Case Blue

Which brings us to 1942 and Hitler's fatal obsession with oil.

Case Blue.

Hitler is desperate for the oil fields in the Caucasus to fuel his war machine, but he makes a catastrophic strategic error driven by hubris.

He splits his forces, sending his massive Sixth Army to capture an industrial port on the Volga River, a city called Stalingrad.

A proper rail bridge across the Don could have eased the bottleneck considerably, but building one would have consumed 70 trainloads of construction material, material that could not be spared from deliveries deemed indispensable to the 6th Army itself.

So everything continued to funnel across a single makeshift bridge at Aichikov, leaving the Luftwaffe to keep shouldering the burden of frontline resupply, just as it had done since the earliest days of Operation Blau.

And yet, withdrawal was never seriously entertained.

Back in Germany, an obsession with Stalingrad's capture had taken firm hold.

Hitler believed that by seizing Soviet oil, he could fuel the Reich forever and strangle the Red Army's ability to resist.

The plan, codenamed Case Blue, began in the summer of one thousand nine hundred and forty-two.

German armies surged forward once again, sweeping through southern Russia with devastating force.

They captured Rostov, gateway to the Caucasus, and pressed onward.

In the case of the Nazi leader, he issued Führer Directive Number 41 on the 5th of April 1942.

This laid out the Wehrmacht's strategic plan for the Eastern Front going forward, including the main elements of what is known as Fall Blau, Case Blue, the plan for capturing Stalingrad and then securing the oil fields southwards into the Caucasus around what are now Grozny in Chechnya and Baku in Azerbaijan.

The need to secure these was stressed as Germany had exhausted its oil reserves in the winter of 1941 and was now almost completely reliant on its ally Romania's oil fields for its supply.

The direct Soviet equivalent of Führer Directive Number 41 was Order Number 227, which Stalin issued on the 28th of July 1942.