Rzhev–Vyazma offensive (1942)

The Rzhev–Vyazma offensive was the first great attempt to turn the victory at Moscow into a decisive result on the Eastern Front. At the beginning of January 1942 Joseph Stalin concluded that the Wehrmacht, thrown back from the Soviet capital, was close to collapse, and ordered a general offensive along the whole front. The most important task fell to Colonel General Ivan Konev’s Kalinin Front and General of the Army Georgy Zhukov’s Western Front: striking from the north and the south-east, they were to close a pincer at Vyazma and destroy the main forces of Army Group Centre.

The plan failed. In January the Soviet armies broke deep into the German rear, and cavalry and paratroopers reached the very outskirts of Vyazma, but the exhausted, poorly supplied troops were unable to close the ring. The Germans, led by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge and the new commander of 9th Army, General Walter Model, sealed the breaches behind the attackers and turned their gains into pockets. By April, when the spring thaw brought the fighting to a halt, the Red Army had lost more than a quarter of a million men killed and missing, and a great salient around Rzhev and Vyazma, pointing at Moscow, remained on the map of the front.

Name and dates

In Soviet and Russian historiography the operation is called the Rzhev–Vyazma strategic offensive operation (Rzhevsko-Vyazemskaya strategicheskaya nastupatelnaya operatsiya) and is dated from 8 January to 20 April 1942. It comprised several front operations, including the Kalinin Front’s Sychyovka–Vyazma operation, the Western Front’s Mozhaisk–Vyazma operation and the Vyazma airborne operation. In parallel, from 9 January, the North-Western Front was conducting the Toropets–Kholm operation further north; from 22 January its armies came under Konev’s command.

The starting date marks the day on which the Kalinin Front’s shock groups went over to the attack in accordance with the Stavka directive of 7 January; the Western Front joined in on 10 January. The boundary between the Battle of Moscow and the new operation is a matter of convention: Konev’s armies had already broken through the German defences west of Rzhev in the first days of January, and in many places the fighting had continued without a break since December. On 20 April the troops of both fronts were ordered to go over to the defensive on the line Rzhev–Gzhatsk–Kirov–Zhizdra. The groups encircled behind German lines nevertheless fought on, some of them until June and July 1942.

German sources speak of the winter battles of Army Group Centre (Winterschlacht) or of the first battle of Rzhev. Russian veterans and historians called the fighting for the Rzhev salient, which went on intermittently from January 1942 to March 1943, “the Rzhev meat grinder” (rzhevskaya myasorubka).

Background

The counter-offensive at Moscow, launched on 5 and 6 December 1941, drove Army Group Centre back 100–250 kilometres from the capital. The Germans lost Kalinin, Klin, Volokolamsk, Kaluga and Maloyaroslavets, and their divisions – without winter equipment, bled white and stripped of most of their tanks – retreated in frosts reaching minus 40 degrees. Adolf Hitler responded with an order to hold positions at all costs and a purge of the high command. On 19 December he personally took over as Commander-in-Chief of the Army from Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and Kluge took over Army Group Centre from the ailing Field Marshal Fedor von Bock. Within a few weeks Colonel General Heinz Guderian was dismissed, followed on 8 January 1942 by Colonel General Erich Hoepner, whom Hitler expelled from the army for retreating without authorisation.

At the turn of the year Army Group Centre’s front formed an irregular arc. In the north, Colonel General Adolf Strauß’s 9th Army was defending the upper Volga around Rzhev and Zubtsov; in the centre, 4th Panzer Army and 4th Army held a line east of Mozhaisk, Vereya and Medyn; and in the south, west and south-west of Kaluga, a wide gap yawned in the German front, into which the Soviet 50th and 10th Armies and Major General Pavel Belov’s cavalry corps had advanced. The main supply artery of the whole army group was the Smolensk–Vyazma highway and railway, while 9th Army at Rzhev was supplied by a single railway line from Vyazma through Sychyovka.

