Status Updates From The Road to Stalingrad: Sta...

the German breackthrough to the south-east in july '42 brought an eruption in the Soviet command. While there must be no more stand-fast disasters, there was every reason to hang on grimly at Voronezh, not merely to hold German forces which might otherwise turn south, but also to cover the Tambov-Saratov area ... throuch which ran MOSCOW's COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE EAST and alternative oil supplies.

17/05/42 operation Fredericus with one prong only aimed straight for the south of the Izyum bulge, where Kleist's First Panzer & the Seventeenth Army would dig into Timoshenko's open flank, threatening the rear of the Soviet shock group (9th & 57th armies) battering its way north-west from the bulge.

Towards the end of March, on the eve of Stalin's last lunge at his strategic objectives, the multiple Soviet penetrations were deep enough to trouble most ofthe German command [YET]not one of the Armeegruppen had been ripped to pieces, tough the ragged edges of their lines & the deep penetrations into their flanks attested to the enormity of the crisis through which they were slowly but now more surely passing.

For the penetration into Armygroup South (the Donbas & Charkiv area), the Russians fought from their snow forts, the Germans huddled in the warmth of hurs and houses, so that while the high command fought for strategic objectives, the infantrymen grappled with each other in a hunt for simple but essential warmth, with merciless persistence.

"Not that the formal Front command organisation was sacred to Stalin. When he required, he merely connected himself by direct wire or telephone to the formation commander he wished to advise or chastise, directing the hunting of the Germans westward himself... but on the battlefronts it needed more than this verbal grapeshot to sweep away the great iron rocks of German resistance which stood out in a Soviet sea.

Barely had Zhukov & Timoshenko "saved Moscow" by pushing Army Group Center back to the Volga, than Stalin envisioned a final push against Army Group Center to Smolensk via the junction with North, even while Guderian's 3rd Panzer Group was still at large.

With its armoured wings peeling of to the isolation of Leningrad & encirclements in Ukraine, Army Group Centre itself would go over to the defensive.. after blood drenched weeks when Timoshenko sucked 9 German divisions into a savage battle of attrition in the "Yelnaya bend", the Soviet barrier 50 miles east of Smolensk on high ground vital for the development of any blow directed against Moscow.

Locked up in the Kremlin, master of a world which he had created by his own selective killings & which reflected back upon him only those images he had himself ordained, steeped in his own genius & fed on its outpourings, Stalin could rage away dissension and doubt from whatever quarter it came.

The designation of Special to a military district signified that these were operational groupings capable of carrying out operations for a limited period without the mobilisation of additional reserves; ordinary district armies were for all practical purposes administrative organisations. The special districts had their headquarters in Riga (Baltic) Minsk (Western) & Kiev.