Operation Mars
Excerpt from Anastasia Petrova, Analysis of the Great Patriotic War (Philadelphia: Pathfinder, 2001)
… The progress of the Wehrmacht along the front-line in the early days of the war was only tempered by supply chain shortages and the few victories that the forces of the various command armies could make in-field as they fought a bitter fighting retreat. The greatest ally of the Soviet Army in those early days was their knowledge of the terrain and their ability to entrench in key positions. Similarly to the bottleneck of Perikop upon which the German army bloodied itself for the duration of the war, the Soviet army was able to establish a great defensive bulwark at the Pripyat marshes.
Though wholly unsuitable for tank battle, numerous Soviet infantry divisions managed to stave off pincer movements from the north and south along the Dnieper and down from Lithuania for several months - forcing the Germans to slow on their advances on other fronts so as to not cause a potentially devastating salient.
Some historians may argue that the Pripyat defences and the entrenchment of the Soviet army in the marshes allowed for more materiel to escape the Wehrmacht's advances, which allowed for a stronger defence of the Moscow perimeter in the months ahead. One such daring hit-and-run attack against the German lines after the fall of Kiev, while a costly battle for the Soviet battalions involved, did equal damage to the German defenders.
The Wehrmacht, having to cope with this festering sore in their frontline preventing an all-out advance through the centre of the Soviet territory - and being unable to dislodge the Soviets from the marshes initially, delayed Operation Teutonic's initial goals by some weeks, giving the forces of the Comintern time to set up pitched defence in key cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow.
That being said, eventually pressure and the threat of encirclement as the Germans crossed the Dnieper and punched through the Baltics did lead to the withdrawal from the marshes - but by then the German belief in Hitler's famous phrase of "kick the door in and the rotten structure shall come crumbling down" was itself in shambles. The resolution of Soviet forces and refusal to cede an inch of land without a proper fight showed the fascist that their opponent would not go quietly, and that every Soviet loss would be repaid in turn.
[...]
The campaigns of the latter half of 1941 demonstrated once again the fundamental role that morale, both civilian and military, play in the protracted military struggle. In both 1940 and 1941 the Wehrmacht inflicted crushing blows against the Soviet Union, both in terms of battlefield devastation as well as the loss of key territory and economic capacity. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy's past campaigns, far lesser victories had brought about the enemy's unconditional capitulation.
What was different in the Soviet Union from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Greece? It cannot be a question of crude military science, the answer must lie in Clausewitz's dictum that war is politics carried on by other means. The Soviet state's resilience against a reactionary foreign invader has been a crucial lesson of revolutionary strategy.
The role of the dictatorship of the proletariat is thus expressed in terms of ensuring the political cohesion of the proletariat, in maintaining its economic mobilisation by investing the body politic in its outcome. This is not merely a question of propagandising the aims of the war, though this was an absolutely essential service. It is also a matter of articulating that shared struggle in concrete terms: what can you, the ordinary citizen, do in service of this cause.
In sum, the cause must be just. Wars waged to secure resources or a geopolitical balance of power do not stir the hearts. The state must make the cause known in the clearest possible terms. There can be no separation between a privileged strata free from the burdens of the war. In the Soviet Union, government apparatchiks were ordered to remain at their posts unless evacuated, and given no special privilege above war critical industries in the rationing system. Educated party members were drafted into the Army and served as officers and NCOs.
Consequently, civilians could at least bear the costs of resistance to the invasion. The demolition of the Dnieper dams, hailed as the eighth wonder of the world, demonstrated a will to resist that demoralised the German invaders. Instead of a demoralised Ukrainian population turning against a "heartless" Soviet government, German security forces faced increased partisan activity in its wake by locals who continued to blame this cataclysm on the invader.
With the earth salted and scorched before them, the crucial war resources that Hitler had hoped to seize for the war effort and the continued ascent of Germany proved to be hopelessly ruined. The final cost paid by the Germans to conquer and refurbish the evacuated and demolished dams, mines, railways, and foundries of left bank Ukraine ultimately sunk what war resources they produced under German occupation.
Excerpt from John Einhorn, The Red Marshals - American Forces in the East (San Diego: Pacific Rim, 1987)
When General Eisenhower arrived at Stavka, he was initially greeted with a cool indifference. For the Soviet military leadership cadre, he was an unknown factor. While some of them had directly interacted with him in the nascent Red Army during the Second American Revolution, he was broadly viewed as another Yankee interloper trying to assert authority over their forces during a crucial moment in the nation's history.
