The Great Patriotic War: 1939-1943

Thinking back to this exchange I think it may provide some clues as to why he has no interest in a serious discussion or debate.

Note that while I did use "your" in stead of "you're" as I should have it didn't lead to any confusion as to my point. And while it is an error it's hardly a systematic one. His use of quote marks on the other hand was systematic and very confusing. Then he tries to use that simple error on my part as an excuse to ignore both his failure to properly quote material and as a rational for ignoring some respectable web sites explanation of copyright and "fair use". Bit of a logic problem with that now isn't there. Then there's the fact that he not only doesn't acknowledge his miss use of quotes but continues to (at least intermittently) miss use them. Inability to construct an logical argument, inability to admit he's made a mistake, and (from other posts of his) accusing others of negative behaviors he has himself graphically demonstrated. Not the sort of person who can hold there own in a reasoned discussion/debate. For the sake of future students I hope the school he's at (if he really is at a school) still maintains reasonable standards.

 

Course not...That's what an editor is for.

 

Sorry, "Slim," but when quoting a long passage involving more than one paragraph, quotation marks go at the beginning of each paragraph, but at the end of only the final one: quotation marks | Common Errors in English Usage and More | Washington State University

Since you don't have enough sense not to take seriously the spelling and grammar correction of someone who doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're," I'm adding you to the ignore list. Bye, Felicia!

 

I wish that applied to me. Not sure why you didn't just use lwd though. Less letters and clearer.

Wow. You actually responded with a proper source, thanks for that. Wonder if the rules changed since I was in school or we just didn't deal much with long quotes. I know some things have changed as we were taught to underline book titles rather than put them in italics. There's also the problem of course that you closed off the quote at the end of each post so you should have given credit there but only did so several posts down. Then there's the issue of an odd number of single quotes in some paragraphs excluding contractions and possessives. In any case it would have been clearer if you had used a block quote as your reference mentioned.

I also note that you failed to quote the sentence you copy and pasted from that site.

??? That's a rather incoherent as well as illogical paragraph. The fact that you posted that I used "your" rather than "you're" indicates that you do know the difference. I've made it clear that I know the difference. So who are you talking about?

Of course none of this really addresses the key problems with your posts and attitude but it does make it clear just how much credence we can give your proclamations.

???Is there some significance buried there?

 

Been waiting for you to use that one...

 

The Crimean Campaign 1941-42: The Battles of Kerch and Sevastopol

By October 28, 1941, the German armed forces had captured Kiev as well as Kharkov, two of the most important cities in the Ukraine. They were close enough to threaten Rostov-on-Don, a major trading port connecting East and West, the portal linking Moscow with southwestern Russia and the Caucasus. Hitler saw it as a prospective “German Gibraltar,” an overseas territory that would give Germany access to the Black Sea and (indirectly) the Mediterranean. It would, of course, be cleansed of its Slavic population and resettled by Germanic colonizers, after Germany had won the war.

As Army Group South advanced further east, the German Eleventh Army under Erich von Manstein and the Romanian Third Army under General Petre Dumitrescu turned south and invaded the Crimean Peninsula. This region, settled since antiquity and occupying an unrivaled strategic position on the Black Sea (and the minor Sea of Azov to the northeast), remains a flashpoint even today; in March 2014, the Russian Armed Forces annexed the area after an uprising by pro-Russian separatists. Moreover, the scenic land and beaches, along with its many palaces, villas, and dachas, makes it one of the most desired parts of the Ukrainian region. For the Germans, their main objective was Sevastopol, the home of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, an especially strong fortification on a peninsula almost surrounded by water. Many of the defenders came from the Soviet Navy, and thus were not suited for an ad hoc infantry role. Also, a “Separate Coastal Army” under General Ivan Petrov had evacuated from Odessa earlier in October also participated in the defense. The Soviets, however, feared a possible naval invasion and deployed many units along the coastline, rather than against the concentration of Axis forces pushing down the slender strip of land connecting Crimea to the Ukraine. Nevertheless, the bottleneck approach and the absence of armored support meant that Manstein faced a tall order from the beginning of his invasion of the Crimea on October 18. He made little progress until October 24, when Luftwaffe superiority permitted a major breakthrough.

