht out of the USSR and all the way back to Berlin.
    As a result of the Stalingrad debacle the Germans and their Axis allies lost fifty divisions and suffered 1.5 million casualties. By early 1943 the Wehrmacht had been driven back to the positions they had started from when they launched Operation Blau in June 1942. The Red Army’s losses were even higher, with 2.5 million casualties sustained during the course of the Stalingrad campaign. As a follow-up to Stalingrad, Stavka attempted another full-scale winter offensive. Voronezh was recaptured in January 1943 and Kharkov in February, but the Red Army was unable to hold the latter when the Germans counterattacked. By this time Soviet operations along the front were grinding to a halt as the spring
Rasputitsa
set in.

BACK TO LENINGRAD
    While all this was happening Zhukov was busy elsewhere. In January 1943 he retuned to Leningrad to supervise an operation by the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts intended to break the German blockade of the city. Operation Iskra (Spark) began on January 12 and by the 18th had succeeded in reestablishing road and rail links to Leningrad. Since the land bridge to Leningrad was only a few miles wide and the constant target of German artillery, it was a case of a blockade cracked rather than broken, as David Glantz puts it. 25 But that same day Zhukov was promoted to the rank of marshal of the Soviet