By Pat McTaggart
During the winter of 1941, both the Red Army and the German Wehrmacht experienced a terrifying bloodletting. Adolf Hitler’s seemingly invincible armies, having advanced hundreds of miles inside the Soviet Union, were slowed by the October muddy season that had turned all but a few roads into almost impassible quagmires. Then came the snow and the cold—a paralyzing cold that was claimed as the worst in a hundred years.
On the night of December 5, STAVKA (the Soviet Supreme Command) launched a massive offensive that drove the Germans back from the gates of Moscow. By the end of March 1942, the Soviet offensive had run its course. Red Army forces had advanced almost 200 miles in some areas, at the cost of more than a half-million casualties. The Germans also suffered heavily. According to an entry in Army Chief of Staff GeneralOberst Franz Halder’s diary, the total of Germans killed, wounded, and sick between November 1, 1941, and April 1, 1942, was almost 900,000, with the majority being lost on the Eastern Front.
Although the main Soviet effort took place on the northern and central sectors of the front, Russian forces had also made gains in the south, especially in the area around the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov. In January 1942, four Soviet armies struck the boundary of the German 6th and 17th Armies in the area near Izyum, about 70 miles southeast of Kharkov. The Russian attack was aimed at creating a future jumping-off point from which they could strike at the main southern crossings of the Dnieper River. They would also be in a position to attack either north toward the key communication center of Kharkov or south into the rear of the 17th Army.
The German Army, trained as an offensive force from the beginning of its revival in 1933, was forced to improvise its defensive operations. The 6th (GeneralOberst Friedrich Paulus) and 17th (General der Infanterie Hans von Salmuth) Armies were no exception. As the Russians struck the German front line, it was often up to the commander at the scene to make life or death decisions for his men. While tank-supported infantry units overran several German positions, others held out, creating breakwaters in the ocean of attacking Russians.
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And once again the Russians have been ejected from Izyum and the nearby localities, this time by the Ukrainian Army.