By November Manstein ordered divisions to Yalta and Balaklava, trapping Sevastopol between the German war machine and the sea. The commander of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky, took charge of the city’s defense and brought additional men from the Caucasus while Manstein assembled enough units for a sustained assault. Aerial superiority remained problematic because Operation Typhoon caused most squadrons on the Eastern Front redirected to Moscow. The Soviet defenders also had the benefit of shelling by the ships belonging to the Black Sea Fleet, including the Parizhskaya Kommuna, one of the first dreadnoughts in the Imperial Russian Navy, renamed in 1921 after the 1871 Paris Commune after its crew joined the failed Kronstadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik government. (In 1943, the ship would be renamed again, this time Sevastapol, in recognition of its part in the defense.)

In December, while the rest of the German front went on the defensive, unprepared for harsh Russian winter, Manstein dug in to organize a proper offensive plan for taking Sevastopol. The German offensive did not start until December 17, which gave the Soviets plenty of time to prepare and plan – which is exactly what they did. Shortly after Manstein’s operation began, the Red Army launched an amphibious landing operation on the Kerch Peninsula, essentially an eastern extension of the Crimean Peninsula. Units from the Transcaucasian Front (including many Georgian soldiers) and the Crimean Front created a bridgehead but suffered high casualties. The main intention of the landings, to relieve Sevastopol, utterly failed; their planned offensive deteriorated into a war of attrition they could not win without continued resupply and reinforcement. From December 26 to January 2, the Red Army lost almost 50,000 men. They did, however, manage to delay the fall of Sevastopol by diverting German forces elsewhere.

It was not until April 1942 that the Germans had completely halted the repeated Soviet offensive attempts ordered by Stalin himself. Manstein faced the daunting prospect of taking back the Kerch Penninsula from a larger, entrenched enemy behind minefields and anti-tank ditches. He finally received armored support in the form of the 22nd Panzer Division in March, although this unit had suffered heavy casualties after arriving on the Eastern Front earlier that spring. It possessed mostly obsolete and lightly-armored Panzer 38(t) tanks and lacked support equipment. From late February into April, the Red Army had launched four unsuccessful offensives, losing over 350,000 men compared to around 24,000 German losses. In the meantime, Luftwaffe fighters and bombers worked to keep away additional Red Army forces and material, regularly bombing Soviet ports and ships. By late April, Stalin was still demanding counterattacks in the Crimea, despite the starved and exhausted state of the survivors in the area.

On May 8, Manstein launched Operation Trappenjagd (“Bustard Hunt”) to retake Kerch, using a holding action against the northern Soviet front while his southern units broke through Red Army lines and then swung around to the north. Despite the odds heavily in favor of the defender, the Eleventh Army and their Romanian allies succeeded in swiftly overrunning the Soviet positions, destroying three entire armies. The order to switch from the offensive to the defensive had come far too late for the Red Army, which had long ago lost any real effectiveness as a fighting force. Far more Soviet soldiers surrendered, but many fought to the last, some even taking to the quarries on the Kerch Peninsula to wage a partisan conflict. Nevertheless, Manstein once more had the freedom to turn all of his attention and resources to finishing off the Crimea. While having to give up the 22nd Panzer Division for the planned German summer offensive into the Caucasus, by May 20 Manstein had finally returned to the conditions of November 1941: with almost all of Crimea under German occupation, save Sevastopol.

 

Sevastopol had held out in all this time, but by spring 1942 was a hollow imitation of the beautiful coastal city it once was. Some residents evacuated, but many remained, including the famous Soviet writer Yevgeny Petrov, one-half of the literary team of he and Ilya Ilf, known collectively as “Ilf and Petrov.” Those that stayed faced incessant and heavy bombing; by July German bombers flew as low as a hundred meters above the northern edges of the city. For fear of collapsing roofs and walls, some Sevastopol dwellers relocated to the caves and tunnels underneath the city. There, they searched usually in vain for fresh water, resorting to drinking water pooled under dead bodies.

