“Fortress Stalingrad” had a grandiose sound to it, but the title was deceiving.  German General Friedrich Paulus knew that his 6th Army was in serious trouble.  What a difference 5 days made!  Back then he believed his Soviet enemies had their backs against the proverbial wall and that Stalingrad was nearly his.

But a massive Soviet counterattack was rapidly changing the situation.  Launched in the dim morning hours of November 19th, Operation Uranus crashed into the weakened German flanks with devastating effect.  By the end of that first day, the Romanians (manning the flanks) had suffered more than 55,000 casualties.  The next day saw the 1st Romanian Armoured Division eliminated and the 22nd Panzer Army badly mauled.

The flanks largely collapsed, leaving the Soviets only modest resistance on their path to encirclement.  Paulus, seeing a horrific disaster unfolding to his back (the west), released his own 3 Panzer divisions, but a lack of fuel and ammunition – keep in mind that supply lines, which were incredibly long, came from the west – made their efforts much less effective.

On November 23, 1942, Paulus’ nightmare became reality when Soviet forces, which had stepped off from both north and south of the city, met up at Sovietskiy, 30 miles west of Stalingrad.  The encirclement, although tenuous, was complete.  What was left of the Romanian Third Army (more than 25,000 men) was forced to surrender…they had suffered nearly 90,000 casualties in four days of brutal fighting.

Inside the pocket lay Stalingrad, General Paulus, and his forces.  They comprised remnants of the Romanian Fourth Army, the Fourth Panzer, and (of course) the German Sixth Army…nearly 270,000 men.  It was at this point that Paulus stood his best chance of escape from his “trap on the Volga”.  Soviet forces had yet to consolidate their positions, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was pushing to reinforce the destroyed flanks, and Paulus still commanded a formidable force with substantial artillery.  A breakout, while not anything close to victory, would have prevented certain destruction.

But it was at this point that the German High Command did itself in.  Hermann Goering foolishly boasted that his Luftwaffe could keep Fortress Stalingrad supplied from the air…even though Wolfram von Richthofen’s 4th Air Fleet only had half the aircraft it needed.  And Adolf Hitler, blinded to all reality but the now vanishing hope of capturing Stalingrad, bought Goering’s plan and ordered Paulus to hold his ground.  One can almost hear Goering’s arrogant assurance and the remaining Generals gasping in dismay.

However, in speaking of the German failures, one should not minimize Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s genius in launching Uranus.  I’ve mentioned Chris Bellamy’s book Absolute War on several occasions, and he is effusive in his praise.

He writes, “Along with the Carthaginians’ encirclement and annihilation of the Romans at Cannae in 216 BC, Zhukov’s destruction of the Japanese at Khalkin Gol in 1939, and Schwarzkopf’s Hail Mary of 1991, it was from a purely military point of view one of the greatest encirclements of history.  But its staggering scale, in spatial and human terms, especially given the very thin margins available to the Soviet High Command, and its strategic and political consequences must make it the greatest encirclement of all time.”

Experts may argue over the “greatest”, but the Soviet linkup at Sovietskiy set in motion the most significant defeat in the 4-year Russo-German war…probably the biggest defeat for Germany in the entire war.

Most historical events are ones I’ve read about or seen on TV.  And regardless of my level of familiarity with them, there’s still a certain sense of detachment that tags along.  After all, I wasn’t Philadelphia when the Declaration was signed.  I wasn’t at Marpi Point.  I never met John Wayne, and I wasn’t in Johnstown when flood waters all but obliterated it.

And on the morning of November 21, 1980, I wasn’t anywhere close to Las Vegas, Nevada.  So I wasn’t in the MGM Grand Hotel when an electrical short started a fire in the walls of one of the hotel’s restaurants.

The fire was discovered by an employee who tried to contain the growing blaze, but was unable to.   Just 15 minutes after the fire was discovered, the first emergency crews arrived on scene, but what greeted them was a raging inferno.  By the time the fire was contained, smoke and toxic fumes had killed 85 people and injured hundreds more.

But while I wasn’t a witness (much less a survivor), the events in Las Vegas had a more personal dimension for me.  I was a 6th grader and, the following morning, our teacher told us that one of our classmates had a father that was one of the 85 victims.  The teacher informed us that the girl would be gone for a while and, when she came back, we should act like nothing had happened…just treat her like we did before that November morning.