Plan and forces

At a conference in the Kremlin on 5 January Stalin pushed through a general offensive from Leningrad to the Crimea, over the objections of Zhukov, who wanted to concentrate the reserves on the western axis. On 7 January the Stavka issued its directive to the Kalinin and Western Fronts. Konev’s right wing was to strike south from the area north-west of Rzhev, through Sychyovka towards Vyazma. Zhukov’s left wing was to advance from the Kaluga area on Yukhnov and on towards Vyazma, while the remaining armies of the Western Front were to attack frontally towards Sychyovka and Gzhatsk. The pincers were to close at Vyazma, and the encircled German forces around Rzhev, Vyazma, Yukhnov and Gzhatsk were to be split up and destroyed. On the southern flank the Bryansk Front was to cover the offensive, and 4th Airborne Corps was to be dropped behind German lines to cut the Vyazma–Smolensk highway and railway.

For the drive south the Kalinin Front had above all Lieutenant General Ivan Maslennikov’s 39th Army, Major General Vasily Shvetsov’s 29th Army and Colonel Sergei Sokolov’s 11th Cavalry Corps; the 22nd, 30th and 31st Armies attacked on neighbouring sectors. The Western Front fielded, among others, Lieutenant General Vasily Kuznetsov’s 1st Shock Army, Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov’s 20th Army, Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army, Lieutenant General Leonid Govorov’s 5th Army, Lieutenant General Mikhail Yefremov’s 33rd Army, the 43rd and 49th Armies, Lieutenant General Ivan Boldin’s 50th Army, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov’s 10th Army and Belov’s 1st Guards Cavalry Corps. According to the figures compiled by Grigori Krivosheev, some 1,059,000 Soviet soldiers took part in the operation. The number was impressive only on paper: divisions that had been fighting without respite since December were often only a few thousand strong, there was a shortage of tanks, artillery ammunition and transport, and in the deep snow supplies arrived by sledge.

On the German side this sector was held by the armies of Kluge’s Army Group Centre: 9th Army at Rzhev, 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies in the centre (the latter taken over from Hoepner by General Richard Ruoff), and 4th Army south-east of Vyazma, where on 20 January General Gotthard Heinrici replaced General Ludwig Kübler in command. In the south 2nd Panzer Army fought on, commanded after Guderian by General Rudolf Schmidt. The German divisions often had only a fraction of their establishment strength, but they defended themselves in villages where they could survive the frost, and their counter-attacks relied on small, well-led battle groups. Estimates of the strength of both sides in this operation vary widely and are uncertain.

Course of the operation

The breakthrough at Rzhev and the Western Front’s offensive (8–22 January)

The most dangerous breach for the Germans opened west of Rzhev. At the very beginning of January Maslennikov’s 39th Army broke through 9th Army’s front between its VI and XXIII Corps, and on 8 January the Kalinin Front’s shock groups pushed into the depth. By the middle of the month 39th Army had come out in the rear of the German grouping at Olenino and reached the Sychyovka area, where 9th Army had its headquarters, while 11th Cavalry Corps drove further south towards the Vyazma–Smolensk highway. 29th Army followed them into the breach. XXIII Corps, cut off west of Rzhev, had to be supplied by air.

On 10 January the Western Front went over to the attack. On its right wing 1st Shock Army and 20th Army, supported by 16th Army, broke through the German defences on the River Lama west of Volokolamsk and moved towards Shakhovskaya and Sychyovka. In the centre the 5th and 33rd Armies attacked along the Minsk highway and south of it. On 15 January Hitler for the first time in this campaign agreed to a substantial withdrawal: 4th Panzer Army and part of 4th Army were to fall back to the so-called winter position then being prepared between Yukhnov, Gzhatsk and Zubtsov. The Red Army thus recovered a number of towns: Medyn (14 January), Ruza (17 January), Vereya (19 January) and Mozhaisk (20 January), and on 22 January 5th Army reached Uvarovka. There, however, the offensive stalled. In February 5th Army bled itself white in fruitless attacks on the River Vorya, and the soldiers called the valley near Uvarovka the “Valley of Death”.