On June 7, after heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe and artillery, German infantry attacked the fortified Soviet bunkers, but just as with the five months on the Kerch Peninsula, both sides see-sawed in their fighting, with little gains and huge losses. On June 12, the Germans took Fort Stalin, an important Soviet stronghold to the north, and between June 18 and 23 the Soviet forces finally broke. The Soviet commanders, General Petrov of the Separate Coastal Army and Admiral Oktyabrsky, evacuated the city; General Pyotr Novikov, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Winter War, assumed responsibility for the final defense of Sevastapol. Novikov too attempted to escape on July 2 but was intercepted and captured by German troops. He died in a concentration camp in 1944.

Over two days – May 8 to May 9, 1942 – the Soviets lost 14,714 people a day. Although the entire Soviet casualties amounted to 177,000 total, this rate far exceeded what the Soviets suffered in the first month of Operation Barbarossa: 23,207 per day on the Western Front and 16,106 per day on the Southern and Southwestern Fronts. Arguably, in perspective, the failed Kerch offensive was one of the costliest Soviet failures of the entire war. Still, it did have the effect of keeping Manstein and the German Eleventh Army stuck in the Crimea and thus diverted important German resources from other objectives, such as Moscow, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus. Manstein received a promotion to field marshal on July 1 for his efforts, but the German Eleventh Army had lost its fighting capacity; Hitler broke it up and sent its individual units to the various army groups. In August 1942, Manstein assumed command of the German forces to finish off the siege of Leningrad, but unlike Sevastopol, victory would remain elusive. Meanwhile, in September, the German Sixth Army would become mired in brutal close-combat fighting in the Battle of Stalingrad; had the Eleventh Army been on hand to reinforce them, that battle may have gone differently. Taking Sevastopol and the Crimea was always going to come at a high price – a price the German Eleventh Army paid.

Throughout this period, Manstein and the Eleventh Army supplied troops and equipment to Einsatzgruppe D, the SS death squad tasked with rounding up and killing “ideological enemies” behind German lines. Manstein regularly received reports about the executions of Jews and even contributed units to the massacre of some 11,000 Jews in Simferopol in November 1941. Since Simferopol lay between major communication routes in the Crimea, the army wanted the area “pacified” – that is, cleansed of “threats,” such as the Jews, behind their lines. (Even non-Jews suffered from the German policy of collective punishment; on November 29, 1941, 50 people were shot in Simferopol in retaliation for a German soldier killed by a mine and a German officer killed by a partisan.) In February 1942, Manstein personally requested that watches collected during the execution of the Jews be given to his troops. At the Nuremberg trials after the war, at the trial of the Einzatgruppen, the verdict stated that the Eleventh Army participated in genocide. Manstein was convicted of war crimes in 1949 and sentenced to eighteen years in prison, but ended up only serving four. He later served in the creation of the West German armed forces and wrote a memoir that contributed greatly to the myth that the Wehrmacht fought a “clean war” on the Eastern Front, presenting himself as the quintessential loyal and chivalrous German commander.

The Crimean campaign also produced a legendary Soviet figure, that of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful woman sniper in history. She fought first in the Odessa region in the summer of 1941, where she obtained 187 kills in the first 75 days of the war. She then moved to Crimea to participate in the defense of Sevastopol, where she notched even more kills and became a star of Soviet propaganda. Wounded before the city fell, she escaped capture by the Germans, but not before recording 309 confirmed kills, including 39 enemy snipers sent to eliminate her. She famously became the first Soviet citizen to meet a U.S. President, meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then touring the U.S. at the invitation of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She eventually returned to the Soviet Union and finished the war as a Red Army sniper instructor.

Sources

Bellamy, Chris. 2007. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Forczyk, Robert. 2008. Sevastopol 1942: Von Manstein’s Triumph. Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Hayward, Joel. 1999. “A Case Study in Early Joint Warfare: An Analysis o fthe Wehrmacht’s Crimean Campaign of 1942.” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 22(4), pp. 103-130.