I don’t recall how long she was gone (too many years have gone by), but when she came back, I don’t think anyone said anything to her.  I know I didn’t.  She and I went to the same high school for the next six years…she sat adjacent to me in class on several occasions…and still I took my 6th-grade teacher’s advice.  Never once did I ask her about the fire or the loss of her dad.  I’m not sure I would have known what to ask or even say.  I hope some of her friends were braver than I.

Every historical event touches people somewhere.  Usually it’s not me.  But on this occasion, it came close.

Case Blue, launched in late June of 1942, got off to a smashing start for both the Soviets and the German aggressors…sort of.  The Red Army got smashed a lot, and the Wehrmacht did a lot of smashing.

By mid-August, the Germans were knocking on the doors of Stalingrad, having reached the Volga River north of the city.  The Soviet armies, having spent a couple of months retreating to avoid the dreaded encirclement, now had their backs to a river a mile wide.

At this point, the fighting degenerated into a meat-grinder house-to-house battle.  General Friedrich Paulus’ 6th Army drove into, and largely through, the city, with elements reaching the Volga to fire at the forces staged on the far side.  But Paulus and his men, while fully ensconced in the city, could not break through.

As the August heat gave way to the inevitable October cooldown, Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov began preparing a massive counterattack.  Codenamed Operation Uranus, it involved a double encirclement, with large forces attacking across the Volga to both the south and north of Stalingrad.

The ultimate goal was to drive through the German flanks (protected by 170,000 Romanian troops) and trap the German 6th Army in the city.  But it was a massive undertaking to move the requisite men and supplies into place while still maintaining some form of secrecy.

General Paulus recognized that his flanks were weak and over-exposed and, on November 17, 1942, German reconnassaince discovered what appeared to be a Soviet buildup northwest of the city.  But still his troops were slashing the remnants of decimated Soviet 62nd Army.  The German press said that the battle for Stalingrad was in its final phase…

…until November 19, 1942.  At 7:30am, Uranus was launched with a massive artillery barrage.  More than a million men, nearly 1,500 tanks, and 900 aircraft crashed into Paulus’ Romanian flanks.  The Romanians put up a valiant effort, but were simply overwhelmed.

Zhukov’s Operation Uranus was a brilliant counterstroke, catching an over-extended army trapped in the rubble of a city.  What’s more, Paulus’ Sixth Army wasn’t allowed to retreat from their positions, forced to hold Stalingrad by Hitler, who had become obsessed with the river-side city.  In less than a week, the German Army would go from “the verge of victory” to trapped.

Recommended Reading: Absolute War

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel knew what full-scale assaults looked like, and this didn’t look like one.  Having just returned to North Africa from Italy (where he had celebrated his 50th birthday), he was greeted with the news that a large contingent of tanks…British tanks…were gathering to the east.  But Rommel had plans, and he didn’t want them interrupted by a British “sortie”.  And in Rommel’s mind, a “sortie” is what it was.

Field Marshal Rommel was wrong.

That large contingent of British tanks was actually a force numbering almost 750, nearly twice the number of tanks Rommel possessed.  Their destination?…Tobruk.  Coincidentally, those plans of Rommel’s that I mentioned?…they involved Tobruk as well.

Several months back, we mentioned the tremendous initial success Rommel had when he arrived in North Africa in early 1941.  Rather than sit around, he immediately took the offensive and began pushing the British out of Libya.  Tobruk was a British-held port city just west of the Egyptian border.  After the Desert Fox’s initial push, it became the last British bastion in Libya, and had been under seige since early April.

The Afrika Korps was preparing its final assault on Tobruk, scheduled for November 20th, when it was interrupted by British General Claude Auchinleck’s forces from the west.  Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June had taken immense pressure off the British, and they were able to move more arms and equipment to Egypt, assembling a considerable force with one objective:  relieving Tobruk.

On November 18, 1941, the relief of Tobruk (Operation Crusader) began as the British, with help from New Zealand, Indian, and Polish forces, crossed from Egypt into Libya.  They had desperately hoped their numerically superior air forces would be able to preface the operation with successful air strikes of their own, but massive storms with torrential rains put paid to that.  Those storms would also affect some pre-operation clandestine missions that we’ll discuss in the future.

Anyways, Operation Crusader got off to a pretty good start for the British.  And as we’ll probably see, it would continue to go well, eventually pushing the Afrika Korps back some distance westward and relieving Tobruk.

Recommended Reading:  The Battle of Alamein – I’ve got a couple good sources dealing with North Africa, but haven’t mananged more than a cursory browse through any of them.  That will change next year.

