The Red Army retakes Medyn

In mid-January 1942 the offensive of General of the Army Georgy Zhukov’s Western Front brought more towns back into Soviet hands. On 12 January Major General Konstantin Golubev’s 43rd Army began the battle for Medyn, a road junction on the highway from Maloyaroslavets to Yukhnov, and on 14 January its divisions drove the Germans out. Several dozen kilometres further south, deep in the forests of the Kaluga region, Lieutenant General Filipp Golikov’s 10th Army took Kirov on 10–11 January, emerging in the rear of the German 4th Army. By the end of the month Soviet troops had driven deep into the dispositions of Army Group Centre in several sectors, and their cavalry and paratroopers stood before Vyazma.

Chronologies record under 13 January that the Red Army took “Kirov and Media” in the course of the continuing counter-offensive, and under 31 January that the Germans were retreating at several points on the Eastern Front. The Kirov in question is the one in the Kaluga region, not the much larger city of the same name on the Vyatka, far from the front, and “Media” is Medyn. According to Russian studies, Kirov was retaken on 10–11 January and Medyn on 14 January, a day after that date. The entry for 31 January is only partly true: the Germans were giving up ground in many places, but by the end of January they had already managed to halt the advance in the key sectors, and at Rzhev they had gone over to the counter-attack.

The Western Front’s offensive

When the counter-offensive before Moscow was losing momentum at the beginning of January, Joseph Stalin ordered a general offensive along the whole front on 5 January, and on 7 January the Stavka gave the Kalinin and Western Fronts the task of encircling the main forces of Army Group Centre in the Rzhev and Vyazma area. Colonel General Ivan Konev’s Kalinin Front attacked west of Rzhev on 8 January, and the Western Front’s offensive began on 10 January. On its right wing the 1st Shock Army and the 20th Army broke through the German defences on the Lama near Volokolamsk and by the middle of the month had reached Shakhovskaya. In the centre Lieutenant General Leonid Govorov’s 5th Army retook Dorokhovo on 14 January, Ruza on 17 January and on 20 January Mozhaisk, from which the Germans had advanced on Moscow in October. Lieutenant General Mikhail Yefremov’s 33rd Army liberated Vereya on 19 January.

On the left wing Zhukov had more freedom of action. After the December fighting for Kaluga, the German 4th Army was holding on in scattered strongpoints, and a wide gap yawned between it and the 2nd Panzer Army. It was into this gap that the 43rd, 49th and 50th Armies advanced, heading for Yukhnov and Medyn, together with the 10th Army and General Pavel Belov’s 1st Guards Cavalry Corps, which pressed on further west and north-west. The left wing’s task was to close from the south the pincers whose northern arm was to come down from Rzhev.

Medyn and Kirov

The Germans had taken Medyn, a small town on the Shanya River, on 12 October 1941, during their first advance on Moscow. At the beginning of January 1942 it lay on the main road by which the 4th Army supplied its flank. By then a group of paratroopers under Major Ivan Starchak, dropped west of Medyn in the first days of January, was already operating around the town, destroying bridges and communications in the German rear. The 43rd Army’s attack began on 12 January. On 14 January the 17th Rifle Division, two regiments of the 53rd Rifle Division, the 10th Airborne Brigade and the 26th Tank Brigade drove the Germans out of the town and the surrounding settlements. The retreating occupiers burned much of the town.

Kirov, more than a hundred kilometres further south-west on the Vyazma–Bryansk railway, was liberated by the 330th Rifle Division of the 10th Army. Golikov’s army was then advancing on a front more than a hundred kilometres wide, strung out between isolated small towns, without a continuous front line. The Germans were quick to exploit this weakness. Around 15 January the flank of the 2nd Panzer Army counter-attacked and pushed some of the 10th Army’s divisions back north of Lyudinovo and Zhizdra. In the Sukhinichi area an encircled German garrison had been holding out since the beginning of January; on 24 January a relief force broke through to it, after which the Germans evacuated the town, and on 29 January the Red Army entered it. Zhukov moved the headquarters of Lieutenant General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 16th Army to this area, and by the end of January it had restored the situation there. Kirov remained in Soviet hands, and in April the line on which the Western Front went over to the defensive ran through the area around the town.

Hitler permits a withdrawal

On the German side mid-January brought a turning point. Since December Adolf Hitler, who had taken over command of the Army on 19 December, had forbidden any withdrawal without his consent. On 8 January he threw Colonel General Erich Hoepner out of the army for withdrawing a corps threatened with encirclement on his own authority. But when the Soviet pincers began to close around the 4th Army, the 4th Panzer Army and the 9th Army, and Soviet raiding columns were cutting through their rear areas, Hitler gave way. On 15 January he allowed Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s Army Group Centre to fall back to the so-called winter position, running from Rzhev through Gzhatsk to a point east of Yukhnov. It was the first time since the December ban that a larger withdrawal had been permitted. The troops fell back on foot, through the snow, abandoning much heavy equipment for lack of horses, tractors and fuel.

