Case Blue

From Metapedia

Case Blue (German: Fall Blau) was the German Wehrmacht's codename for the 1942 summer offensive. It led to the Battle of Voronezh, Battle of Stalingrad, and the Battle of the Caucasus. It was originally intended to be called Operation Siegfried, after the mythical Teutonic hero. However, Adolf Hitler, recalling the last grandiosely-named offensive operation in Russia, Barbarossa, and its results which had fallen short of German expectations, settled on the more modest name of "Blue".

Army Group South was selected for a sprint forward through the southern Russian steppes into the Caucasus to capture vital oil fields of the Caucasus, then belonging to the Soviet Union. The summer offensive was named Fall Blau ("Case Blue"—German military plans were "cases", or solutions, to problems). It included the Sixth and Seventeenth Armies and the Fourth and First Panzer Armies, and saw spectacular initial gains. However the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, and then forced the Germans to pull back from their newly-conquered territory, by conducting Operation Uranus and Operation Saturn.