By mid-November of 1776, the reality of their rebellion against the King George III was beginning to slap the Colonists in the face…hard.  The excitement of July 2nd’s Declaration of Independence had, in the ensuing months, been replaced a new truth.  A sobering, more immediate truth, stronger than the flush of breaking from the Crown.  The Colonies were now faced with an angry motherland, a motherland which had a pretty good army and an overwhelming navy.

The colonial militia was inexperienced, poorly equipped, lacked proper training, and simply wasn’t prepared to deal with an organized fighting machine like the one populated with Redcoats.  Early engagements verified it.  New York City’s fall in September was truly embarrassing to General Washington, who looked in anger at the men turning tail and shouted, “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?”

September’s humiliation became October’s embarrassment at White Plains where, despite holding the high ground and inflicting more casualties than they took, the colonials were forced to retreat.  Desertion was becoming a problem, as were drunkeness and carousing.  Looking across the battlefields at the polished muskets, crisp uniforms, and strict discipline, it’s not hard to imagine Washington’s growing despair.

The White Plains debacle left the colonials with the barest of grips on Manhattan.  Fort Lee and Fort Washington, both constructed in early 1776, were built on opposite sides of the Hudson River, and constituted the last best positions that Washington’s men could hold in the area.  But that was fleeting as well.

On November 16, 1776, General Washington watched from Fort Lee’s observation post as Fort Washington was overrun by a combined force of British soldiers and Hessian mercanaries.  This loss was particularly painful because a large amount of supplies (muskets, gunpowder, etc.) were captured, as were more than 2,800 prisoners.

But even worse, Fort Lee was left in an indefensible position.  Four days later, it would be surrendered.  Washington was forced to retreat from New York with what was left of his “army”.  It was during the retreat that Thomas Paine would write that “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

General Washington, unanimously chosen to lead the militias, was now being heavily criticized for the loss of Fort Washington.  The army was a mess, dissension was growing, and the war for independence was looking more and more like a mismatch of comical proportions.

We’ll keep it brief this evening…

Barely one week had gone by since the Second Continental Congress had passed the Lee Resolution, which declared the 13 Colonies to be independent from the British Crown, and there was a bustle of activity.  Some members of the Congress had returned home, needing to sell the idea of independence to their constituents.  Others (5 in particular) had been formed into a committee that was charged with creating a formal “declaration of independence”.

The next day (June 12, 1776), another committee was formed.  This group of 13 men was given the more daunting (if less immediate) task of drafting a constitution for a confederation.  And for more than a year, the work and the debate would continue.  And on November 15, 1777, America’s first “constitution”, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, were approved by the Congress.

A collective sigh of relief probably went up from men assembled…until they realized that, in the midst of a war against a more powerful opponent, with a financial condition approaching bankruptcy, they would somehow have to get this document ratified.  That would take three and a half years.

Recommended Reading: American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic

When any of us boards an airplane, I wonder if we ever give any real thought to how much work, design, and planning went into building and testing it.  I’m not a big fan of flying by any means, so I usually hope that the plane I enter merely conquers gravity for the 90 minutes or 2 hours I’m in its clutches.  I’m too preoccupied to give much thought to testing.

But it’s the testing that, even more than the construction, proves the designers got it right.  The real-world, gravity-defying arena of “in the air” is where the truth is verified.  That is true for any aircraft that has entered production, starting with the one Orville and Wilbur crafted more than a century ago.  So while this topic could be written about any plane, I choose to focus on McDonnell Douglas’ fabulous F-15 Eagle.

As avid readers will remember, the F-15 first flew in July of 1972.  You might also recall that it was born of two parents.  The father was the realization that interceptors (like the F-102/106 Delta Dagger/Dart and F-4 Phantoms) couldn’t really fight other aircraft very effectively without the use of sophisticated avionics and stand-off missiles…this was the story of the air war in Vietnam.  The mother was the more immediate issue of answering the Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat, the ultimate interceptor that initially looked like a fighter to the West.

So the baby that was the F-15 was not just the continuation of an existing concept, but a radically new design built out of new thinking using new, lightweight, exotic materials.  And once built, these would all be asked to operate in a performance envelope (high maneuverability and Mach 2+ speed and standoff capability) that stressed them to their limits.

Which meant that, after that first introductory flight, the Eagle would spend more than 2 years in verification tests.  The radar systems had to be checked out.  The landing gear needed to be checked…no fair having to land on its belly.  The massive Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines (the pair of which gave the fighter the ability to accelerate while completely vertical) were run through an entire battery of tests.

The advanced airframe was tested at (and beyond) its limits, which included one of the most dangerous maneuvers for a test pilot…the spin tests.  Here the pilot purposely induced a flat spin to test how the plane can be made to recover before becoming a smoking hole in the ground.