Lemay, Benoit. 2010. Erich von Manstein: Hitler’s Master Strategist. Trans. Pierce Heyward. Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers.

Markwick, Roger and Euridice Charon Cardona. 2012. Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

 

It is funny to think about it but first the Red Army had a clear way to blast its way through AGS and with Manstein back hand the way to Stalingrad might have been open if the Germans had enough troops and it was not mud everywhere.

 

The Soviet Union Strikes Back: December 1941
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In December 1941, the Soviet Union suddenly found itself in a position to launch a counteroffensive. The German advance had finally stopped short of Moscow, and the overextended and exhausted Wehrmacht lacked the preparation for the harsh winter conditions. Although they retained superior equipment and armor, the Germans had to spend hours warming panzer and aircraft engines to use them. The Red Army was better prepared for the biting cold, and with the arrival of reserve units, obtained numerical superiority over the German forces. In terms of training and experience, the Germans held the advantage; with so many armies destroyed, and prisoners killed or captured in the summer, new recruits and reserve troops went straight into battle under officers just as inexperienced and raw as enlisted members. With the blitzkrieg contained, the German-Soviet war had become one of attrition, and the Soviet strategy was to relentlessly push back against the Germans before they could dig in or reinforce, starting around Moscow. From Kalinin, north of Moscow, to Yelets in the south, the Soviet plan was to cut off and destroy the panzers surrounding Moscow and then drive deep behind German lines through the flanks.

​

A German intelligence report from December 4 stated that "at present the enemy in front of Army Group Center are not capable of conducting a counteroffensive without significant reserves." What the Germans did not realize is that the Red Army indeed had nine new armies and 27 divisions ready for winter warfare. At the same time, the temperature dropped dramatically. Russian weather stations around Moscow at the time recorded an average temperature of -19 degrees Fahrenheit (around -29 degrees Celsius). Red Army leaders such as Georgy Zhukov and Semyon Timoshenko understood quite well such temperatures would render German tanks and artillery ineffective. Even firing pins broke and German soldiers had to rely, in some cases, on hand grenades alone to keep the Soviets at bay. Demoralized and defenseless, the Germans would collapse.

​

The counteroffensive began on December 5. Against orders, the commander of Army Group Center, Fedor von Bock, had ordered his subordinates to withdraw into defensive preparations, against the general desire of Hitler to maintain momentum. German units were thus in the process of moving when the counteroffensive began. The left flank of Army Group Center threatened to collapse, leaving Bock with the unfortunate choice of fighting desperate last stands or retreating in heavy snow with low fuel and supplies. The very presence of large, sustained Soviet operations seemed impossible based on what the Germans believed about their enemy; just months ago the Soviet Union seemed doomed, the fall of the Bolshevik capital a matter of time. Now, fresh Soviet soldiers were on the attack. Bock requested reinforcements but was informed he could not have any replacement units until January. The German units around Moscow fell back while, further north, the Soviets attacked the Germans at Tikhvin, on the approaches to Leningrad and an important railway link. Bock, in a state of panic, worried about a German retreat on par with Napoleon's disastrous rout from Russia in 1812. The Red Army, meanwhile, was irritated that its new divisions were, unfamiliar with combat, attacking the German positions head-on rather than flanking them. More veteran and seasoned troops may very well have caused the mass retreat that Bock feared.

It was not until December 14 that Hitler, finally accepting that Army Group Center faced a crisis, permitted the withdrawal of the depleted Second Panzer Group and a straightening of the front. He continued, however, to forbid any retreats and ordered German soldiers to stand and fight. On the December 18 a formal order banned "larger evasive movements" and encouraged "fanatical resistance." Shortly thereafter, several German commanders on the Eastern Front were relieved. Bock, whose caution throughout the war had clashed with Hitler’s boldness, lost his command over Army Group Center. Field Marshal Walther von Brauschitsch, the Supreme Commander of the German Army, became the scapegoat for Barbarossa’s shortcomings; Hitler made himself the army’s official commander-in-chief. On Christmas 1941, Bock’s replacement, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge demanded and later received the removal of Heinz Guderian as commander of Second Panzer Group after Guderian had repeatedly disobeyed orders to stop retreating. General Rudolf Schmidt replaced him. Not much later, on January 8, 1942, Fourth Panzer Group commander Erich Hoepner would also be sacked for retreating without permission, replaced by General Richard Ruoff. Hitler effectively seized complete command and initiative from his leading generals.

