>"Mein fuhrer, the entire 6th army is encircled! Should

>>2480254

Once you're encircled, it's usually a little late. The proper time to retreat would have been before Uranus picked up steam.

>>2480271
I still don't get why the Germans committed such a huge number of forces to capture the entire city when their objective of Baku was way further south.

>>2480290
Control Stalingrad, control the Volga, control the oil going to northern armies. That was the idea anyways.

>>2480271
If that were true the German military in the east would have been defeated in 1944. Even in Barbarossa there was large scale soviet breakouts of the encirclement.

>>2480290

Because the city was a Soviet logistical linchpin, one of the few railroads that serviced the area stopped off at Stalingrad. The Germans were worried, and rightly so, of an attack from the northeast while they were busy trying to secure the Caucasus, and thought that if they could take and hold Stalingrad, any counter-offensive plans would be severely hampered.

They wound up getting the worst of both worlds because they failed to actually take the city, but trying to dive into the Caucasus and hoping that the Soviets wouldn't be able to pull anything on your flanks is risky as hell.

>>2480310

>If that were true the German military in the east would have been defeated in 1944.

I'm not following. I'm having trouble thinking of any sizeable evacuation after encirclement in 1944 in the east, which is what I think you're going at. And for all effective purposes, the German military in the East was defeated in '44. By 1945 they were a pitiful scraping only really capable of trying to hold onto prepared ground and getting crushed one at a time.

>Even in Barbarossa there was large scale soviet breakouts of the encirclement.

They were only large scale because of the scale of the forces trapped in the pockets. Most of those encirclements trapped hundreds of thousands of troops, of which a few tens of thousands usually escaped.

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>>2480313
and by the time they actually did went there the oils and infrastructure was already burned down by the retreating soviets

that's why you shouldn't let an autistic person be the commander in chief

Hitler had delusions of grandeur, he was envisioning how people of the future Reich would look back at the heroes of Stalingrad and the sacrifice that they gave with teary eyes.

>>2480339
>I'm not following. I'm having trouble thinking of any sizeable evacuation after encirclement in 1944 in the east

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Korsun%E2%80%93Cherkassy_Pocket

I'm not arguing that the germans weren't defeated in 1944, just that encirclement doesn't mean the complete destruction of your forces. You can still escape with forces intact.

>>2480389

>You can still escape with forces intact.

I wouldn't exactly call 75%ish personnel losses and almost total heavy equipment losses escaping with your forces intact. But if I implied that it was utterly impossible for anyone to escape once they're in a pocket, I apologize, that's not what I meant.

Rather, I was aiming at that attempting to retreat once pocketed is enormously harder and more costly than retreating before you get pocketed when you're merely in a salient, and that the proper time to retreat, assuming you can, is before the enemy armor and mobile formations encircle you. It's much, much worse if you let that happen.

>>2480271
Once the butt is in motion, can't do much but cum all over it

>>2480415
>Rather, I was aiming at that attempting to retreat once pocketed is enormously harder and more costly than retreating before you get pocketed when you're merely in a salient, and that the proper time to retreat, assuming you can, is before the enemy armor and mobile formations encircle you. It's much, much worse if you let that happen.

I completely agree with that. directed at your first post, I think the 6th army could of successfully broken out of the encirclement during the first week of Operation Uranus. They would have had to leave the heavier artillery pieces behind, but the encirclement lines were very unstable at the beginning. The russians were overextened and a breakthrough to the Don was well within the Wehrmacht's abilities. It was within the means for the 6th army to escape relatively intact (obviously minus equipment). By Operation Winterstorm though it was far to late. At best maybe less than half would have been able to escape if Paulus tried to break out.

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>"Comrad, the entire civilian population is still in the city and the Germans are quickly advancing! Should we evacuate them?
>"Nyet, it's more important we give the soldiers something to protect. You against the wall for even suggesting now!"

Whats up with Russians fighting in pockets?


We saw the same shit in the Urkanian/Russian war just recently, battle of Illyvosk or some shit. (Ameritard, please forgive butchering of the name.)

>>2480462

That seems legit, although I would quibble about leaving the guns behind not in and of itself constituting a major defeat. Those heavy guns are often a good chunk of a given division's firepower, and while it wasn't as extreme as WW1, artillery was still causing more deaths, by far, than any other arm of the military.

But yeah, an early breakout would attempt would have been far better than what happened, or even a later breakout attempt.

>>2480553

I'm not up on the recent war, but at least in WW2.

1) A lot of the time they had nowhere to go anyway, and especially once the treatment that the Germans gave to Soviet PoWs became widely known, why not go down swinging? Add on the heavy layering of ideology and propaganda, and you had a soldiery that was often willing to fight at any odds under any circumstances, even grossly ineffective ones.

2) Especially early in the War in the East, the Soviets got pocketed a lot, far more so than it happened on other fronts with other powers. They liked to meet offensives with counteroffensives, and when those failed, as they pretty much all did in 41, that left large concentrations of troops in an easy position to be pocketed. There was more opportunity.

3) The area involved in the fighting was HUGE. You had a lot of men fighting in it, to be sure, but because the front line encompassed such a wide area, troop density at the point of contact was often very low. That makes it much easier to pick a point on a map and say "Let's attack here", often succeeding unless your opponent could figure out where you were aiming your next thrust at and reinforcing it. It was much more maneuvering and sweeping than fighting on say, the Western or Italian fronts, which can lead to lots of encirclements.

>>2480340
If Trump purges the CIA, the results will be disastrous.