undergoing reforms to strengthen its discipline and troop training and this was
expected to take years, even up to a decade. Senior commanders of large forma-
tions were unequal to conducting large-scale operations and individual soldiers
lacked the initiative to operate effectively on the modern battlefield. 38 The war
with Finland had exposed Soviet military weaknesses the Wehrmacht could
exploit in the coming war.
A TALE OF TWO OPERATIONS: URANUS AND MARSOne of the more controversial issues associated with the Zhukov–Vasilevsky team
and their mastery of operational art concerns their roles as Stavka representatives
coordinating two nearly simultaneous multi-front operations in the autumn and
winter of 1942: Operations Uranus and Mars. Operation Uranus, the Soviet
counter-offensive at Stalingrad, was launched on 19 November 1942 and involved
the South-Western, Don, and Stalingrad Fronts. Its objective was the encir-
clement and the destruction of the German 6th Army. Operation Mars, the Soviet
offensive conducted by the Kalinin and Western Fronts, had as its objective the
reduction the Rzhev salient defended by General Walter Model’s 9th Army. It was
launched on 24–5 November 1942.
Along with the near-simultaneous Battle of El Alamein, Operation Uranus has
been hailed as a turning point in the Second World War. The scale of these two
operations says much about the nature of operational art as practised by the
Western Allies and the Soviet Union. At El Alamein, Montgomery directed an
army of 230,000 troops, 1,440 tanks, 2,310 tubes, and 1,300 aircraft against Erwin
Rommel’s Army Africa, a German–Italian force of 80,000 men, 540 tanks, 1,300
tubes, and 350 aircraft. 39 In the Stalingrad counter-offensive, the Stavka com-
mitted a Soviet force of 1.1 million men, 1,460 tanks, 15,300 tubes, and 1,350
aircraft against a German–Romanian force of 1 million men, 675 tanks, 10,300
tubes, and 1,220 aircraft. 40
The end of the summer fighting had put the German 6th Army and 4th Tank
Army into Stalingrad and some of the most intense and bloody urban combat of
the war. Hitler was fixated on taking the city and most German senior officers
considered the Red Army to be quite weak and incapable of large-scale offensive
operations. Fremde Heere Ost was predicting a Soviet blow on the Moscow axis
for the early autumn. Soviet counter-attacks in the immediate vicinity of Stalin-
grad had not broken the dogged German drive towards the bank of the Volga, and
the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH) assumed that there was no immediate
Soviet operational threat to Army Group B.
In this context, Zhukov and Vasilevsky met with Stalin in September and
proposed a more sweeping solution to the crisis at Stalingrad. Noting the fact
that the flanks of the 6th and 4th Panzer Army to the north and south of
Stalingrad were held by the 3rd and 4th Romanian Armies and that neither
of these armies possessed significant mobile reserves, they proposed a deep
76 The Evolution of Operational Art