On the left wing Golikov’s 10th Army, attacking on a broad front almost a hundred kilometres wide, retook Kirov and Lyudinovo in the first half of January and reached the area of the Vyazma–Bryansk railway. At Sukhinichi, an important railway junction, it surrounded some 4,000 Germans under Major General Werner von Gilsa. Hitler forbade them to break out, and on 16 January XXIV Panzer Corps began concentrating near Zhizdra for a relief operation. The counter-stroke threw 10th Army back, and on 24 January the spearheads of 18th Panzer Division reached the Sukhinichi garrison. In the end the Germans withdrew from the town, which the Red Army occupied on 29 January; the headquarters of Rokossovsky’s 16th Army, transferred from the northern wing, took over this sector and stabilised the front.

The transfer of 16th Army was part of a wider problem. On 19 January, contrary to Zhukov’s plan, Stalin personally ordered 1st Shock Army to be withdrawn from the fighting and handed over to the North-Western Front, which was fighting at Demyansk. The Western Front thereby lost one of its few fresh armies just when a chance of a breakthrough was emerging on its right wing. Vlasov’s 20th Army was unable to cut through the German defences on its own and eventually went over to the defensive.

Model closes the breach at Rzhev (16 January – February)

Strauß, ill and at odds with Kluge, asked to be relieved in mid-January. On 15 January command of 9th Army was given to General of Panzer Troops Walter Model, until then a panzer corps commander, who took over on 16 January, passing over more than a dozen more senior generals. Model found his army in disarray, but he saw the enemy’s weakness: the Soviet armies that had entered the breach west of Rzhev were hanging on a narrow supply corridor. Instead of patching up the front, he decided to cut that corridor. When on 19 January Hitler wanted to hold back in reserve the units earmarked for the counter-attack, Model flew to his headquarters in East Prussia and, according to accounts, asked him point-blank who commanded 9th Army – he or the Führer. He was given a free hand.

On 22 January, in frosts reaching minus 40 degrees, VI Corps struck west from Rzhev, while the cut-off XXIII Corps attacked east to meet it. On 23 January the two groups met in the area of Nikolskoye and Solomino. 9th Army’s front was continuous again, and 39th Army, 11th Cavalry Corps and part of 29th Army were cut off from their rear. At the same time the Germans assembled in the Sychyovka area General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s XXXXVI Panzer Corps, with the 1st and 5th Panzer Divisions, 86th Infantry Division and most of the SS Division Das Reich, which cleared the ground between Sychyovka and the Volga. In heavy fighting at Osuyskoye and Klepenino, in frosts down to minus 50 degrees, Otto Kumm’s SS Regiment Der Führer held the neck of land between the two corps, losing almost its entire strength. By 5 February XXXXVI Panzer Corps had shut 29th Army into a tight pocket south-west of Rzhev.

Konev tried to save the encircled troops. On the night of 17–18 February he ordered 29th Army to break out westwards to 39th Army. By 28 February, according to Soviet figures, only about 5,200 men, including 800 wounded, had escaped from the pocket in the forests near Monchalovo; the rest of the army had been killed or taken prisoner. 39th Army and 11th Cavalry Corps held on in an extensive pocket between Rzhev, Bely and Sychyovka – cut off, but still a threat to 9th Army’s rear. Model, rewarded in those weeks with the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross and promotion to colonel general, became in Hitler’s eyes a specialist in hopeless situations.

On Vyazma: Belov, the paratroopers and 33rd Army (late January – February)

The southern arm of the pincers was to reach Vyazma from the south-east. On 17 January Zhukov ordered Yefremov’s 33rd Army, worn out by the fighting at Vereya, to advance on Vyazma. Between 18 and 22 January the 201st Airborne Brigade and the 250th Rifle Regiment were dropped by parachute and landed from aircraft south of the town, with orders to cut the roads linking Vyazma with Yukhnov and Bryansk. On 26–27 January Belov’s cavalry corps crossed the Warsaw highway south of Yukhnov – the main supply road of the German 4th Army – and headed north. On 27 January the landing of 4th Airborne Corps began in the area of the village of Ozerechnya, south-west of Vyazma. There were, however, too few transport aircraft, and the Luftwaffe destroyed some of them on their airfields. By 1 February only three battalions of 8th Brigade, some 2,500 men, had been dropped, scattered over a wide area; roughly half of them reached the assembly point. Even so, the paratroopers cut roads and railway lines. “The situation of 4th Army is very serious,” the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, noted in his diary on 31 January.