Fundamentally, there was no better man at the time to assist–or command–such a vast urban defence, than Eisenhower. While other generals had achieved more acclaim in the Civil War, Eisenhower had commanded stubborn urban defences in Ohio through his managerial skills as much as his military acumen. The realities of the war had pushed a factitious assemblage of professional, ideological and irregular forces into common cause, and Eisenhower had proven adept at managing the coalitional nature of the early Red Army.
These skills were further honed in 1935 when Eisenhower was appointed Commandant of the Kansas City All-Arms Military Academy, the successor to the US Army's Command and General Staff College that Eisenhower had been an alumnus of. In concert with other heroes of the revolutionary war, Eisenhower implemented the curriculum of modern all-arms military education for an entire generation of command and staff officers.
[...]
In Moscow, Eisenhower was initially placed in command of the Front of Reserve Armies, displacing Marshal Budyonny. The old guard's final eclipse had been cemented, and now in one way or the other the defence of the capital–and the fate of the war effort itself–was in the hands of theorists of the Unified Military Doctrine. They only had to win the battle now.
With the enemy massing, Frunze split the mangled Western Front into three fronts: the Kalinin, Moscow and Tula fronts. He placed them under the command of Gen.A. Kuznetzov, Mar. Blyukher, and Gen. Kirponos respectively. The three fronts would be coordinated from the new headquarters of the Western TVD, commanded by Frunze himself, with Gen.A. Haywood as deputy commander and chief liaison.
As commander of the Reserve Front, Eisenhower would direct the mobilisation to fighting strength of reserve units and arriving expeditionary divisions, managing the parcelling of scarce resources to the fronts, and de facto chief of the rear area maintaining supply. It was in this role that Eisenhower's skill at handling his irascible colleagues came to the fore.
Frunze's strategy relied upon maintaining stiff but elastic resistance long enough to amass forces for a timely counteroffensive against Army Group Centre. The main effort of this attack would come from the Reserve Front itself, and thus the planning would have to balance how much fighting strength could be diverted to the immediate defence.
Eisenhower had hoped to keep his old colleague Patton for Operation Mars, but this proved impossible when Frunze wanted him to remain in the Moscow Front commanding 3rd Army. The Separate Mechanised Army, renamed 2nd Mechanised Army, was placed under the command of Lt. Gen. Maurice Rose, would fill the new role of the operational manoeuvre group to the front.
The goal of Operation Mars would not be to envelop and destroy Army Group Centre in the traditional manner. Instead, the dispersion of mechanised manoeuvre groups to each of the fronts would subdivide the enemy into more digestible chunks, to be encircled or overrun as expedient.
Excerpts from Col. Theophile Durand (Ret.), Deep Battle: A History, (London: Frank Cass, 1991)
As Army Group Centre consolidated and digested its great victory at Smolensk, the gears were already turning for the next German offensive. Named Operation Valkyrie at Hitler's discretion, the operational concept put forth by Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch promised to shatter Soviet military resistance by taking the capital and destroying the armies arrayed to defend it with a series of encirclements.
The mood in the OKW was brimming with optimism. In spite of the horrendous casualties incurred in the last thirteen months of war, the military had scored absolutely crushing victories. In spite of Hitler's insistence of proceeding in the Caucasus and the industrial centres of Eastern Ukraine, he once again deferred to the professional military establishment. The offensive would proceed along the entire front, but all effort would be concentrated under Army Group Centre, with the other two groups taking a supporting role to secure the flanks.
In the north, the operation would begin with an offensive towards Veliky Novgorod and Leningrad, coordinated with Finnish and Swedish attacks in Karelia. The northern thrust would begin with a breakthrough towards Pskov and the Velikaya River by the Fourth Panzer Army, with the aim of making a sickle-cut northwards to trap the bulk of the Northwest Front in Estonia.
The relatively fresh troops of the Fourth Panzer Army, with the attachment of the IL Corps and multiple heavy tank battalions from the army group reserve, nonetheless encountered fierce resistance. In spite of nominal air superiority, tactical breakthroughs against the 101st Airborne Division were thwarted for eight days, cause incredible mechanical attrition on the tanks and trucks of the Fourth Panzer Army, especially the heavy Nashorn tanks that were doing the important work of breaching the American anti-tank defences.
