Eastern Front (WWII)
The Eastern Front was the primary theater of combat between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. It was somewhat separate from the other theatres of the war, not only geographically, but also for its scale and ferocity. In Russia, the war is referred to as the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная Война, Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna in Russian), a name which alludes to the Russo–Napoleonic Patriotic War on Russian soil in 1812. Some scholars of the conflict use the term Russo-German War, while others use Soviet-German War or German-Soviet War.The war began as Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 4:00 am, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union; and ended on 8 May 1945 when Germany surrendered following the Battle of Berlin. In the Soviet Union the end of war was marked on 9 May, when the surrender took effect Moscow time. This date is celebrated as national holiday, Victory Day, or День Победы in the Russian Federation and some other post-Soviet countries.
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2 Stalemate 3 Soviet initiative 4 Casualties 5 Historiography 6 Timeline 7 Reference 8 External links |
In 1939, the German and Soviet governments had arranged a peaceful border via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and so Operation Barbarossa caught the Soviet leadership largely by surprise; Germany conquered vast areas of territory and captured hundreds of thousands of troops in the first few months. The Red Army withdrew, and the Soviet Union managed to move most of the heavy industry away from the front line and re-establish it in more remote areas. Tenacious, sacrificial defense in the Battle of Moscow prevented the Wehrmacht from capturing Moscow by the time winter set in. The German leadership, expecting the campaign to be over in a few months, had not equipped their armies for winter fighting.
In the north, the Red Army attacked Finland in a pre-emptive attack on 25 June, thus beginning the Finnish Continuation War, lasting until armistice in 1944. By September the Finns had recaptured the losses of the Winter War while the Germans had advanced halfways to Murmansk and to the outskirts of Leningrad; but there they were unable to capture the city, thus beginning the lengthy Siege of Leningrad.
The Soviet winter offensive of 5 December 1941, commenced using fresh troops diverted from Siberia following the Japanese decision not to invade Russia from the east, prised the German pincers away from Moscow. A further Soviet attack was mounted in late January, focusing on the junction between Army Groups North and Centre between Lake Seliger and Rzhev, and drove a gap between the two German army groups. In concert with the advance from Kaluga to the south-west of Moscow, it was intended that the two offensives converge on Smolensk, but the Germans rallied and managed to hold them apart, retaining a salient at Rzhev. A Soviet parachute drop on German-held Dorogobuzh in this vein was spectacularly unsuccessful and those paratroopers who survived had to escape to the partisan-held areas beginning to swell behind German lines. To the north, the Soviets surrounded a German garrison in Demyansk, which held out under air supply for four months, and established themselves in front of Kholm, Velizh and Velikie Luki.
In the south the Red Army crashed over the Donets at Izyum and drove a sixty-mile deep salient. The intent was to pin Army Group South against the Sea of Azov, but as the winter eased the Germans were able to stabilise their front and think about the 1942 campaigning season.
Although plans were made to attack Moscow again, on 28 June 1942 the offensive re-opened in a different direction. Army Group South took the initiative, anchoring the front on Voronezh and then following the Don river southeastwards. The grand plan was to secure the Don and Volga first and then drive into the Caucasus towards the oilfields, but operational considerations and Hitler's vanity made him order both objectives to be attempted simultaneously. Rostov was recaptured on 24 July when 1st Panzer Army joined in, and then that group drove south towards Maikop. As part of this, Operation Shamil was executed, a plan whereby a group of Brandenburger commandos dressed up as Soviet NKVD troops to destabilise Maikop's defenses and allow the 1st Panzer Army to enter the oil town with little opposition.
Meanwhile, 6th Army was driving towards Stalingrad, for a long period unsupported by 4th Panzer Army who had been diverted to help 1st Panzer Army cross the Don. By the time 4th Panzer Army had rejoined the Stalingrad offensive, Soviet resistance (comprising the 62nd Army under Vasili Chuikov) had stiffened. A leap across the Don brought German troops to the Volga on 23 August but for the next three months the Wehrmacht would be fighting the Battle of Stalingrad street-by-street.
Towards the south 1st Panzer Army had reached the Caucasian foothills and the Malka river. At the end of August Romanian mountain troops joined the Caucasian spearhead, while the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies were redeployed from their successful task of clearing the Azov littoral. They took up position either side of Stalingrad to free German troops for the proper fighting. Mindful of the continuing antagonism between Axis allies Romania and Hungary over Transylvania, the Romanian army in the Don bend was separated from the Hungarian 2nd army by the Italian 8th Army. Thus all of Hitler's allies were in it - including a Slovak contingent with 1st Panzer Army and a Croatian regiment attached to 6th Army.
The advance into the Caucasus bogged down, with the Germans unable to fight their way past Malgobek and to the main prize of Grozny. Instead they switched the direction of their advance to come at it from the south, crossing the Malka at the end of October and entering North Ossetia. In the first week of November, on the outskirts of Ordzhonikidze, the 13th Panzer Division's spearhead was snipped off and the panzer troops had to fall back. The offensive into Russia was over.
While the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army had been fighting their way into Stalingrad, Soviet armies had congregated on either side of the city, specifically into the Don bridgeheads that the Romanians had been unable to reduce, and it was from these that they struck on 19 November 1942. Two Soviet fronts punched through the Romanians and converged at Kalach on 23 November, trapping 300,000 Axis troops behind them. A simultaneous offensive on the Rzhev sector known as Operation Mars was supposed to advance to Smolensk, but was a failure, with German tactical flair winning the day.