At the beginning of February Yefremov’s leading divisions – the 113th, 160th and 338th Rifle Divisions – reached the approaches to Vyazma, and the Kalinin Front’s 11th Cavalry Corps stood west of the town. The pincers were open by little more than ten kilometres. The Germans, however, managed to bring up reinforcements which, with the help of the Luftwaffe, beat off the attacks on Vyazma. On 3 February the German XII Corps, attacking from the south, and 20th Panzer Division, striking from the north, closed the gap north of Yukhnov through which 33rd Army had passed. Its shock group, more than 10,000 men, found itself encircled near Vyazma, together with Belov’s cavalrymen and the paratroopers.

On 1 February Stalin restored the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Western Direction and gave it to Zhukov, who retained command of the Western Front. The Stavka again demanded the destruction of the main forces of Army Group Centre. In the second half of February the 9th and 214th Airborne Brigades, 7,373 men in all, were dropped west of Yukhnov. On 23 February the commander of 4th Airborne Corps, Major General Aleksandr Levashov, was killed when his aircraft came under fire. The paratroopers fought their way more than ten kilometres through the German rear towards 50th Army, but the army failed to break through the German defences and the corps went over to the defensive.

An extraordinary area took shape near Vyazma: behind the front line, in the forests and villages south of the town, Belov’s cavalry, the paratroopers and the partisans controlled a large territory for several months, tying down several German divisions. The German sweeps aimed at these units also struck the population of the surrounding villages.

The last attempts and the destruction of 33rd Army (March – April)

In February and March the operation degenerated into a series of costly, piecemeal attacks. 43rd Army tried in vain to punch a corridor through to Yefremov’s encircled troops, while the front-line armies of Zhukov and Konev kept attacking German strongpoints around Rzhev, Gzhatsk and Vyazma. A report from the headquarters of one of 29th Army’s regiments, dating from the turn of February and March and cited by Russian historians, describes the typical course of this fighting: after repeated attacks without the support of artillery or neighbouring units, the regiment numbered first 32 and then 9 men, and after being topped up with men from rear-echelon units it was defending a two-kilometre sector with 19 soldiers. The only significant success of those weeks was the recapture of Yukhnov at the beginning of March by troops of the Western Front’s left wing, which eliminated the German wedge projecting towards Moscow between Vyazma and Kaluga. At the end of March and the beginning of April the two fronts made one more attempt to smash the German groupings at Rzhev, Olenino and Vyazma and link up with the units behind enemy lines. This attempt also failed.

The position of Yefremov’s group grew steadily worse. From February it was supplied only by air; ammunition, food and medicines were running short, and the Germans were shrinking the pocket step by step. At the beginning of April it numbered some 11,500 men. The Stavka sent an aircraft to fetch its commander, but Yefremov refused to abandon his soldiers and sent the colours and the wounded out on it instead. In April he was given permission to break out eastwards. According to Russian researchers, permission to take the shortest route, towards the River Ugra, was given to him personally by Stalin, contrary to the plan of the front staff, which had specified a roundabout route to the south-west, through the area controlled by Belov, towards Kirov. From the evening of 13 April the front headquarters lost contact with 33rd Army’s headquarters. On 14 April 50th Army attacked towards the encircled troops, but on 15 April, when according to Soviet accounts it was no more than two kilometres away from them, the Germans threw it back.

The army ceased to exist as a cohesive whole and tried to break out in scattered groups. The headquarters group was ambushed. The badly wounded Yefremov shot himself rather than be taken prisoner; most sources give the date as 19 April, some as 17 or 18 April. Among those killed with him were the army’s artillery commander, Major General Pyotr Ofrosimov, and almost the entire staff. The Germans buried Yefremov with military honours in the village of Slobodka; a German general is said to have held him up to his soldiers as an example. According to Soviet figures, only 889 soldiers of 33rd Army got out of the encirclement in small groups. On 16 April Halder noted in his diary: “Russian 33rd Army liquidated.” On 20 April, when the thaw had made the roads impassable, the Stavka ordered a switch to the defensive.

