Holding the Line at Smolensk: The Red Army s Bloody Attempt To Stop the Nazi Juggernaut
In Smolensk during the summer of 1941, the Soviet Red Army attempted to slow Hitler s Operation Barbarossa.
Here s What You Need to Know: The Red Army suffered over 600,000 casualties, including almost 400,000 men taken prisoner.
After crushing the first-line Soviet armies in brutal three-week cauldron battles at the border, the steamroller of German Army Group Center continued deeper into Soviet territory during the opening days of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941.
The twin armored spearheads of Army Group Center were Panzer Group 2 under the command of General Heinz Guderian and Panzer Group 3 under extremely capable tank general Hermann Hoth. Their coordinated offensive on July 10, 1941, unleashed the Battle of Smolensk, a bloody struggle around the ancient Russian city that was to last two long months.
Weeks of heavy fighting produced the first Red Army victory of the war on the Eastern Front.
Here s What You Need to Know: Although Yelnya became nothing more than a footnote in the history of the war on the Eastern Front, it showed what a determined Red Army could accomplish.
The smell of victory was in the air as the forces of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center continued to drive deep into the Ukraine during the final week of June 1941. To most of the young soldiers of the army group it seemed that this would be another unstoppable blitzkrieg. Their commander, however, saw things differently.
Hitler and Stalin Wrestled for Stalingrad - and the Fate of the World
It will never be known how many people died at Stalingrad. Some postwar estimates claim that Chuikov lost over a million soldiers in his effort to hold the city, but that figure is almost certainly exaggerated. Still, the loss of life was appalling.
After Adolf Hitler’s audacious invasion of Russia finally ground to a halt in December 1941 on the forested outskirts of Moscow, the exhausted German Army stabilized its winter front in a line running roughly from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. The strain of the harsh winter campaign upon the ill-prepared Wehrmacht, as well as the severe strain placed on the Luftwaffe in its prolonged efforts to air-supply the army’s string of city-bastions along the front, was tremendous. But despite the horrendous losses they had suffered in the heavy fighting of 1941 a staggering 850,000 casualties the Germans remained confident that they would master the Red Ar