If the Germans had stuck to the original plan and concentrated on Stalingrad first, they might well have taken the city in August. I'm not so certain, however, that they could have supplied a much larger force using the one rail line available. Historically, even in October Paulus still had to accumulate supplies before resuming his attacks, and this was after an additional two months of work on his supply line. Suppose, though, that the Germans captured all of Stalingrad in August. Capture of all the Caucasus oil was still extremely unlikely, and the Germans might well have battered themselves against the Caucasus mountains as badly as they did historically against Stalingrad's ruins. Winter would still have found the Germans deeply embedded in the southern USSR at the end of tenuous supply lines with their flanks guarded by weak allied armies (the Germans still couldn't have covered the whole front themselves). Instead of reading about the Stalingrad pocket, today we might be reading about the "Grozny pocket" or the "surrender of Army Group A".
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