When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler

415 Pages·1995·3.83 MB·English

by  David M. Glantz

When Titans Clashed HOW THE RED ARMY STOPPED HITLER
David M. Glantz Jonathan M. House Maps by Darin Grauberger and George F.
McCleary, Jr.
In memory of an able historian and fine friend, Colonel Paul Adair, British Army
Retired, who worked so hard to reveal the human dimension of the War on the
Eastern Front
Contents
List of Maps and Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PRELUDE: 1918-1941
1 The Red Army, 1918-1939
2 Armed Truce, 1939-1941
3 Opposing Armies, 1941
FIRST PERIOD OF WAR: JUNE 1941-NOVEMBER 1942
4 German Onslaught
5 Soviet Response
6 To Moscow
7 Rasputitsa, Spring 1942
8 Operation Blau: The German Drive on Stalingrad SECOND PERIOD OF
WAR: NOVEMBER 1942-DECEMBER 1943
9 Operation Uranus: The Destruction of Sixth Army 10 Rasputitsa and
Operational Pause, Spring 1943
11 Kursk to the Dnepr
THIRD PERIOD OF WAR: JANUARY 1944-MAY 1945
12 Third Winter of the War
13 Operation Bagration: The Death of Army Group Center 14 Clearing the
Flanks
15 Battles in the Snow, Winter 1945
16 End Game
17 Conclusion
Appendixes: Statistical Tables Archival Sources
Notes
About the Authors
Index
Maps and Illustrations MAPS
Theater of Operations
Threat Assessment and Deployment Plan, October 1941
Summer-Fall Campaign (1), 22 June-30 September 1941
Soviet Dispositions on 31 July 1941 and Reinforcements to 31 December 1942
Summer-Fall Campaign (2), 1 October-December 1941
Winter Campaign, December 1941-April 1942
Summer-Fall Campaign, May-October 1942
file:///C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/Temp/Rar$EX00.494/WTC.htm[1/19/2011
1:52:33 PM]
Soviet Dispositions on 30 April 1942 and Reinforcements to 31 December 1942
Winter Campaign, November 1942-March 1943
Soviet Counteroffensives at Stalingrad Operation Mars
Summer-Fall Campaign, June-December 1943
Soviet Defensive Actions in the Battle of Kursk, 5-23 July 1943
Winter Campaign, December 1943-April 1944
Summer-Fall Campaign, June-October 1944
Belorussian Operation, June-August 1944
Winter Campaign to April 1945
Berlin Operation I, 16-19 April 1945
Berlin Operation II, 19-25 April 1945
Berlin Operation III, 25 April-8 May 1945
Assault on Berlin, 21 April-5 May 1945
ILLUSTRATIONS (PHOTO INSERT) "Under the banner of Lenin, forward
to victory!" (poster, 1941) "The Motherland calls!" (poster, 1941) Chiefs of the
Red Army
Marshal of the Soviet Union G. K. Zhukov, Stavka representative, Western and
1st Belorussian Front commander General of the Army N. F. Vatutin, Voronezh
and 1st Ukrainian Front commander Marshal of the Soviet Union I. S. Konev
and his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General M. V. Zakharov, planning the Korsun'-
Shevchenkovskii operation, January 1943
Marshal of the Soviet Union R. Ia. Malinovsky, 2d Ukrainian Front commander
Marshal of the Soviet Union K. K. Rokossovsky, 3d Belorussian Front
commander General of the Army I. Kh. Bagramian, 1st Baltic Front commander,
1944
General of the Army I. D. Cherniakhovsky, 3d Belorussian Front commander,
1944
Lieutenant General P. A. Rotmistrov, 5th Guards Tank Army commander, and
his staff Surviving Soviet front commanders at war's end Colonel M. T. Leonov,
commander of the Voronezh Front's 112th Tank Brigade, and his brigade staff
conduct tabletop training for a forthcoming operation in the Kursk region, 1943
Soviet "Shturmovik" aircraft in action, 1943
Red Army "Katiusha" multiple rocket launchers firing during the battle of
Kursk, 1943
Soviet T-34 tanks in the attack
Soviet infantry assault
Soviet infantry assault
Soviet tanks and infantry assault a village Soviet tank column enters a city
Soviet tank and infantry assault, Kursk 1943
Soviet tank assault with infantry on board tanks, Kursk 1943
Soviet forces crossing the Dnepr, November 1943
Soviet attack on a German column, Belgorod-Khar'kov operation, August 1943
A defeated German soldier, Kursk 1943
German prisoners of war in the streets of Moscow, July 1944
"Glory to the Red Army!" (poster, 1946) Acknowledgments
The authors owe a special debt to historians who have long struggled to unearth
the truths of the German-Soviet war, among them a host of Russian military
historians who have had to contend with the awesome task of conducting
historical research and writing within stifling and rigid ideological constraints. It
is indeed remarkable, and a testament to their doggedness and skill, that so many
have succeeded in determining and revealing truth despite formidable obstacles.
Among Western military historians, Malcolm Macintosh and John Erickson
stand colossal in their field. Their massive contributions in the study of the Red
Army served as inspiration and models for this work, and their contributions
have well endured the test of time. Earl F. Ziemke, Albert Seaton, and many
others who have worked from primarily German archival materials on the War in
the East deserve similar recognition, as do numerous German veterans who have
written memoirs about a war against a shadowy enemy.
Above all, the authors acknowledge the millions of Soviet and German soldiers
who fought, suffered, and died in this titanic and brutal struggle.
Their sacrifice demands that this story be told.
Finally, heartfelt thanks go to the able editors of the University Press of Kansas
and to Mary Ann Glantz, who were instrumental in putting this book into
presentable form.