​

By December 16 the Soviet counteroffensive had pushed the Germans away from the northern approaches to Moscow and sent the Third and Fourth Panzer Groups into a rout. These successes led to much higher ambitions for the Red Army, and over the rest of the month directives went out from Leningrad to the Crimea to launch similar offensives (such as the Kerch offensive in the Crimean Campaign). Once the envelopment of Army Group Center began to take shape, however, the Germans responded with defensive plans of their own. As Hitler predicted, the order to stand fast meant they were able to hunker down with heavy weapons and shelter they would have lost in mass withdrawals.The Soviets could not keep the Germans staggering forever, and eventually they established new defensive lines. Still, by mid-December the Soviets had retaken territory around Tula, Ryazan, Rostov, Kalinin, Leningrad, Smolensk, Orlov, and Kursk. The Germans avoided the grander Soviet dream of encircling and dissecting Army Group Center, to the extent it was ever feasible.

​

By January 1, 1942, the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front had lost over 830,000 men, over 25 percent of its original strength. These were heavy casualties, but still nothing like what the Germans had just inflicted on the Red Army. The Germans were tired, undersupplied, freezing, and stunned by enemy resilience – but they were far from beaten. Although pushed back from Moscow, they remained relatively close. By January 5 Stalin was convinced that the rest of 1941 would be dedicated to similar Soviet offensives that would drain the Germans of their reserves while the Red Army raised more armies and divisions to make up for what had been lost that summer. When the Germans had no reserves left, the Red Army would drive them back into Poland and Germany. Zhukov disagreed with this, citing the lack of Soviet manpower and equipment to sustain major offensives on all fronts, but Stalin had already made up his mind.

Just as Operation Barbarossa produced early successes that led the German leadership the Soviet capacity to continue the war, so too did the early successes of the 1941 Soviet counteroffensive lead Stalin to underestimate German tenacity. The inability of the Red Army to win at Rzhev or at Kharkov or to reclaim the Crimea in 1942 would set the stage for the German army to once more go on the offensive by the following summer.

Sources

Bellamy, Chris. 2007. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David. 2011. Operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia. Stroud, UK: The History Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

 

Stalin actually blew the victory. Zhukov wanted one or two main attack points but Stalin wanted a Wide front attack. This Wide front attack helped Germans to fight back where two strong points would have crushed the AGC. Stalin the man to Lost Warsaw now helped germans with his strategy. Even in Kursk he wanted to attack first but Zhukov made him change his minď.

 

Arrogant, much?

APA (American Psychological Association) style is most commonly used to cite sources within the social sciences. This resource, revised according to the 6th edition, second printing of the APA manual, offers examples for the general format of APA research papers, in-text citations, endnotes/footnotes, and the reference page. For more information, please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, (6th ed., 2nd printing).​

APA states:

Long quotations
Place direct quotations that are 40 words or longer in a free-standing block of typewritten lines and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, indented 1/2 inch from the left margin, i.e., in the same place you would begin a new paragraph. Type the entire quotation on the new margin, and indent the first line of any subsequent paragraph within the quotation 1/2 inch from the new margin. Maintain double-spacing throughout. The parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark.
​

Which is distinctly more clear than anything you have produced.

 

Are you actually still reading this stuff?

 

It's true both sides tended to bite off more than they could chew when they encountered unexpected success. However, due to the depleted, inexperienced nature of the Red Army troops used in the December counteroffensive, I don't they would have been able to encircle AGC even if Stalin had been removed from the equation. Zhukov, Shaposhnikov, etc. understood that the December attack on AGC did not mean that a general offensive would also bear fruit and thus would have stopped the disastrous Kerch landing, the Second Battle of Kharkov, etc. But I don't think any decisive defeat of AGC was in the cards after what the Soviets suffered in the summer of '41.

