COUNTERPOINT TO STALINGRAD
Operation Mars (November-December 1942):
Marshal Zhukov's Greatest Defeat
David M. Glantz
http://rhino.shef.ac.uk:3001/mr-home/rzhev/rzhev3.html
The architects of the Stalingrad victory entered the annals of military history as unvanquished heroes who led the subsequent Soviet march to victory. Foremost among them was Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov, the hero of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.
Originally planned for late-October 1942, but postponed until 25 November, Operation Mars was intended to be a companion piece to Operation Uranus, the code-name for the Soviet's Stalingrad strategic counteroffensive. By conducting Operations Mars and Uranus, the Soviet Stavka [Headquarters of the High Command] sought to regain the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front and set the Red Army on the path to total victory. Planned and conducted by Marshal G. K. Zhukov and a host of other famous Soviet generals and appropriately named for the God of War, Operation Mars formed the centerpiece of Soviet strategic designs in Fall 1942. Its immense scale and ambitious strategic intent made Operation Mars at least as important as Operation Uranus and likely more important. In its fickleness, however, history has forgotten Operation Mars because it failed, while it has extolled Operation Uranus because it succeeded.
Zhukov answered Stalin's call by planning and leading the victorious Soviet Moscow counteroffensives in winter 1942. Subsequently, in spring and summer 1942, he commanded Soviet forces along the Moscow axis. While the Germans were advancing on Stalingrad, Zhukov orchestrated several offensives against German forces in the central sector of the front, including a major attack on the Rzhev salient in August, which was a virtual rehearsal for Operation mars.
Zhukov believed that the Soviet Union could best achieve strategic victory by smashing German forces along the Moscow axis. In short, Zhukov considered that German Army Group Center, whose forces were lodged in the Rzhev salient menacingly close to Moscow, posed the most serious threat to Moscow and the Soviet war effort In his view, the Rzhev salient, a legacy of the chaotic fighting of winter 1941-42, which measured 150 x150 kilometers and which contained Army Group Center's powerful German Ninth Army, represented a dagger aimed at Moscow. Therefore, argued Zhukov, the Soviet Union could best achieve strategic victory in 1942 by smashing German Ninth Army in the salient and, thereafter, all of German Army Group Center.
Zhukov emphasized Soviet force superiority in the decisive central sector of the front. Here the Soviet Kalinin and Western Fronts, supported by the Moscow Defense Zone, numbered almost 1,900,000 men with over 24,000 guns and mortars, 3,300 tanks, and 1,100 aircraft.
On the evening of 26 September, the Generalissimo ordered major strategic counteroffensives be conducted at both Rzhev and Stalingrad. Appropriately, Zhukov would command the former, and his contemporary, General A. M. Vasilevsky, would command the latter. Vasilevsky, then Chief of the General Staff and Deputy Minister of Defense, was a penultimate staff officer and a prot‚g‚ of former Chief of the General Staff, marshal B. M. Shaposhnikov. At the outbreak of war, Vasilevsky had been chief of the General Staff's Operations Directorate, and, because of his obvious talents, he rose from colonel to colonel general in only four years. His wartime accomplishments as key General Staff planner and "fireman" in key operational sectors had won Stalin's confidence and appointment in July 1942 as Chief of the General Staff. Vasilevsky's calm demeanor and keen intelligence tended to moderate both Stalin's and Zhukov's excesses.
In fact, Zhukov's over 2,300 tanks and 10,000 guns and mortars exceeded the firepower the Stavka allocated to Vasilevsky to carry out Operation Uranus.
Zhukov's offensive began early on 25 November simultaneously against the eastern, western, and northern flanks of the German Rzhev salient.Numbering well over 200,000 men and 500 tanks, the 2 Soviet armies faced about 40,000 German defenders. Despite this numerical superiority and initial German confusion, the violent attack achieved only mixed results since German forces occupied strong defenses, and Soviet forces had to assault across generally open and rolling terrain at a time when incessant fog and driving snow showers reduced the effectiveness of the Soviet artillery preparation.
Even the twin catastrophic Soviet defeats along the Vazusa River and at Belyi did not totally destroy Zhukov's resolve, for, despite being thwarted on the flanks of the Rzhev salient, Zhukov continued to attack with the 39th Army in the north until mid-December (see Map 14). Despite Zhukov's stubborn defiance of reality, by 15 December Operation mars was a shambles. Stalin, the Stavka, and perhaps even Zhukov himself knew well that mars was at an end. Furthermore, long before, Stalin had abandoned any hopes of launching Operation Jupiter. By early December 1942 the bulk of Stavka reserves were already en route southward to reinforce Vasilevsky's successful Operation Uranus at Stalingrad.
While causing catastrophic Soviet casualties, the German divisions themselves were fought to a frazzle. It was no coincidence that several months later Model asked for and received permission to abandon the Rzhev salient. He and his army could ill afford another such victory.
Operation mars cost the Red Army nearly half a million men killed, wounded, or captured. Individual Soviet combat units were decimated in the operation. The Soviet 20th Army lost 58,524 men out of its original strength of over 114,000 men.72 General Solomatin's 1st Mechanized Corps lost 8,100 of its 12,000 men and all of its 220 tanks, and the accompanying 6th Stalin Rifle Corps lost over 20,000 of its 30,000 men.73 At lower levels the cost was even higher. The 8th Guards Rifle Corp's 26th Guards Rifle Division emerged from combat with 500 of its over 7,000 combat infantrymen intact, while the 4,500 man 148th and 150th Rifle Brigades had only 27 and 110 "fighters," respectively, available at the end of the operation.
Soviet tank losses, correctly estimated by the Germans as around 1,700, were equally staggering, in as much as they exceeded the total number of tanks the Soviets initially committed in Operation Uranus at Stalingrad.75 In Western armies losses such as these would have prompted the removal of senior commanders, if not worse. In the Red Army it did not, for when all was said and done, Zhukov fought, and the Red Army needed fighters.
Although far less severe than those of the Soviets, the Germans too suffered grievous losses in the operation, losses which they could ill afford given their smaller manpower pool and the catastrophe befalling them at Stalingrad. For example, the 1st Panzer Division suffered 1,793 casualties, and the 5th Panzer 1,640, while losses in the infantry divisions (the 78th, 246th, 86th, 110th, and 206th) along the Soviet main attack axes were even greater.76 The overall Soviet casualty toll, however, was at least 10-fold greater that the total German loss of around 40,000 men.