Over and over the new mark was put through its paces, with adjustments and tweaks made all along the way.  So when President Gerald Ford visited the McDonnell Douglas plant in St. Louis on November 14, 1974 and took delivery of the first production F-15 (a single-seat A model), the Air Force he commanded knew it was getting an aircraft that was not only superior to any other fighter on the planet, but one that had been extensively tested.

I hope every airplane in which I’m forced to fly has been tested as thoroughly.

The Battle of Taranto is one of the Second World War’s more obscure engagements.  Maybe that’s because it happened at night, or because it lasted only a few hours.  But as we’ll soon see, it was very important for a couple of reasons.

Taranto itself might be familiar to readers of Today’s History Lesson, who may recognize the harbor and city as one of the landing areas for Allied troops commencing the invasion of Italy in 1943.  But this was 1940, and Operation Husky was too far into the future to even be a gleam in the General’s eye.

In November of 1940, France had fallen and Britain stood alone in Western Europe as the only country unconquered and unoccupied by Nazi Germany.  But more than just standing on her own, Britain’s holdings in the Mediterranean were threatened as well.  Axis advances were threatening Crete, Malta was already under heavy attack, and Hitler had his eye on the key chokepoint at Gibraltar.

The Germans didn’t have a large naval presence in the Mediterranean, but the Italians did.  British operations in North Africa were supplied through Egypt, and a strong naval presence at Taranto meant Axis forces were in a good position to cut British supply lines.  A way was needed a way to level the playing field a bit.

The British had been considering action against Taranto for years, but planning stepped up after the fall of France.  A two-carrier operation was formulated using carrier aircraft from the HMS Eagle and HMS Illustrious.  An attack in the latter part of October was scratched when the Illustrious suffered a small but potent fire and the Eagle was diagnosed with serious fueling problem.  In the end, aircraft from the Eagle were shuttled to the Illustrious and Operation Judgement became a one-carrier mission.

At 10:00pm on the night of November 11, 1940, two dozen Swordfish aircraft left the decks, many armed with torpedoes and some with bombs.  The Swordfish itself was a World-War-I-style biplane (shown above) that couldn’t even reach 140mph, but on this night, it didn’t need to.  Just before 11:00pm, they made their first pass over Taranto for target acquisition.  Fifteen minutes later, the attack began.

And these outdated biplanes did far more damage than their diminutive sizes would have suggested.  The battleship Conte di Cavour was hit, as was the battleship Littorio (twice).  The next wave succeeded in hitting the Littorio again and putting a large torpedo-sized hole in the battleship Caio Duilio.  Italy’s power had been seriously damaged, and its battleship force had been cut in half.  The British lost a couple of Swordfish.

Naval convention said that torpedo launches had to be made in water that was at least 100 feet deep.  The waters around Taranto were only 40 feet deep and the British dropped their torpedoes at a very low altitude and pioneered a dramatic change in torpedo tactics.

The Swordfish would go on to achieve greater fame six months later, when they would again put holes in a battleship…this time the legendary Bismarck.

The Battle of Taranto would also go on to achieve greater fame, thirteen months later, when the Japanese studied the British attack and used many of the same tactics…this time at legendary Pearl Harbor.

The mighty battleship HMS Hood was felled in 1941 in spectacular (and catastrophic) fashion.  Engaged in a fight with the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, her aft ammunition magazine was pierced by gunfire from the Bismarck.  The Hood exploded in a conflagration that split her in two, sank her in minutes with nearly all hands, and reverberated through the British Admiralty all the way to Number 10 Downing.

So one is only left to wonder why the U.S. Navy didn’t feel some misgivings when it commissioned the USS Mount Hood in July of 1944.  After all, “Mount Hood” sounds a lot like “Hood”.  What’s more, Mount Hood is a volcano that, while dormant now, is certainly capable of exploding.  Even more ominous, the ship bearing the volcano’s name was an ammunition ship…and she was loaded with ammunition.  By now, you should know this isn’t going to turn out well.

She was sent packing from Norfolk with 3,800 tons (that’s 7,600,000 pounds) of ammunition.  Her destination?…Seeadler Harbor on Manus Island.  Manus is located a couple hundred miles to the northeast of Papua New Guinea.  The U.S. Navy was stockpiling supplies and ammunition for its forces that were battling on and around the Philippines.