 

Konstantin Rokossovsky

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Konstantin Rokossovsky was born on December 21, 1896, in Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, his father a Polish railway worker and his mother a teacher from Belarus. He was bilingual in Polish and Russian, speaking the latter with a Polish accent. In 1904 his father died in a rail accident and his mother died in 1910. Briefly working as an apprentice stone-cutter, he was arrested in 1912 after participating in a demonstration by Warsaw workers. These humble beginnings would subsequently be exploited by the Soviet propaganda machine to promote Rokossovsky as not just a war hero but a working-class hero as well.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rokossovsky joined a prestigious dragoon regiment and served in the cavalry throughout the war. He was wounded twice and won the Cross of St. George. In 1917, the October Revolution brought an end to Russian involvement in the war but ignited a civil war between the Bolshevik Reds and tsarist Whites. Throwing in with the Red cavalry, Rokossovsky commanded a squadron in Central Siberia while fighting against the White forces under Aleksandr Kolchak until 1921, after which he commanded a regiment in Mongolia against the infamous general and occultist Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who believed he was the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. In recognition of his bravery Rokossovsky earned the Order of the Red Banner twice, decorated in May 1920 and December 1921 respectively.

After the Civil War and throughout the 1920s, Rokossovsky initially benefitted from his record as a hero, climbing the ranks, commanding cavalry brigades in the Far East and Central Asia. He had made important friendships with other promising young cavalry officers who would also show their mettle in the German-Soviet war, including Andrey Yeryomenko, Ivan Bagramyan, and Prokofy Romanenko. He married the daughter of a minor official from a small town on the Soviet-Mongolian border. In 1929, he served in the Sino-Soviet conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway that connected the Republic of China with the Soviet Union, a major test for the nascent Red Army. As a leader of the cavalry troops attached to the Soviet intervention force sent to reassert Moscow’s control over the railway, Rokossovsky further advanced his status. However, his association with the overall commander of the Soviet force in East Asia, Vasily Blyukher, would sow the seeds for Rokossovsky’s arrest and torture in the purges to come.

By the time the purge of the Soviet armed forces began in earnest in 1937, Rokossovsky was based in Leningrad, leading a cavalry corps. His past link to Blyukher led to his detainment in August that year, and like many officers arrested by the NKVD, he was accused of being a spy and saboteur in the employ of the Japanese government. He refused to confess; when told his old Civil War commander had confessed against him, he replied that the commander had died seventeen years ago. He survived extensive torture, including having his fingernails removed, and endured several mock executions, but maintained his innocence all the while. He would not be released until 1940, after the disastrous Soviet performance in the attack on Finland the previous year. With Soviet military weakness revealed and war with Germany becoming more probable, the Red Army needed talented, experienced officers after the purges had led to the death or imprisonment of the majority of senior officers in the army, air force, and navy.

Rokossovsky was restored as a cavalry corps commander after his release and served on the Soviet Union’s western borders. In the summer of 1940 he participated in the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina before returning to the area around Kiev in Ukraine.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Rokossovsky was leading the 9th Mechanized Corps and commanded that unit in the Battle of Brody, one of the fiercest tank battles of the entire German-Soviet conflict. Soviet medium and heavy tanks actually showed themselves superior to German armor, but German air superiority and superior armored tactics led to a major Soviet defeat with severe casualties. The concentration of Red Army troops in Ukraine prior to the invasion slowed the German advance, but further north, rapid German successes meant Moscow was in danger. In July, Rokossovsky moved to command forces in the Battle of Smolensk, where again German forces were slowed down but not defeated.

Rokossovsky was put in command of the 16th Army in the fall of 1941, a rag-tag mix of battle-scarred units, volunteer militia, and the first reserve troops raised in Siberia and Central Asia. The army would take the worst of Operation Typhoon, the German effort to take Moscow before the end of the year. Until December, the 16th Army fell back closer and closer to Moscow, despite insistence from above to not retreat; Rokossovsky would clash with Zhukov over the matter. With the onset of winter, however, advantage swung to the Soviet side. Despite their heavily depleted nature, the 16th Army fought on through the December Soviet counteroffensive.

