Although Sixth Army's battle for Stalingrad dominates accounts of the German summer 1942 offensive, the parallel thrust by von Kleist's elite First Panzer Army actually came closer to Hitler's main strategic objective of 1942: the Caucasus oilfields. In this book, military historian William E. Hiestand presents an analysis of the armoured forces that fought this campaign. The Germans struggled with difficult terrain, stiffening Soviet resistance, and extraordinarily long lines of communications, but the campaign would see the Panzers battle into the mountains and towards the Caspian Sea, marking the Wehrmacht's deepest thrust eastward.
