On the Eastern Front during World War II, the German Army had reached its high water mark in Oct 1942 with the Sixth Army assault to seize the Soviet city of Stalingrad. However, a tenacious and heroic defense by General Chuikov’s 62nd Army, and Marshall Zhukov’s counterattacks during Operations Saturn and Uranus, surrounded and cut off 290,000 Germans in Stalingrad. Hitler was consumed by the idea of capturing the city named after his nemesis and would allow no breakout. To accomplish this, he ordered General Paulus, the 6th Army commander, to stand his ground. He ordered Field Marshall Goering’s Luftwaffe to supply Paulus from the air. And finally he told Field Marshal Von Manstein to break through to the beleaguered German defenders. All of them failed in their tasks. Paulus lost 2/3s of his army trying to hold the ever shrinking “cauldron”, Goring could only supply 15% of what Paulus needed, and Manstein fought to within 35 miles of Stalingrad but could get no closer. On 31 January 1943, Paulus surrendered the remaining 90,000 skeletal and starving members of the 6th Army in Stalingrad to the Soviets. Most would die in the prison camps and only 5,000 would ever see Germany again. The surrender was a devastating and irreplaceable loss of men and material for Germany. For the rest of the war, the Germans would be on the strategic defensive in the East.