By August of 1942 reinforcements sent to assist Army Group B's drive on Stalingrad had transformed the German Sixth Army from a potent assembly of men and machines to the most powerful army in the world, with 22 divisions and supporting units under the command of General Friedrich Paulus. Facing the Sixth Army, and Fourth Panzer Army's seven German and four Romanian divisions, was a Soviet Stalingrad Front that had been decimated in July.
Early in 1945 the Japanese war machine was in a sorry state: “American submarines and aircraft destroyed in four years almost all of Japan’s merchant fleet. It was radically defeated even before American bombs incinerated the cities and Roosevelt obtained the entry into the war of the Soviet Union.”(1) Immediately after the surrender, the Japanese government confessed that shipping losses were the main reason behind defeat.(2) Japanese failure to protect its merchant fleet and thwart the U.S.
If one is seeking to understand how and why the Second World War ended as it did it's instructive to take a look at Soviet planning during the fall of 1942. It represented everything German planning was not. First, unlike the chaos at OKH during the fall of 1942 (the third full year of war for the German high command and a time when you would have thought a competent leadership team would have been nailed down and in place), the Soviet Union had a stable military and political high command.
In a previousseriesofarticles I examined the state of play on the German Sixth Army's flanks outside of Stalingrad during the Axis assault on the city. In this follow-up article I would like to take a look at the Romanian Third Army's positions opposite the "bridgeheads" that would prove so crucial in the eventual success of the Soviet Southwestern Front's portion of the Red Army's November 19, 1942 counter-offensive. First, let's examine the formation of these bridgeheads over the Don River and why they were so important.
Between July 6th and October 24, 1942 the Red Army launched
The initial plans for Germany's 1942 summer offensive, code-named "Operation Blue" called for four sequential operations. The first, Blue I, featured the Four Panzer Army, German Second Army, and German Sixth Army all working together to encircle and destroy Soviet forces before the city of Voronezh along the upper Don River. The second part of the campaign, Blue II, called for the German Sixth Army to turn south in hopes of engineering a planned encirclement at Millerovo on the Donets River.
Since the Second World War ended it has been popular to present the Soviet Union as an overwhelming economic and military colossus that was essentially undefeatable by 1942 if not earlier in the war. The groundwork for this belief was laid by German officers who after the war sought to cast blame for their own failures of leadership. American military leaders then latched onto these aguments. Doubtlessly this occured in part as a response to the Cold War era Communist threat.
Last year I published a series of articles examining some of the significant but often overlooked Soviet counterstrokes directed against the Sixth Army's flanks outside Stalingrad. To this day, when one thinks of the exposed northwestern shoulder of Germany's drive into the Caucuses, and Soviet efforts to penetrate that flank, they think first and foremost of events exactly like those. However, what one needs to understand is that from Case Blue's first days the Red Army proved far from a passive defender.
In examining the how and why of Operation Barbarossa's failure there is still a significant contingent of historians who believe the sheer numerical superiority of the Red Army had doomed Germany to defeat as early as the late summer of 1941. For instance, the vast majority of David Stahel's decade long work posits that the Wehrmacht in general, but the German army (Heer) in particular, had shot their bolt as early as August of 1941. Oftentimes, exhibit A for those making this argument is the manner in which Barbarossa fell apart late in 1941. It is my contention however, that events on
On June 22, 1941 Nazi Germany launched it's invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed Operation Barbarossa). The Germans concentrated the bulk of their effort in three massive Army Groups (North, Center, and South). In this article, we shall take a look at Army Group South's operations during Barbarossa as well as examine the condition in which the Army Group stood as several key points in the campaign. In this way we can better assess how and why Army Group South fell short in terms of taking its objectives for Barbarossa.
There are some that believe the sheer numerical superiority of the Red Army and Allies doomed Germany to defeat less than two years after continent wide war resumed in Europe late in 1939. For instance, the vast majority of David Stahel's decade long work posits that the Wehrmacht in general, but the German army (Heer) in particular, had shot their bolt as early as August of 1941. In assessing such claims this article will take a look at the primary component of the German army's striking power - it's panzer divisions.