In March 1942 Rokossovsky was wounded by shrapnel and had to recover. That summer, the German Wehrmacht launched its offensive to take the Caucasus and southern Russia in a bid to capture vital resources and knock the Soviet Union out of the war. After briefly commanding the relatively quiet Bryansk Front before Moscow, Rokossovsky was sent to Stalingrad to handle the growing crisis there. In September he was placed in command of the Don Front, which – along with the Stalingrad Front under his old comrade, Andrey Yeryomenko – was to entrap the bulk of the German 6th Army under Friedrich Paulus along with the Third and Fourth Romanian armies. This effort, Operation Uranus, was a huge Soviet success, leading to an incredible encirclement that essentially sealed the Battle of Stalingrad as not just a decisive German defeat but, at least according to some, a critical turning point during the German-Soviet war.

In February 1943 Rokossovsky’s Don Front became the Central Front, commanding the 21st and 65th, and 70th Armies. That March, it became clear that the Germans were massing for Operation Citadel, a final effort by the Germans to regain initiative, in and around Kursk. The Battle of Kursk would last through summer into the fall, and Rokossovsky relied on a defense-in-depth strategy that repelled the German assaults. By August it had become clear that the strategic initiative had passed over to the Red Army, and a massive counteroffensive from Orel to the Sea of Azov began. In October, the Central Front was reinvented again, this time as the Belorussian Front. Rokossovsky would oversee the planned Soviet advance after the triumphs of 1943 by moving on Minsk and then toward Warsaw. Once Poland was liberated, the next stop was Berlin.

 

In June 1944 Operation Bagration, the Soviet effort to liberate Belorussia, began. The German line collapsed, and Army Group Center under Field Marshal Walter Model was destroyed. Rokossovsky’s forces entered Minsk on July 4 and by July 25 had crossed the River Bug, entering Lublin. From eastern Poland, the Red Army was within striking distance of Germany. A Polish National Committee was established in anticipation of a post-war communist government in Warsaw. For his part in the Soviet victory, Rokossovsky would be promoted to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union as well as Hero of the Soviet Union in July 1944. In August, the Polish Home Army started the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupation, under orders from the Polish government-in-exile in London. For Stalin, who had just set up his own government-in-waiting, the idea of aiding the rebels to restore the pre-war, anti-communist Polish government did not appeal to him, and so he permitted the uprising to be brutally crushed by the German forces. Rokossovsky would later claim that, after the Belorussian campaign, his forces were in no condition to take Warsaw and relieve the Polish Home Army. Given the rapidly deteriorating condition of the German forces post-1943, it is debatable among historians whether the ultimate refusal of the Soviets to aid the Poles was for political or practical reasons.

In November 1944 Stalin transferred Rokossovsky to the Second Belorussian Front with the mission to take East Prussia. Upset at being denied the chance to take Berlin, he nevertheless oversaw the Soviet advance through that historic territory and witnessed firsthand the savage revenge and atrocities exacted on the German population by his soldiers. Rape, murder, and looting remained the order of the day and Rokossovsky only made perfunctory attempts to stop them. By March 30, he captured Danzig, the city over which Germany had ostensibly gone to war with Poland for in September 1939. In April, the Battle for Berlin began, with the Soviet forces comprised of Georgy Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front, Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front, and Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front against the largely shattered Army Group Vistula under General Gotthard Heinrici. The honor of entering Berlin would go to Zhukov, who shelled the capital’s center on Hitler’s birthday, April 20. Meanwhile, Rokossovsky was advancing on the Elbe and the Baltic Sea to the north. On May 4 he met British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in Pomerania, ending his wartime career.

