Gerasimova - The Rzhev slaughterhouse : the Red Army’s forgotten 15-month campaign against Army Group Center, 1942-1943

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Published by Helion & Company 2013

Designed and typeset by Farr out Publications, Wokingham, Berkshire
Cover designed by Euan Carter, Leicester (www.euancarter.com)
Printed by Gutenberg Press Limited, Tarxien, Malta

Text Svetlana Gerasimova 2013. English edition translated and edited by Stuart Britton,
Helion & Company Limited 2013.
Maps Helion & Company Limited 2013. Maps designed by Paul Hewitt, Battlefield
Design (www.battlefield-design.co.uk)
For of photographs see credits within the book.

Originally published as 1941: Viazemskaia katastrofa (Moscow: Yauza, Eksmo, 2008).

ISBN: 978 1 908916 51 8
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 910294 17 8

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Front cover: Burning Soviet T-34 tank. (Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild F-016221-0016).

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Contents

List of photographs

List of maps

In colour section

List of map abbreviations

List of tables

Introduction

T hat there are still blank spots in the history of the Great Patriotic War [the Russian name for the Eastern Front of the Second World War] is indisputable even 65 years after its conclusion. To be sure, in the last 20 years much has been done to reduce their number. New documents have been published, previously unknown facts have been introduced into scholarly circulation, and books, articles and papers on individual wartime events and episodes have appeared that contain alternative assessments to the official ones.

This, in particular relates to the history of combat operations in the region of the Rzhev Viazma salient in 1942 and early 1943. In the Soviet era, they never became a subject of serious scholarly research by military historians. For ideological reasons, an objective study of them was taboo. The volume of information about what took place on this sector of the front increased only gradually, as the Soviet government strictly controlled the release of factual material about the battles to the public.

By the start of the political changes in Soviet society in the middle of the 1980s, textbook, research and memoir literature recognized three major Soviet offensives on the Moscow axis in the period of the Great Patriotic War that we are examining here: the Rzhev Viazma strategic offensive of 1942, the Rzhev Sychevka offensive in July-August 1942, and the Rzhev Viazma offensive of 1943. The operations were always described in positive terms, while downplaying or concealing blunders and failures. One more offensive operation at the end of 1942 was very rarely mentioned, sometimes even without a name, which is today known as Operation Mars. There was no attempt to link these operations, even though they involved the very same fronts virtually on the same territory and had essentially a common aim the destruction of the German Army Group Center.

The official assessment of the fighting in the area of the Rzhev Viazma salient in the Soviet era was unequivocal. In response to a query from the Rzhev Regional Museum, the USSR Ministry of Defenses Institute of Military History said, The fighting in the area of Rzhev was part of the overall battle for Moscow. This official response created a paradoxical situation: if according to the official determination of those times the Battle of Moscow concluded on 20 April 1942, while its main results before this date were determined by the end of December 1941, then where do the operations of the Red Army on this sector of the front in the summer and winter of 1942 and the spring of 1943 belong? If they should be considered part of the overall battle for Moscow, then according to this logic the Battle of Moscow ended with the liquidation of the German Rzhev bridgehead at the gates of the capital in March 1943. That is to say, the official point of view created more ambiguities than answers in the assessment of combat operations on the Moscow axis.

In the 1990s and the first years after the year 2000, interesting publications appeared, in particular regarding the Soviet casualties in the operations of the Great Patriotic War, including in the Rzhev Viazma area. Although these estimates were plainly conservative, the data immediately placed the combat operations in the Rzhev Gzhatsk Viazma area on par with the Battle of Stalingrad in terms of the casualties they generated. The study of Operation Mars written by the American historian David Glantz, and then its official Russian version as well filled one blank spot in the historiography of the Red Armys

These materials, as well as the wartime archival records, to which access for a certain time was expanded, allowed individual regional scholars and local historians to take a fresh look at the Red Armys operations directed at eliminating the dangerous German salient in the center of the Soviet-German front. While relying on the existing conceptual framework in military-historical studies, they smashed the accepted understanding and declared that between January 1942 and March 1943 there occurred on this sector of the front one of the bloodiest battles of the Great Patriotic War the Battle of Rzhev. In this case, the city of Rzhev stands as a symbol, giving its name to a battle that unfolded in the expansive Belyi Rzhev Zubtsov Sychevka Gzhatsk Viazma area, just as Moscow lent its name to a battle that sprawled over the territory of several oblasts.

This point of view about a separate battle on the Moscow axis has not been accepted by official military science. There are disputes as well over the enormous casualty figures from the fighting over the Rzhev Viazma salient. As a result, a strange situation has arisen. On the one hand, the presence of a great number of facts and documents upon which contemporary military historical theory rests permit one to view the combat operations of the Soviet and German forces in the area of the Rzhev Viazma salient as a battle distinct from the Battle of Moscow. On the other hand, the military-historical literature produced by government research institutes still clings to traditional assessments. Leading Soviet military historians, not wishing to see the obvious, took things even further: they accused the revisionists of distorting and besmirching the history of the war. One must agree with the opinion of the historian Iu.N. Afanasev, who asserts that too many personal fates, remembrances of youth and the pain of losses have been mixed into the existing historical boilerplate text: