Eastern front (1941-5). The campaign on the eastern front was the largest land campaign ever fought. It was unsurpassed in the length of the front, depth of the advance and retreat, duration of continuous fighting, and the size of the armies on each side. It was unique, too, in the scale of violence and the number of casualties. It was the last great extensive war of the age of coal, steel, and railways; weapons of mass destruction have ruled out another such massive ground war between great powers. It was very different from the campaign fought up to 1945 in the west or in the Pacific. For geographical, technological, and historical reasons neither naval forces nor strategic air forces were much used by either the Germans or the Soviets. Although a war of machines and of movement, the eastern front was essentially a war between ground forces, albeit between armies with a large motorized component and huge tactical air forces employed as flying artillery.
The extraordinary early successes against the numerically superior Red Army achieved by the attacking German forces in BARBAROSSA had a number of explanations: the efficiency and experience of the Wehrmacht, the ability of Germans to concentrate the bulk of these forces in the east, the exposed position of the enemy forces along the new Soviet western frontier, and the operational (see operational level of war) and tactical surprise achieved on 22 June 1941. In many respects the Wehrmacht succeeded in its initial objective of destroying known Soviet forces in the western frontier zones. In encirclements extraordinary in military history, the panzer formations of von Bock's Army Group Centre had by the end of the first week of the war trapped the main mass of the Pavlov's Western Army Group in the region west of Minsk. Leeb's Army Group North had meanwhile secured crossings over the river Dvina, opening the way into the Baltic region and Leningrad. In mid-July another grand German encirclement was completed by Army Group Centre east of Smolensk. Some historians perceive a critical German mistake in Hitler's decision to secure the flanks in the Ukraine and Leningrad rather than pushing on immediately to Moscow, which was only 220 miles (354 km) to the east. In particular, when Hitler ordered the transfer of Guderian's Panzergruppe from Army Group Centre to Army Group South, which had been making a relatively slow advance into the Ukraine, the result was a decisive success in the Kiev encirclement but a missed chance to take the Soviet capital.
The battle of Smolensk (July-September 1941) was thus a protracted affair, and the point when Soviet resistance in the centre began to stiffen. Only in early September did Guderian's group again become available as part of what became the final offensive of the year, TAIFUN. The attack had early successes, creating another huge pocket in the Briansk-Viazma area west and south-west of Moscow and setting off a panicky evacuation of the Soviet capital in the middle of October. At this point the weather intervened in the form of the autumn mud and then the winter snow. Stalin remained in Moscow, and the Soviets' ability to mobilize reserves, including formations transferred from the Far East and Siberia, proved telling. The Zhukov counter-attack before Moscow came at the start of December. Within two weeks Hitler had himself replaced Brauchitsch as army C-in-C. The Germans now suffered their first really serious ground-war setback of WW II, as a series of successful Red Army offensives were launched along the length of the front. The Red Army did not have the operation skill it was to display in a similar situation in the following winter (at Stalingrad) or in the winter of 1943-4, nor did it have comparable resources. The Germans were able to stabilize the situation, and indeed in the spring were to achieve some striking local successes, notably the battle of Kharkov where an armour-led advance by Timoshenko on the Ukrainian city was encircled, with the loss of another 250, 000 Soviet troops. By the winter of 1941-2, however, the Soviets had stabilized the northern and central parts of the front.
Timoshenko's failure at Kharkov cleared the way for the main German effort in 1942. BLAU began on the anniversary of BARBAROSSA, its objectives being the destruction of Soviet reserves and capture of Soviet oil production centres in the Caucasus, sensibly avoiding the strongest part of the Soviet defences, the central sector before Moscow. The Soviets made a long retreat across the Don steppe, avoiding the encirclements of the previous summer. Hitler is often criticized for dividing his forces as a result of his initial success; Army Group A was sent south-west toward the oilfields and Army Group B west toward Stalingrad, with the result that neither could fully complete their tasks. Gen Paulus's Sixth Army did reach the outskirts of Stalingrad in early September and the famous—and pointless, in terms of overall German strategy—street-fighting epic began. It culminated in Gens Vasilevskii and Zhukov's URAN in mid-November 1942, which broke through the flanks of the Axis line and trapped Sixth Army within the ruins of Stalingrad. Hitler, on the model of his successful ‘fanatical defence’ directive of the previous winter, would not allow Paulus to break out. Air supply of the pocket proved impossible, and in mid-January 1943 the newly promoted FM Paulus surrendered. The exposed southern part of the front was rolled up, Rostov was recaptured by the Red Army, and Kleist's Army Group A was only with difficulty extracted from the Caucasus.
The eastern front: the Axis on the attack, 1941-3.
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The eastern front: the Soviet advance into central Europe and the defeat of Germany, 1943-5.