After the war, Rokossovky led Soviet forces in Poland until the 1949 establishment of a communist Polish government firmly in Moscow’s sphere of influence. Rokossovsky was made a Marshal of Poland and appointed the Polish Minister of National of Defense. This move was motivated by events in Yugoslavia, where the Tito regime had broken from Stalin, along with the need to rebuild the Polish armed forces in accordance with Soviet needs. Despite his origins, Rokossovsky was viewed as a symbol of Soviet repression and the persecution of the Polish Catholic Church. In 1956, Rokossovsky oversaw the government’s response to protests in Poznan against poor working conditions. The protesting civilians were fired upon, with eight killed and several wounded. As part of an attempt to improve relations with the Polish population, Rokossovsky returned to the Soviet Union, holding various posts. He retired in April 1962 and died in August 1968. He was cremated and his ashes placed in the Kremlin Necropolis.

Rokossovky is perhaps the least known of the three major Soviet war heroes to emerge from the German-Soviet war, along with Zhukov and Konev. In some ways, he was a man without a country, considered Polish by Russian nationalists and a Russian stooge by Polish nationalists. If anything, he was more loyal to Stalin and the Soviet state than any nationality – more ironic considering the brutality shown to him by the Stalin regime from 1937 to 1940. It is difficult to comprehend why someone so ill-treated by the state would go on to become one of its most famous defenders. Perhaps Rokossovsky was a more capable, modern version of Budyonny, his fellow dashing cavalry officer, but open-minded enough to embrace mechanization and a new form of war. He was already decorated before the German-Soviet war and his repeated valiant performances outside Moscow and then at Stalingrad and in Belorussia cemented his position as one of the “best of the best” commanders produced by the Red Army during the conflict.

Sources

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Woff, Richard. 1993. “Konstantin Rokossovsky.” In Stalin’s Generals, ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Grove Press.

 

Was Zhukov sent after the war to Odessa military District even held prisoner to his home by Stalin? After Stalin died he returned to Moscow. So it seems Stalin simply took care of possible enemies as soon as he considered the threat being there.

 

Comrade General
First, thanks for a great thread.
Regarding Operation Bagration: initially the operation had more modest scope and objectives. By all means, Warsaw wasn’t among the objectives of Bagration. Therefore, Poles may take an extension of Soviet advance westwards until the outskirts of Warsaw as a bonus, a precious but undeserved gift. Stating that »(Stalin) permitted the uprising to be brutally crushed by the German forces« is unnecessary. By all means Rad Army had no obligations whatsoever to intervene in this Polish-German slaughter. Poles played with fire in 1939 and got burnt, they repeated the same mistake just five years later in 1944.
To clarify this; it is possible, yet unnecessary, to state that Allies have betrayed Algerians by »permitting French to re-establish their brutal colonial regime in their country«.

 

The Poles can hardly be accused of "Playing with fire" in 1939 now a few years earlier and you'd be correct. As for whether or not Stalin permitted the uprising to be crushed, isn't there still a fair amount of debate on that? I'd argue that the Red Army did have an interest in intervening in the uprising as well. The question would be the risk and costs as opposed to the rewards. Whether one is looking at just the current war or the post war landscape will impact those as well.

I also can't see how it is reasonable to state that the Algerians were betrayed. They were a French colony before the war and no promises were made before or during to them nor did they act in any coherent way to support the Allies. Poland was rather the opposite. Now looking at it from today the West and even the French (not to mention said colonies) would have been better off had they willingly relinquished their colonies after the war.

 

Nobody is accusing Poles for hurting themselves with their extremely relentless behavior. They should have been more cautious instead of stirring things up and waiting for others to rescue them time and time again. They have been hostile neighbors, expansionists. They’ve already annexed Soviet territories, they have been granted purely German territories, they have actively participated the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. How could they expect courtesy from countries they’ve insidiously attacked. They’ve just reaped what they sow.

There might have been “still a fair amount of debate on Stalins’ permission to crush Poles” but that doesn’t prove anything. Plain propaganda unrelated to the facts.

 

I think the earlier attack by the Poles on the USSR was a much better example of "playing with fire". Czechoslovakia is an interesting case but there's a pretty good argument for it being not only defensive but in the best interest of the people there. Not that the latter was a primary concern for the Poles.

The fact that there is still debated does indeed prove that neither side has made a conclusive proof of their position. If it was all false propaganda that wouldn't be the case. Indeed even if it were all propaganda it wouldn't be the case.