Hitler was also changing commanders. In mid-January he relieved the sick commander of the 9th Army, Colonel General Adolf Strauss, whose place was taken on 16 January by General Walter Model, until then commander of XLI Panzer Corps. On 20 January General Gotthard Heinrici took over command of the 4th Army from General Ludwig Kübler. Model immediately proposed a counter-attack to Hitler. On 22 January his troops struck west of Rzhev at the base of the Soviet wedge and within a few days closed the gap through which the 29th and 39th Armies and the 11th Cavalry Corps of the Kalinin Front had passed. By the end of January the 29th Army was cut off from the main force.

Stalin, for his part, weakened his own offensive. On 19 January, over Zhukov’s objections, the Stavka took the 1st Shock Army away from the Western Front and sent it north to Demyansk. Zhukov later wrote that he had thereby lost an army that might have decided the struggle for Sychovka and cut off the Rzhev grouping from the east. The 20th Army, left on its own, failed to break through the German defences at Shakhovskaya.

Before Vyazma

At the end of January Zhukov and Konev decided to close the ring around Vyazma. On 17 January Zhukov ordered Yefremov’s 33rd Army, bled white by the fighting at Naro-Fominsk and Vereya, to advance on Vyazma. Its leading group, three divisions, set off north-westwards on 26–27 January and at the beginning of February reached the outskirts of the town. On 27 January Belov’s corps crossed the Warsaw highway south of Yukhnov and began its march on Vyazma from the south. On 27 January, in the area of the village of Ozerechnya south-west of Vyazma, the drop began of the 8th Airborne Brigade of the 4th Airborne Corps, which was to cut the railway and the highway between Vyazma and Smolensk. Earlier, between 18 and 22 January, the 201st Airborne Brigade and the 250th Rifle Regiment, trained for airborne operations, had landed south of Vyazma. For lack of transport aircraft and because of German raids on the airfields, only about 2,100 paratroopers had been dropped by 1 February, scattered over a wide area. From the north-west the Kalinin Front’s 11th Cavalry Corps was approaching the Moscow–Minsk highway.

On 31 January the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, noted in his diary that the situation of the 4th Army was very serious and its supplies were in danger. The Germans, however, had enough forces in and around Vyazma to defend the town and the road junctions, while the Soviet troops that had reached Vyazma were exhausted, few in number and lacking heavy weapons. At the beginning of February German counter-attacks cut the 33rd Army off from the rest of the front, and Belov and the paratroopers found themselves deep in the German rear.

Retreat at several points

The entry for 31 January reflects the picture on the northern wing of Army Group Centre well. There the 3rd and 4th Shock Armies, which had begun the Toropets–Kholm offensive on 9 January, were advancing rapidly through thinly defended forests at the junction of Army Groups North and Centre. Around 20–21 January they retook Toropets with its large German depots, which allowed them to press on despite supply shortages. By the end of January they had reached Velizh, threatening Vitebsk, and at Kholm they had surrounded General Theodor Scherer’s German garrison of several thousand men, which was thereafter supplied from the air. Further north the North-Western Front was tightening the noose around the German II Army Corps at Demyansk; it closed it at the beginning of February. In the south, on the Donets, the troops of the South-Western and Southern Fronts had been advancing since 18 January in the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya offensive and by the end of the month had covered 90–100 kilometres.

In the centre itself the picture was different. The Germans had given up Mozhaisk, Medyn and dozens of villages, but they held Rzhev, Gzhatsk, Yukhnov and Vyazma. At Rzhev Model had gone over to the counter-attack, at Sukhinichi relief had arrived, and in the Crimea the 11th Army had retaken Feodosia in mid-January. The front of Army Group Centre, though bent into deep salients at several points, did not break.

Place in the war

The recapture of Medyn, Kirov and Mozhaisk closed the period of greatest danger to Moscow. The Moscow region was now almost entirely free, and the front had generally been pushed back more than a hundred kilometres from the capital. The January offensive, however, showed the limits of what the Red Army could do after half a year of defeats and a month of counter-offensive. Soviet armies broke deep into the German rear, but they lacked the strength to hold the corridors they had won and to close the encirclements. Instead of a German disaster at Vyazma, their forward groupings were themselves trapped in pockets: the 29th Army’s group was destroyed in February in the forests west of Rzhev, and the 33rd Army, cut off near Vyazma, perished in April together with General Yefremov.

The key German decisions of January – the withdrawal to the winter position and the handing of the 9th Army to Model – enabled Army Group Centre to survive the winter. On the map a great salient formed around Rzhev and Vyazma, pointing towards Moscow. The battles for it, which went on intermittently until March 1943, consumed hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and passed into Russian memory as the “Rzhev meat grinder”. Zhukov admitted after the war that in the winter of 1942 the Soviet command had overestimated its own strength and underestimated the enemy. For the Battle of Moscow the January gains were a culmination; for the war in the east they were a foretaste of a long and costly struggle of attrition.