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Although the Wehrmacht had to give up all the ground captured in 1942, and even some of the positions held since the winter of 1941-2, it was able to stabilize the situation after the Stalingrad defeat. There was even a final German victory in the east, when Kharkov was recaptured in February-March 1943. But the overall outlook was poor, and not just on the eastern front. With each campaigning season the extent of the German effort had been reduced. The objective of the next, and last, major German offensive operation—ZITADELLE—was to destroy the large Soviet salient, halfway between Moscow and the Black Sea and centred on the town of Kursk. The Germans built up local strength, both numerical and qualitative, and fought the largest concentrated tank battle of the war. The offensive from north and south of the bulge began early in July 1943 and was brought to a halt by the layers of the Soviet field defences. The battle of Kursk showed the Soviets could fight successfully in the summer, and after it the Germans no longer could, losing the strategic initiative irrevocably, something underlined by the simultaneous Allied landing in Sicily. The Soviet counter-offensives that followed removed, in turn, German salients around Orel (KUTUZOV) and Belgorod-Kharkov (RUMIANTSEV). By the end of the autumn of 1943 the Red Army had reached the line of the Dnepr river and crossed it at a number of points.
The traditional Soviet view sees a third period of the war in the east from January 1944 to May 1945, and this does form a coherent period. The Soviets now combined abundant resources of matériel with a mature command system and military structure. Using concentrated mobile forces, especially the Guards Tank Armies, and backing them with massed artillery and tactical air power, they finally achieved those ‘deep operations’ which had been the focus of Soviet strategic thought in the 1930s. Soviet propagandists spoke of the ‘10 Stalinist crushing blows’ of 1944. The first of these was the recapture of the ‘right bank’ Ukraine west of the Dnepr in December 1943-April 1944, followed by the recapture of the Crimea in April-May. At about the same time, in January-March, at the other end of the front, the German stranglehold around Leningrad was finally broken. Shortly after D-Day in Normandy came two more major offensives. The first, the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk operation north-west of Leningrad (June-August 1944), forced the Finns to sign an armistice. Much more important in the overall course of the war was BAGRATION in Belorussia, which led to the destruction of FM Busch's Army Group Centre; in another extraordinary victory organized by Zhukov and Vasilevskii the Red Army advanced 350 miles (563 km). BAGRATION was shortly followed by breakouts further south, the Lvov-Sandomierz operation (July-August 1944), in what had been south-east Poland, and the Jassy-Kishinev operation (August 1944), which captured Moldavia (in Bessarabia), led Romania to change sides, and opened the road to the Balkans.
These striking successes, up to the autumn of 1944, were still largely being fought to recapture Soviet territory, at least taking into account the annexations of 1939-40. This process would be completed by the Baltic operation in September-November 1944, except for German units trapped in Kurland (in western Latvia). Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1944 the Red Army began the campaign for the ‘liberation’ of east central Europe that would indirectly have such a telling effect on post-war international relations. Having already occupied Romania the Red Army quickly invaded Bulgaria (an Axis member but not an active anti-Soviet belligerent) in September 1944. The Belgrade operation (September-October 1944) took the Red Army into Yugoslavia, and the Debrecen and Budapest operations (October 1944-February 1945) into Hungary.
By 1945 the Third Reich was on its last legs, under siege from east and west. The most striking Soviet success of this period was the Vistula-Oder Operation (January-February 1945) in which Zhukov and Koniev took the Red Army from the middle of Poland to the approaches to Berlin. The flanks of this operation were secured by hard fighting in East Prussia and Lower Silesia. The final battle of Berlin began in mid-April 1945 and ended with the German surrender.
Historians will probably not cease to see a range of explanations for the outcome of the fighting on the eastern front. Is the outcome to be explained by mistakes of Hitler and the German high command, by Soviet military skill, by geography and climate, or by the Soviet numerical advantage? It could be argued that the Soviet campaign was essential and unavoidable for the government in power in Germany, given its ultra-nationalist and ideological programme. It was also a campaign premissed from the German side on faulty ‘technical’ military intelligence and an underestimation of the Soviets based on racialist theory; the invasion of the USSR was thus essentially based on political factors rather than military ones. Once the Soviet system did not collapse in the summer and autumn of 1941 the defeat of Germany in the campaign, and in the war in general, was probably inevitable. This is not to say that Hitler's defeat was not hastened by the remarkable rebirth of the Red Army's fighting qualities in the later part of the war and by a Soviet readiness to take very high losses.
Arguments will continue about the relative importance of the eastern front in the overall history of WW II. Hopefully with the end of the Cold War these historical disagreements will become less politicized. The Soviets certainly paid the heaviest price in lives and territory, but that does not in itself make their role decisive. They did engage, in the middle part of WW II, much the greater part of mobile German ground forces, and they inflicted huge losses on those forces. On the other hand the decisive defeat of Nazi Germany would probably have been impossible without Allied naval control of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, without American and Commonwealth ground operations (especially from mid-1943), and without the strategic bombing campaign. Although the USSR could and did survive without the ‘second front’, the retaking of the western borderlands and the advance into central Europe would have taken much longer and would have cost even more. At the same time the operations of the Americans and British would not have been decisive—in the framework of pre-atomic technology or barring political changes in Germany—without the immense contribution of the eastern front.
Bibliography
- Erickson, John, The Road to Berlin (Boulder, Colo., 1983).
- —— The Road to Stalingrad (New York, 1975).
- Glantz, David M., and House, Jonathan, When Titans Clash: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, Kan., 1995).
- Wiesczynski, Joseph L. (ed.), Operation Barbarossa: The German Attack on the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941 (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1993).
- Ziemke, Earl, and Bauer, Magna, Moscow to Stalingrad: Decisions in the East (Washington, 1987)
— Evan Mawdsley
