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Don River

July and August of 1942: Why Operation Blue Began to Falter

on Mon, 04/09/2018 - 18:38

Traditional accounts of Germany's 1942 summer offensive on the Eastern Front (codenamed Operation Blue) describe the tyranny of time, space, and distance all working together to undermine German efforts. Couple that with the Red Army's wise decision to pull back, draw the Germans in, and only then stand and fight, using its superior size and strength to beat the Axis forces, and you have a conventional wisdom that proved surprisingly enduring.

As it turns out a huge chunk of this conventional wisdom has already been proven to be more myth than reality.