At 8:55am on the morning of November 10, 1944, the Mount Hood was rocked by an explosion.  Seconds later, another much larger explosion blew the ship to smithereens.  Now sometimes when we say “blown to smithereens”, we’re exaggerating to some degree.  We want to convey the force of the explosion, even though whatever it was that exploded wasn’t really reduced to fragments.  But in this case, “blown to smithereens” is appropriate.  “Obliterated” is also accurate.

Eighteen men (not part of the ship’s crew) had left the ship at 8:30am and witnessed the explosion from the beach.  Scrambling back to their transport boat, they headed to the ship and found little bits of debris.  In fact, the largest piece of the Mount Hood found (which had left the shipyards as a 460-foot-long chunk of steel weighing almost 14,000 tons) was a piece of metal 16-feet-by-10-feet.  It was lying in the bottom of the crater.  Yep, just like a real volcano, the Mount Hood eruption left its own mark in Seeadler Harbor.  The crater was 1000 feet long, 200 feet wide, and 30 to 40 feet deep.

A junior officer and five enlisted men (part of the crew) also left the ship just before the explosion.  Not only were they the only survivors, they were the only human remains recovered from the Mount Hood’s 350-man compliment.  Mindanao, a repair ship along-side, was heavily damaged and suffered more than 80 killed.  Every ship within a one-mile radius was either damaged or sunk, and a further 370 men were injured.

A investigation into the cause of the explosion turned up nothing because, well, there wasn’t enough left to study.

For nearly a month, direct negotiations had persisted.  Back-and-forth communications?…more than 18 months.  The Soviet Union had, since April of 1938, been interested in territory that belonged to Finland, its neighbor to the west.  And Finland had (more or less) politely refused.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact came and went.  The combined German-Soviet removal of Poland from the map came and went.  And still the Soviets negotiated with Finland.  Not as far as he could kick him did Soviet dictator Jospeh Stalin trust his counterpart in Berlin.  Yes, half of Poland gave Stalin a sizeable space-cushion between himself and the National Socialism he despised.  But he was still afraid that Adolf Hitler would use his military might, vastly superior to any of the Scandanavian countries, to take over Finland, whose borders were just a stone’s throw from the Communist “Mecca” of Leningrad.

So, Stalin’s representatives asked that Finland give up 20 miles of territory on the Karelian Isthmus (the strip of land between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga).  They also desired that Finland cede several islands in the Gulf of Finland and the northernmost tip of Finland (the Rybachi Peninsula).  Finally, they asked that Finland allow them to lease the port of Hanko (on the the southernmost tip of Finland) and build a base there.  Essentially Stalin was creating additional buffer space on all approaches to Leningrad.

For its part, Finland reiterated that it was a decidedly neutral nation, and any incursion (including one from Germany) would be viewed as hostile.  So there was no need to give the Soviets a buffer zone…Finland would provide it for free.  What’s more, giving up territory in the Karelian Isthmus meant destroying much of the Mannerheim Line, a fairly stout series of fortifications, tank traps, and pillboxes.  Finland would essentially be defenseless, which wasn’t necessarily terrible…if that’s all that Stalin wanted.  If.  IF.

But Joseph Stalin was a man who had spent most of the last several years slaughtering thousands and thousands of officers, including a goodly number of Finnish-born officers.  If his own men could not trust him, how much less a target country with almost no military power?  If Finland ceded the territory, there was no way it could defend itself against subsequent aggression.

Carl Gustav Mannerheim, Finland’s leading military man, did not hold to the Finnish convention.  He strongly believed Finland should give the Soviets what they wanted.  He said that if the Soviets wanted the territory badly enough, they would simply take it by force, and Finland could do nothing anyway.  So while Foreign Minister Eljas Erkko was convinced Stalin was bluffing, Mannerheim was not.

And so the Soviet-Finnish meetings continued.  Having begun in earnest on October 12, 1939, they had lasted throughout the month.  The Finnish delegation (shown above) gave some ground, offering to give up a bit of Karelian territory and some of islands, but the Mannerheim Line and the port of Hanko were simply non-negotiable.

It was on this day, November 9, 1939, that the negotiators met for the last time, where the Finnish delegation reminded Stalin of their compromises…and their unwillingness to go any further.  Stalin was somewhat surprised by the intransigence he witnessed.  After an hour, the meeting concluded (despite the heavy discussions) on an upbeat note. Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister smiled and waved.  Stalin wish the Finns the best and then departed…

…to meet with his generals and begin making plans to subdue a stubborn little pip-squeak country on its western border.

Recommended Reading:  A Frozen Hell – A friend (and fellow reader of Today’s History Lesson) recommended this book to me.  I’m reading it now, and it’s really good.