[7.2] MOLOTOV IN THE WEST
[7.3] PLAN BLUE
[7.4] THE FALL OF SEVASTOPOL
[7.5] CALM BEFORE THE STORM
[7.6] RED ARMY STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES
[7.7] THE GERMANS DRIVE EAST
[7.1] SOVIET FUMBLINGS / OPERATION FREDERICUS
* The Red Army's attacks of December 1941 had been performed for limited objectives, and in early January Stalin decided to follow up with a general counteroffensive, consisting of five coordinated thrusts up and down the line that would throw the Germans out of the USSR. The plan had been created at Stalin's order by Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, the chief of the Red Army's general staff. Shaposhnikov, incidentally, was something of an anomaly in Stalin's military family, an ex-Tsarist officer who had survived the purges. Furthermore, for whatever mysterious reasons Stalin treated him with a level of respect he rarely granted other generals, calling him familiarly "Boris Mikhailovich" and not raising his voice even when he and Shaposhnikov disagreed on some matter.
Shaposhnikov presented the plan to senior Red Army generals in Stalin's office at the Kremlin on the evening of 5 January. Stalin asked Zhukov for comments, and Zhukov replied that the plan was unrealistic: the Red Army lacked the resources to sustain such a broad offensive and would suffer excessive casualties for little gain. That was a particularly strong statement coming from Zhukov, who had little squeamishness over losses. Zhukov instead advocated limited and focused actions as
resources allowed.
Stalin ignored the advice and said the offensive would go ahead anyway. Zhukov was annoyed at the whole farce and complained to Shaposhnikov after the meeting. Shaposhnikov, who had constructed the plan against his own better judgement, replied: "It was foolish to argue. Koba had already decided. The directives have gone out to almost all the fronts, and they will launch the offensive very soon." "Well then, why did Stalin ask me to give my opinion?!"
"I just don't know, old man, I just don't know." They both really knew it was just Stalin toying with his underlings again.
The offensives went forward as Stalin ordered on 10 January 1942, and they came to ruin just as Zhukov had predicted. As the Red Army advanced, casualties and material losses sapped the momentum of the offensive, and Soviet supply lines through rough territory grew longer while German supply lines grew shorter. The Germans had built defenses anchored around key cities that could be kept supplied, and these "hedgehogs" withstood Red Army attacks. Almost 100,000 Germans had been encircled at Demyansk, but for ten weeks they were resupplied by air until a German relief column punched through in April. The success of the Demyansk air resupply operation would have unfortunate consequences for the Wehrmacht later.
The Soviet offensive faded in February and died out in March. Overextended Red Army forces were surrounded and wiped out. The Soviet Union had wasted great numbers of men and piles of
equipment that would be desperately needed in the spring. The only compensation was that the Red Army had pushed the Germans hard and made them suffer as well.
* Despite the bloody failure of the grand offensive, Stalin wanted to try again immediately, convening a meeting in late March where Shaposhnikov outlined a scheme involving no less than seven
coordinated attacks all up and down the line. Zhukov and others protested that resources were lacking, and that it would be wiser to focus on one or a few fronts and perform "active defense" in the others, simply probing the Germans with limited attacks to keep them off-balance and to prevent them from shifting forces to other parts of the line.
Stalin mocked Zhukov's proposals as half-measures, and then relented much more than anyone expected. He decided that there would be three offensive thrusts: one in the north to relieve
Leningrad, one in the south to relieve Sevastopol, and one in the center to retake Kharkov. In the other four sectors, the Red Army would perform "partial offensives", which amounted to active defense operations.
The Leningrad offensive hardly got off the ground. The Second Shock Army, which had attempted to block the German drive on Leningrad, had been isolated by the Wehrmacht during the winter fighting, and the Red Army ended up being diverted by attempts to relieve the trapped men. On 21 March, Stalin had sent Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov to take command of the Second Shock Army and lead them to safety. Vlasov had distinguished himself during the fighting in the fall and winter, but he was unable to perform a breakout; the Germans would finally mop up the remnants of the Second Shock Army in late June, inflicting a loss of almost 100,000 men on the Red Army, the majority of them killed in action. Vlasov was captured by German troops in a farmhouse. Embittered, he actually signed up with the Germans to lead a force of equally disaffected ex-Soviet troops, the "Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Armiya (ROA / Russian Liberation Army)", against the USSR.
The attack to relieve Sevastopol failed as well. The Red Army jumped off in April from their lines in the Kerch peninsula, on the eastern shore of the Crimea, only to find that the Germans in front of them had been reinforced. The offensive, which was poorly led and organized in the first place, was halted in its tracks within days.
The drive on Kharkov seemed to go well at first. Marshal Timoshenko was in command and was enthusiastic about the operation. The winter fighting had produced a salient into German lines around the town of Izyum, on the west bank of the Donetz to the southeast of Kharkov, and Timoshenko used the salient as springboard to attack on 12 May with 640,000 men and 1,200 tanks. The troops went forward, feeling confident, as massed Soviet artillery hammered the German defenses. When the soldiers advanced through the lines, they found no German corpses, but many were still naive enough at the time to interpret this as evidence that the enemy was on the run. The Germans had in fact been caught off-balance -- but they rarely stayed off-balance for very long.
The Red Army reached the outskirts of Kharkov on 17 May. However, Timoshenko had to call a halt, since he was outrunning his supply lines and was also beginning to suspect he was walking into a trap. German resistance was uncharacteristically and suspiciously light, and prisoners had been captured who were from units not known by Soviet intelligence to be in the area; it seemed wisest to dig in and consolidate the gains. The next day Stalin ordered that the offensive drive continue. Timoshenko's political commissar, Nikita Kruschev, called the Kremlin to protest, but it did no good.
It was too late anyway. The German Army Group South was now under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Reichenau had suffered a heart attack after going for a run in bitterly cold weather in mid- January; he might have survived, except that the aircraft being used to cart him off to a hospital crashed. Even before the beginning of Timoshenko's offensive, Bock had been massing forces to pinch off the Izyum salient, and though the Germans had been originally surprised and thrown back by the attack, they were ready and more than willing to respond. The 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus was to drive into the salient from the north while the 1st Panzer Army under General Ewald von Kleist struck from the south. The offensive, codenamed Operation FREDERICUS, was to jump off on 18 May.
Although the 6th Army had been forced to yield ground to the Soviets and was fighting a difficult defensive battle, FREDERICUS went forward on schedule on 18 May, with the First Panzer Army driving into the flank of Timoshenko's force after a heavy artillery barrage. Paulus managed to shuttle 6th Army tanks northeast behind his line of defense and begin the other half of the pincer movement on 19 May. Soviet troops fought desperately to keep the trap from closing shut, but elements of the German First Panzer Army and the 6th Army linked up at the on the Donets on 22 May, closing what was later called the "Barvenkovo Mousetrap", after a town in the area. By the end of the month, it was all over. 70,000 Red Army soldiers had been killed, 200,000 taken prisoner, and only 22,000 escaped. The entire Soviet defense of the south was correspondingly weakened.
One Red Army soldier who could speak German and was captured recalled later that he overheard two SS officers chatting, one saying: "It's a shame Marshal Timoshenko is not present to see all of this. The Fuehrer has reserved a medal for him, the iron cross with oak leaves, to thank him for making such a big contribution to German victory."