The fighting behind German lines went on after the operation ended. Belov’s group and the paratroopers held the area south of Vyazma until the end of May; on the night of 25–26 May they broke out of the encirclement, raided their way through the German rear and on 24 June linked up with 10th Army near Kirov. 39th Army and 11th Cavalry Corps were destroyed in July 1942 in the German Operation Seydlitz; Maslennikov was evacuated by air, while his deputy, Lieutenant General Ivan Bogdanov, was killed in the pocket.

Losses

The operation was one of the bloodiest of the entire German–Soviet war. According to Krivosheev’s figures, based on Soviet archival data, of the roughly 1,059,000 soldiers who took part, the Red Army lost 272,320 killed, missing and captured (25.7 per cent) and 504,569 wounded and sick – a total of 776,889 men. Some Russian researchers, among them Svetlana Gerasimova, consider these figures too low, because reports from encircled armies were incomplete and the losses from some periods of the fighting never made it into the official returns at all.

German losses are harder to isolate, because the data cover the whole of Army Group Centre, which was fighting simultaneously at Rzhev, Vyazma and Sukhinichi and, in the north, at Toropets and Velikiye Luki. According to the most frequently cited estimate, between 1 January and 30 March 1942 the army group lost about 330,000 killed, wounded and missing – roughly half its strength. On top of the combat losses there were tens of thousands of cases of frostbite and sickness. The Germans could not make good these losses: the divisions of 9th and 4th Armies came through the winter as thin, exhausted formations.

Civilian losses were enormous. The land between Rzhev and Vyazma was a battlefield throughout the winter, and villages were burned in turn by the retreating Germans, by Soviet sabotage units and by German anti-partisan units. On the Soviet side thousands of soldiers who escaped from encirclement were subsequently screened by the NKVD, like all the okruzhentsy (men who had been encircled).

Significance

The Rzhev–Vyazma offensive revealed the limits of the Soviet victory at Moscow. Stalin took the December success as proof that the Wehrmacht was close to disintegration and scattered his reserves across many simultaneous offensives: at Leningrad, Demyansk, Rzhev, Vyazma, Kharkiv and in the Crimea. On none of these axes did the Red Army have enough strength to achieve a decisive result. It lacked tanks, artillery, communications and transport, and commanders at every level did not yet know how to conduct deep operations. Thrusts deep into the German dispositions, unaccompanied by supplies, ended with the attackers themselves being encircled. In his memoirs Zhukov criticised the offensive along the whole front without the resources to sustain it, and the removal of 1st Shock Army from his command at the decisive moment; Russian historians, however, also point to his own mistakes, among them setting his armies tasks beyond their strength.

For the Germans it was a defence bought at the price of immense effort, but a successful one. Army Group Centre survived the worst crisis of the winter, and on 19 February Hitler declared that the danger of a panic “on the 1812 pattern” had been averted. He was convinced that he owed this to his order to hold fast – a conviction that cost the Wehrmacht many armies in the years that followed. A new star also rose: Model, who at Rzhev had shown how to conduct an active defence by counter-attacking the enemy’s weak points, became one of Hitler’s favourite commanders and until 1945 was sent wherever the front was crumbling.

The most lasting result of the operation was the Rzhev–Vyazma salient, driven into the Soviet front and at its nearest point less than 200 kilometres from Moscow. Hitler refused to give it up, seeing it as a springboard for a future offensive against the capital, while Stalin and Zhukov saw it as a permanent threat that had to be removed. In the summer of 1942, in the first Rzhev–Sychyovka operation, and in the autumn, in Operation Mars (November – December 1942), the Red Army attacked Rzhev again, with similar losses and similar results. Only in March 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, did the Germans withdraw from the salient of their own accord in Operation Büffel, shortening the front and freeing more than 20 divisions, some of which fought at Kursk that summer.

In the USSR these battles were long spoken of reluctantly, since they were hard to present as a victory. Their memory survived, among other things, in Aleksandr Tvardovsky’s poem “Ya ubit podo Rzhevom” (“I Was Killed near Rzhev”), written in 1945–1946. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did Russian historians begin to study the “Rzhev meat grinder” systematically; counting all the fighting of 1942–1943, it cost, according to various estimates, from around 400,000 to half a million or more Soviet soldiers killed or missing.