While the 101st Airborne effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force by the eighth day, it and the rest of the 7th Rifle Corps had blunted the German spearhead. The Comintern retreat that followed was savage, but the great cauldron the Germans had sought never materialised.
[...]
The supporting offensives in the Ukraine followed a much less dramatic course. After the disaster at Kiev, IntRev forces reorganised, with forces in Northeastern Ukraine consolidated under the Kharkov Front, under the command of General of the Army Iona Yakir.
In the southwest, the remaining forces in the Donbass were grouped under the Rostov Front, with General Vasilevsky assuming command. Beleaguered in the Crimean peninsula, a separate Crimean Front under General Andrey Yeryomenko was established, under strict orders to hold the peninsula at any cost.
General Kirponos, who only narrowly escaped the Kiev cauldron, was sacked in the reorganisation, and recalled to Moscow for an official inquiry.
In the interim Marshal Blyukher would serve as the main representative of Stavka to coordinate the theatre, before being replaced by Timoshenko at Frunze's insistence.
The temporary disorganisation of the RevInt lines allowed for minor German advances throughout the days which followed, though within the week of the Kiev disaster, the lines had stabilised enough where skirmishes were made costly to the German invader.
In one such instance – General Yeryomenko made a greater name for himself as his troops withstood tremendous assault over land via the Kherson-Kalanchak corridor, managing to inflict heavy losses on the Germans despite being forced to retreat further southeast, setting up an incredibly stout defensive perimeter along the narrow Perikop chokepoint, stymieing further German advance and denying them total control over the Black Sea naval zones, though this was far from the last phase of the Axis attempts to seize the Crimean Peninsula.
In one of the Axis' more ill-fated ventures, the Germans attempted a naval landing behind Yeryomenko's army at Yevpatoriya and Sevastopol, only to find themselves pushed roughly back into the sea by the combined arms of the Yeryomenko's troops, along with mobilised locals.
[...]
The stage was now set for Operation Valkyrie. The southern flank had been cleared–at great cost–pushing Soviet forces back into the Donbass. The utilisation of motorised and tank forces in cooperation with air power had enabled the Soviet defenders to fight an elastic defence, but now the Wehrmacht was pushing into Kharkov. Army Group South's northern wing entered the city of Kursk.
The assault on the Orel-Vyazma line began with great fury in early November, as the first frosts signalled the ending of the fall rasputitsa. The southern thrust would be spearheaded by Guderian's First Panzer Army, now augmented with the I SS Panzer Corps, and followed by Hoth's Second Panzer Army. Their aim was to outflank Moscow from the south, cutting the rail link at Tula before proceeding north to the city of Vladimir, cutting the Moscow-Gorky railway.
The northern thrust would be spearheaded by Hoepner's Fourth Panzer Army, striking towards Kalinin before hooking eastward to meet east of Moscow. The fresh Fifth Panzer Army under von Reichnau would leapfrog forward after the initial assault to complete the encirclement.
The horrendous losses of the summer and fall campaigns had left Marshal Frunze with no choice but to fight a further elastic defence, with Stalin breathing down his neck with every German advance. However blunted their strength had been in the fighting, the fact was that at the outset of Valkyrie, Germany enjoyed a superior correlation of forces, especially at the Moscow sector. The whole war effort was concentrated in Army Group Centre, with the rest of the line stripped of assets, filled in with lower quality Italian, Rumanian, or Hungarian divisions.
Against this mass concentration of two million men, some 4,100 tanks, 19,000 guns, and over 900 combat aircraft, the Comintern could put only 950,000 men and 1,500 tanks initially. Reinforcements were already on the move or mobilising, but time was not their ally.
[...]
The initial red flags in Valkyrie had emerged almost immediately. While extensively outmatched on the ground, the Red Army Air Forces retained much of their strength, and were further reinforced by the massive deployment of new air armies from North America. By contrast, the Luftwaffe had endured incredible mechanical attrition to make the great summer offensives possible. With pilots worn down to the nubs, and a repeated failure of German industry to compensate for the immense attrition caused by high-tempo sortieing, they failed to achieve air superiority at any point of the offensive.