The Germans rushed to transfer troops to Russia for a desperate attempt to relieve Stalingrad, but the offensive could not get going till 12 December, by which time the 6th Army in Stalingrad was starving and too weak to break out towards it. Operation Winter Storm, with three transferred panzer divisions, got going briskly from Kotelnikovo towards the Aksai river but bogged down 40 miles short of its goal. To divert the rescue attempt the Soviets decided to smash the Italians and come down behind the relief attempt if they could, that operation starting on 16 December. What it did accomplish was to destroy many of the aircraft that had been transporting relief supplies to Stalingrad.
On 31 January 1943 the paltry remnant of the 300,000 man 6th Army surrendered, and by that time the Hungarian contingent had also been wiped out. The Soviets were 300 miles to the west of Stalingrad, having taken Kursk and Kharkov. At the close of 1942 the Soviet advance from Stalingrad towards Rostov threatened the entire German force in the Caucasus, so it was pulled out rapidly. The Rzhev salient was abandoned in February, freeing enough German troops to make a successful riposte in the eastern Ukraine. Manstein's counteroffensive recaptured Kharkov, upon which the spring thaw intervened. However, this had left a glaring bulge in the front centred on Kursk.
After the failure of the over ambitious attempt to capture Stalingrad, Hitler had deferred planning authority for the upcoming campaign season to the Army High Command. Debate among the general staff was polarised, with the majority favouring a conventional campaign against the Kursk Salient. Field Marshall von Manstein felt that an ambitious out-flanking manoeuver at Rostov had a better chance of success, but was also more risky. He knew that in the intervening six months the Russian position at Kursk had been reinforced heavily with anti tank guns, tank traps, mines, barbed wire, trenches, pillboxes, artillery and mortars. However his plan involved abandoning their positions, and retreating 300 miles, drawing the Soviet lines thin, and exhausting their momentum, before crushing them with a giant counteroffensive from the north, isolating the Red Army, and them annihilating it between two German army groups.
Had this offensive succeeded, it would have had grave concequences for the Red Army, and could have extended the war in the East, possibly weakening it beyond the ability to resist- the Red Army's massive reserves of manpower had been bled dry in the summer of 1941 and 1942. Under pressure from his other Generals, Hitler chose the Kursk option, considering it to be less risky, little realising that the Abwehr's intelligence on the Soviet position there was grossly inaccurate, and distorted by a concerted Stavka misinformation and counter-intelligence campaign. Manstein's appreciation of the Kursk defences was based on his own instincts- the Red Army had done at Kursk exactly as he would have done.
When the Germans began the operation, it was after months of delays waiting for new tanks and equipment, in which time the Russians had reinforced the Kursk salient with more anti-tank firepower than had ever and has ever been assembled in one place before or since. The Battle of Kursk represented a horrifingly scaled-up version of the battles of the first world war- infantry advancing under machine gun fire, and tanks advancing on batteries of anti-tank guns. Moreover, much of the German equipment was new and untested, with undertrained crews. The new tank hunter units, though sporting a highly effective 88mm cannon, had no hull mounted machine gun to protect against infantry, and were quickly targetting by the Soviet anti tank guns, which were positioned in hemispherical concave bulges, forming semicircles of high velocity crossfire. Moreover, these positions were protected by small two-man foxholes armed with limpet tank mines, machine gun nests, and mortar fire, ensuring than the Wehrmacht infantry could not effectively defend the tanks. The Kursk offensive was the last on the scale of 1940 and 1941 the Wehrmacht was able to launch, and subsequent offensives would represent only a shadow of previous German offensive might. Following the defeat, Hitler would not trust his generals to the same extent again, and as his own mental condition deteriorated the quality of German strategic decision fell correspondingly. The Russian armies continued their slow, innexorable advance on the Fatherland.
In January 1944 Novgorod was recaptured; by February the Red Army had reached Estonia and pocketed 10 divisions near Cherkassy. In the south, they reached the Romanian border in March, captured Odessa in April, and Sevastopol in May. The Soviet advance continued into Romania and Poland and following a coup against Axis-allied government of Romania, the Red army occupied Bucharest on August 31. In Moscow on September 12, Romania and the Soviet Union signed an armistice on terms Moscow virtually dictated.
In Poland, as the Red Army approached Warsaw, the Soviet propaganda encouraged the Poles to take up arms in the Warsaw Uprising, but the Soviet Army halted at the Vistula River under circumstances that raised suspicions that the motive was to weaken the Poles and make Poland more susceptible for a Communist takeover.
In October, the Red army moved into Hungary.
At the beginning of 1945, the Red Army began the assault on central Germany. They reached Berlin by April, and the ensuing Battle of Berlin ended with Hitler's suicide and the German surrender.
Several cities in the Soviet Union were awarded the title Hero City for their heroism in the desperate defence against the German aggressors.
The war on the Eastern Front was unparalleled for its ferocity, intensity, and brutality. By most estimates some 4 million Axis troops and 11 million Soviet troops fell in battle or died as POWs. Another 15–17 million Soviet civilians fell victim to massacres, disease, and starvation during the war.
The scale of the conflict dwarfs all others in World War II; Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had hundreds of divisions in action, while other theaters of the war measured their commitments in tens of divisions or less. However, full accounts of the war have been difficult, partly due to loss of records, and partly due to Soviet secretiveness and propaganda efforts. In recent years the opening of Soviet archives has afforded considerable insight into the strategies and motives on the Soviet side, supplementing previous accounts that often had to be written largely based on the point of view of the Western Allied and surviving Germans.
Invasion
Stalemate
Soviet initiative
Casualties
Historiography
Timeline
Reference
External links
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