Introduction
file:///C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/Temp/Rar$EX00.494/WTC.htm[1/19/2011
1:52:33 PM]
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has passed from the world scene.
Appropriately enough, its death throes in August 1991, like its birth in 1917,
were marked by the refusal of the armed forces to repress opponents of the
conservative government in power. With this demise, the intensive Cold War
study of Soviet history and institutions may seem irrelevant.
Yet the decline and death of the USSR has provided historians with
unprecedented sources and opportunities to integrate Soviet experience into the
broader history of Russia and Europe as a whole. These sources and
opportunities are particularly significant in regard to a seemingly familiar topic
—the Soviet defeat of National Socialist Germany in World War II.
For decades, both popular and official historians in the West presented the
Soviet-German struggle largely from the German point of view.1 As a practical
matter, German archives and memoirs have been readily available as sources
about this struggle since the 1950s, whereas their Soviet equivalents were
obscured by difficulties of ideology, access, and language. Even when published
in translation, most popular Soviet accounts of the war were filled with
obligatory communist rhetoric that made their factual assertions appear to be so
much propaganda. Westerners quite naturally viewed with suspicion the many
detailed Russian-language accounts of the war and the few Western studies that
relied on them.
Consciously or unconsciously, however, German accounts were often just as
biased as their Soviet counterparts, warping our understanding of the titanic
struggle that occurred on what the Germans taught us to call the "Eastern Front."
German officers such as Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and Major General F.
W. von Mellenthin wrote about the war in Russia based primarily on their
experiences during 1941-1943, when the Red Army was still recovering from the
purges of the 1930s and the surprise of the German invasion. The senior German
commanders of 1944-1945, the period of the greatest Soviet triumphs, left few
memoirs.2 If they escaped capture or death, they were loath to dwell on the
series of defeats they suffered at the hands of their opponents. Thus our view of
Soviet military capabilities and performance was twisted by an error equivalent
to evaluating American war performance based on the American defeats
immediately after Pearl Harbor.
The Soviets themselves, however, devoted enormous energy to the study of their
"Great Patriotic War." Even today, with the USSR gone, virtually all former
Soviet officers and officers of the Soviet Union's former allies view military
affairs through the prism of 1941-1945. The idea of military history as a Marxist
science produced a remarkably frank and open Soviet literature about the war.
Once Premier N. S. Khrushchev began to de-Stalinize official history in the late
1950s, World War II Soviet commanders at all levels felt free to publish their
memoirs of the war. Such memoirs were subject to considerable censorship and
deliberately avoided certain embarassing political and military topics. With these
memoirs appeared a host of detailed operational studies necessary for the proper
education of future Soviet military leaders. Moreover, few Soviet military
writers, including senior commanders, had full access to surviving archival war
records. Within these constraints, however, these publications were frequently
honest, largely accurate regarding place, time, and event (although not always
consequence), and even critical about many of those wartime decisions they
were permitted to describe.
In recent years, the gradual Soviet collapse has led to increasing frankness on
economic, political, diplomatic, and military matters, including publication of
many documents, as well as extensive, yet still limited, access to Soviet archives
and archival products. While these recent disclosures were naturally subject to
censorship before they were published, many of the extensive military
documents have been released in full and without editing. The authenticity and
accuracy of these works can now be verified by comparing them with the many
archival materials that fell into German hands in wartime and into Western hands
in the postwar years. In the absence of complete access to Soviet participants and
archival records, this body of recent archival publications and disclosures still
represents a considerable advance in our understanding of the war.
When compared with the more traditional accounts of the Eastern Front derived
from German sources, these archival materials allow us to develop a far more
complete synthesis of that war.
This book summarizes ongoing research and reinterpretations of the Soviet-
German conflict based on newly released Soviet archival studies.
Because the bulk of new sources are Soviet, this study emphasizes the Soviet
side as much as previous histories exaggerated the German version of events.
What emerges is an intensely human story of leadership errors, military
adaptation under the pressures of war, disruption and suffering on a gigantic
scale, and incredible endurance by both German and Soviet citizens. An
understanding of this story is essential for historians to correct some mistaken
generalizations about World War II.
PRELUDE
1918-1941