The campaign intended to secure the Wehrmachts flanks had proven one front too many for the German Army. And now the offensive at Stalingrad, the epic clash that marked Germanys failure on the Eastern Front, was entering its grim final phase. In Book One of the third volume of his acclaimed Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz offers the definitive accountthe ground truth to counter a half-centurys worth of myth and misinformation—of the beginning of the end of one of the most infamous battles of the Second World War, and one of the most costly in lives and treasure in the annals of history.

When Volume Two left off, Germanys vaunted Sixth Army, already deflected from its original goal—the Caucasus oil fieldshad been drawn into a desperate war of attrition within the ravaged city of Stalingrad. In Volume Three, Book One, we see the ultimate consequences of the Germans overreach and the gathering force of the Red Armys massive manpower and increasingly sophisticated command. After failing repeatedly to find and exploit the weaknesses in Axis defenses, Stalin and the Stavka (High Command) finally seized their chance in mid-November of 1942 by launching a bold and devastating counteroffensive, Operation Uranus.

“A top-down treatment of battle planning and maneuvering of forces by high-level staff and commanders, with the detailed order of battle and statistical information one has come to expect from David Glantz and Jonathan House.”

—The Historian

“The team of Glantz and House has once again collaborated and has successfully completed the superb trilogy on Stalingrad.”

—Army History

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“Fifteen years ago the late John Erickson wrote that the research of Glantz and house reflected an ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’ of the Nazi-Soviet war and constituted a benchmark for excellence in the field. The Stalingrad trilogy reflects the fact that they maintain that standard, while bringing to light a new understanding of many old questions.”

—War in History

“After providing us with the magisterial When Titans Clashed, Glantz and House have now supplemented this account with a masterful documentation of Stalingrad.”

—The Russian Review

“Glantz is the world’s top scholar of the Soviet-German War.”

—Journal of Military History

“David Glantz has done something very few historians achieve. He has redefined an entire major subject: the Russo-German War of 1941-1945.”

—World War II

“Glantz and House are writing the definitive history of the Stalingrad campaign. Their trilogy, backed by meticulous scholarship and refreshingly fair minded, significantly alters long-accepted views of several important aspects of the campaign. . . . A monumental work that is unlikely to be surpassed as an account of the most important single campaign of the Second World War.”

—Evan Mawdsley, author of Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945

“A magisterial study that draws on a wealth of previously inaccessible Red Army records and will be indispensable reading for all serious students of the battle.”

—Michael K. Jones, author of Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed

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Glantz draws a detailed and vivid account of how, in Operation Uranus, the Red Armys three fronts defeated and largely destroyed two Romanian armies and encircled the German Sixth Army and half of the German Fourth Panzer Army in the Stalingrad pocket—turning the Germans world on its head. Like its predecessor volumes, this one makes extensive use of sources previously out of reach or presumed lost, such as reports from the Sixth Armys combat journal and newly released Soviet and Russian records. These materials (many cited at length or printed in their entirety in a companion volume) lend themselves to a strikingly new interpretation of the campaigns planning and execution on both sides—a version of events that once and for all gets at the ground truth of this historic confrontation.