While the direct damage done by tactical air power, particularly to hard assets like tanks, has always been well short of expectations, the psychological impact of forces marching in hostile territory never safe from aerial attack has immense power. In the cold autumn of 1941, sleep-deprived, hungry landsers trudged through mud and snow under freezing, hostile skies, fighting an ever multiplying enemy. It was as though the very countryside itself was rising against the invader.
The prelude to the backhand blow was two months of heavy fighting against an enemy withdrawing in orderly fashion to new strongpoints and the corresponding exhausting of effort, both of men and their equipment.
[...]
The needs of compartmentalization placed Soviet commanders in the impossible situation of fighting losing battles, sacrificing space for time. Even front commanders did not know when the counteroffensive would come, and lower level commanders could only trust in a plan with almost no tangible presence.
Matters came to a head on 21 December, when Zhukov, commanding 18th Army in the Tula Front, phoned Kirponos at his headquarters to ask for relief. In the heated exchange, he shouted "There is nowhere left to retreat, Moscow is behind us." Kirponos replied, "then tell your soldiers that."
On the 22nd, one of the worst blizzards in recent memory descended over the Moscow area. The front was paralyzed. The tenuous supply lines of the Wehrmacht had congealed like engine oil. It was earlier than the meteorologists had predicted, but within margins. Frunze ordered Operation Mars would begin on the 24th. The die was cast.
It was close, but by a great feat of military science the great majority of the Reserve Front's forces reached their starting points in time for the operation. New operational manoeuvre groups were released for use by the other three fronts.
The guns opened up at 0500 with renewed violence. Rockets barrages and long-range super-heavy artillery ripped open defensive works and savaged command posts. As dawn broke, the tanks of four mechanised armies were already past the first line of resistance, with scores of aircraft striking deep into the enemy rear.
Brauchitsch, already engaged into block-by-block fighting in Moscow's outskirts, had no initial reservations in carrying out Hitler's no retreat order. Initially believing it to be Moscow's death rattle, he ordered his disparate armies to repel the attackers and continue preparations to resume the encirclement attempt.
It was not until the dawn of the 26th that the cold reality settled in at AGC's headquarters. The frontline was breaking down, and the enemy operational groups had broken into the deep rear. They were being carved up like a side of beef, and the panzers stuck forward on the flanks would have to be brought back to blunt the enemy offensives.
In the interim, cut off forces would hold to strongpoints in fortifiable towns and await relief. But at the front, the situation was breaking down faster than could be anticipated. The "death rattle" had turned into a general offensive across the whole front, and attempts to break from the line of contact were turning into routs. The panzers were losing head on against Soviet and American tanks and tank destroyers.
[...]
Additional forces from the Novgorod Front in the North and the Bryansk Front in the South joined in the counter offensive on D-Day+5. By now, the direness of the situation could no longer be ignored by even the most pigheaded. The encirclements were beginning: LXVII Panzerkorps at Klin, XX Armeekorps at Borodino, V Armeekorps west of Kalinin, XXXV Armeekorps at Kaluga.
Within two weeks, the bulk of four corps and scattered elements of other units were encircled. Though the casualties were devastating, the counteroffensives continued, forcing Brauchitsch to make repeated requests for withdrawal. For his impudence he was sacked, replaced by Model who received permission to do more or less exactly what Brauchitsch had wanted.
Having broken the back of Army Group Centre, it was now up to Frunze to not overextend himself. With the blood in the water, he whipped the offensive onwards to retake as much ground, and overrun as much of the German forces as possible. But as digestible as the corps sized pockets were, they were significant obstacles to the conveyance of troops and supplies to the advance elements, stuck on major road and rail junctions.
It was clear by 20 January that the Desra River goal was out of reach. But they had their footholds across the Oka River, if only tenuously, and Vyazma would soon fall. Demyansk was encircled, trapping a withdrawing German division, 212th Infantry, along with supply caches. But further south the offensives had stalled in the marshlands east of Velikiye Luki. Frunze ordered consolidation to begin, and for destruction operations to commence against the encircled enemy forces within the week.
The Battle of Moscow had been won. But hopes of completely seizing the strategic initiative in the war had remained elusive. The balance of power in Eurasia was shifting in the West, bringing new forces into the war on both sides.
