Russia at war 1941-1945

forces... in order to achieve certain successes. That is what happened, on the Kerch peninsula... But such local successes cannot decide the outcome of the war. The

German Army of 1942 is not what it was a year ago. The picked German troops have,

in the main, been destroyed... The German army cannot carry out offensive operations

on a scale similar to last year's. [Emphasis added.]

But even if this optimistic propaganda was believed for a short while it was very soon to be disproved by events and as the German offensive progressed throughout the summer

of 1942, the feeling that Russia—Holy Russia—was again in mortal danger grew from

day to day. True, there was not the same feeling of bewilderment as in the early days of the invasion in 1941, and the German failure to seize either Moscow or Leningrad had created an undercurrent of hope—and perhaps even the conviction—that "something"

good would happen again. Even so, whereas the communiqués in May and the greater

part of June were vague but reasonably optimistic, those that followed were to spread almost undiluted gloom throughout the country.

Hitler's Directive No. 41, drawn up in the spring of 1942 outlined the main aims of the German summer campaign; but certain important changes were then made in the course

of the campaign itself. Briefly, Hitler's plan boiled down to this: first, liquidation of the Russians in the Crimea (Kerch and Sebastopol); second, the capture of Voronezh, which would present the double advantage of constituting a serious German threat both to

Central Russia south-east of Moscow (Tambov-Saratov area), as well as to Stalingrad; third, the encirclement and liquidation of the main Russian forces inside the Don bend, with one German pincer striking south-east from Voronezh, and the other north-east from Taganrog; fourth, after thus clearing the way to Stalingrad, either capture the city on the Volga, or at any rate destroy it completely by bombing, and then turn due south towards the Caucasus, and capture the oil areas of Maikop, Grozny and Baku, and finally reach the southern frontier of the Soviet Union, which would probably bring Turkey into the war on the side of the Axis Powers. The plan also provided, among other things, for

another attempt to capture Leningrad.

But once the campaign had started, a number of major and, as it proved, fatal, changes were made in this plan. First the Russians stopped the Germans at Voronezh and

secondly, they did not allow themselves to be trapped—at least not in large numbers—

inside the Don Bend. These, and a few other factors (such as the easy German capture of Rostov) made Hitler change his original plan. As Chuikov was to comment later:

This logical and coherent plan was abandoned; and so, instead of doing his utmost in using the bulk of his forces to capture Stalingrad during the third phase of the campaign, and then proceed to capture the oil areas in the Caucasus, Hitler decided to carry out two operations simultaneously: capture Stalingrad and invade theCaucasus.

[V. I. Chuikov, Nachalo puti (The Beginning of the Road). (Moscow, 1959), p. 18.]

The big German offensive which began over a wide front on June 28—i.e. a few days

before the fall of Sebastopol, which was by now a foregone conclusion—assumed at first all the old characteristics of the blitzkrieg. Telpukhovsky's semi-official history of the war, published in 1959 briefly sums up the situation in June-July as follows:

Our forced abandonment of the Crimea and our defeat at Kharkov substantially

changed the situation along the whole southern part of the front in the Germans'

favour. Once more the enemy was able to take the initiative... On June 10 the

Germans started offensive operations in the Kharkov sector, and on June 28 they