Operation Uranus was the codename for the World War II, Soviet military operation which led to the encirclement of the German 6th Army, and elements of the German 4th Panzer Army. It was part of the Battle of Stalingrad, which was the most ferocious battle of the war. Launched with the objective of destroying the German forces fighting in the streets of Stalingrad, the Bolshevik army had a mayor ally: the Russian winter.
The planning and preparations for Operation Uranus had begun in October 1942, and was developed simultaneously with plans to envelop and destroy German Army Group Center and German forces in the Caucasus. In Operation Uranus the Red Army took advantage of the German army’s poor preparation for winter, and the fact that German forces were overstretched in the southern Soviet Union, having to use poorly trained and ill-equipped Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian troops to guard their flanks. The Soviet Generals established the offensives’ starting points along the section of the front directly opposite the Romanian forces. These Axis armies lacked anti-tanks weapons to deal with Soviet armor.
Operation Uranus was initiated at 07:20 hours on November 19, 1942, when Soviet forces on the northern flank of the Axis armies at Stalingrad began advancing westward, under the command of General Georgy Zhukov. Soviet troops in the south started their move on November 20. At the beginning Romanian units were able to repel the first attacks, but by the end of the second day of the Soviet offensive, the 3rd and 4th Romanian armies were in retreat, while the Red Army bypassed several German infantry divisions. German mobile reserves were not strong enough to repel the Soviet mechanized spearheads, and the German 6th Army, under the command of von Paulus, did not react quickly enough to disengage German armored forces in Stalingrad and reorient them to defeat the impending threat. By late 22 November Soviet forces linked up at the town of Kalach, and 290,000 men were trapped in the encirclement east of the Don River. The German commander tried to obtain authorization to break out of the encirclement, but Adolf Hitler ordered his men to stay in Stalingrad and fight to the last man.
[...] German 6th Amry could not capture the city fast, the Russian winter came and the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, which was a Soviet counter-attack by Soviet that surrounded the Germans in a pincers movement from [...]