Stalin orders a general offensive

On the evening of 5 January 1942, at a conference in the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin decided to turn the victorious counter-offensive before Moscow into a general offensive by the Red Army along the entire front, from Leningrad to the Crimea. He judged that the Germans, thrown back from the capital, were in disarray and would not survive the winter if they were given no respite. General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, commander of the Western Front, and the chairman of Gosplan, Nikolai Voznesensky, warned that there were not enough troops, tanks or ammunition for so broad an undertaking. Stalin did not listen to them. Two days later, on 7 January, the Stavka issued its directive for an offensive towards Rzhev and Vyazma, and in Soviet historiography that day marks the end of the counter-offensive before Moscow.

Popular war chronologies describe these days as follows. Under 5 January they record the start of a great Red Army offensive under General Zhukov; under 7 January, that the Soviet winter counter-offensive came to a halt, having pushed the exhausted and frozen German army back 62–155 miles (100–250 kilometres) from Moscow, and that Operation Barbarossa had failed. Both statements need qualifying. No offensive began on 5 January: that was the day the decision was taken, and the various fronts went over to the attack between 7 and 18 January. Nor was it Zhukov’s offensive. He commanded only one of the nine fronts that were to take part, and he was its best-known critic. Finally, the advance did not stop on 7 January but passed without a break into a new operation.

After the counter-offensive

By the beginning of January the Red Army had a month of victories behind it. The counter-offensive launched on 5 and 6 December had driven Army Group Centre back from the capital, which only a few weeks earlier German patrols had seen from its outskirts. Kalinin, Klin, Volokolamsk, Kaluga and Naro-Fominsk had been retaken, and on 2 January Maloyaroslavets. In the north the Soviet 4th Army had recaptured Tikhvin on 9 December, frustrating the German attempt to close a second ring around Leningrad. In the south the Red Army had retaken Rostov-on-Don at the end of November and, in the last days of December, landed at Kerch and Feodosia, forcing the Germans to break off their assault on Sevastopol.

On the German side there was a crisis. On 19 December Adolf Hitler had taken personal command of the Army and forbidden any withdrawal without his consent. The dismissals reached commanders of army groups and armies and of dozens of corps and divisions. Army Group Centre, commanded from 19 December by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, had many divisions with only a few thousand men fit for combat, and its positions on the Lama and the Ruza and further south consisted of hastily fortified villages.

Stalin read this picture in his own way. Encouraged by success and convinced that the enemy had no reserves left, he decided that the moment had come to smash the main groupings of the Wehrmacht before they could recover and resume the offensive in the spring. The Stavka had already issued some directives in this spirit in December: the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts were to break the blockade of Leningrad, the North-Western Front was to strike at Staraya Russa and Demyansk, and the Caucasus Front was to widen the Kerch bridgehead and relieve Sevastopol. The conference of 5 January was meant to bring these undertakings together into a single plan.

The conference of 5 January

What happened at the conference is known chiefly from Zhukov’s memoirs, written more than twenty years later, so they must be read with caution. According to them, those present were members of the Stavka and the State Defence Committee, among them the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria and Nikolai Voznesensky, who was in charge of economic planning. Shaposhnikov outlined the situation at the front and the draft plan for a counter-offensive in the western direction. Then Stalin spoke. The Germans, he said, were stunned by their defeat before Moscow and poorly prepared for winter; this was the best moment to go over to a general offensive.

Stalin’s plan took in almost the whole front. In the north the Leningrad and Volkhov Fronts and the right wing of the North-Western Front were to defeat Army Group North and break the blockade of Leningrad. In the centre the Kalinin, Western and Bryansk Fronts and the left wing of the North-Western Front were to encircle and destroy Army Group Centre. In the south the South-Western and Southern Fronts were to defeat Army Group South and recover the Donets Basin, while the Caucasus Front and the Black Sea Fleet were to liberate the Crimea.

Asked for his view, Zhukov came out in favour of continuing the offensive in the western direction, where conditions were best and the enemy had not yet had time to rebuild his strength. For that, however, he said, reinforcements of men and equipment, above all tanks, were needed. He considered an offensive at Leningrad and in the south-western direction premature: the troops there faced strong defences and without powerful artillery would not be able to break through them, but would merely bleed themselves white in fruitless attacks. Voznesensky backed Zhukov: the country did not yet have the material resources to supply a simultaneous offensive on all fronts. Ammunition was especially short – industry, evacuated eastwards in the autumn, was only just starting up production in its new locations.

Stalin replied that he had spoken to Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, who was in favour of attacking, and that the Germans had to be “ground down” quickly so that they could not go over to the offensive in the spring. Of Voznesensky he remarked that he always came with difficulties that could not be foreseen, and Malenkov and Beria nodded in agreement. After the conference Shaposhnikov is said to have told Zhukov that he had argued in vain, since the Supreme Commander had settled the matter in advance and the directives had already been sent to most of the fronts; Stalin had merely wanted to “push” the commanders into action. However much later stylisation there may be in this account, the Stavka’s documents confirm its essence: in the first half of January nine fronts went over to the attack almost simultaneously, and the reserves that might have decided a single operation in the spring were divided among many directions.

The end of the counter-offensive before Moscow

On 7 January the Stavka issued a directive to Colonel General Ivan Konev’s Kalinin Front and Zhukov’s Western Front. The Kalinin Front was to strike from the area north-west of Rzhev towards Sychovka and Vyazma, and the left wing of the Western Front from the Kaluga area towards Yukhnov and Vyazma. Zhukov’s remaining armies were to attack frontally towards Gzhatsk and Sychovka. The pincers were to close at Vyazma, encircling the main forces of Army Group Centre in the area of Rzhev, Vyazma, Yukhnov and Gzhatsk. The Kalinin Front moved off on 8 January, the Western Front on 10 January.

In Soviet historiography the directive of 7 January closes the counter-offensive before Moscow. Its record was impressive. According to the most commonly cited figures, the Germans had been thrown back 100–250 kilometres from the capital – furthest on the flanks, near Kalinin and Kaluga, and least in the centre, where the front before Mozhaisk still stood about a hundred kilometres from the Kremlin. An area containing several dozen towns and thousands of villages had been recovered, although many of them were found burned. According to Grigory Krivosheev’s tabulation, however, the counter-offensive from 5 December to 7 January cost the Red Army 139,586 killed, missing and captured and 231,369 wounded and sick, and many divisions were down to only a few thousand men.

The widespread formula that the counter-offensive “came to a halt” does not reflect the state of affairs. Nothing ended at the front on 7 January: the troops of the Western Front were still advancing, and the offensive passed into the Rzhev–Vyazma operation. The date is a conventional boundary drawn by historians, not the moment when the fighting stopped. The second popular statement – that Barbarossa had failed – is closer to the mark, although it too needs qualifying. What collapsed was the intention to defeat the Soviet Union in a single campaign in 1941, on which Hitler had built his entire strategy. The Germans, however, had not been beaten. The front of Army Group Centre did not disintegrate, the Wehrmacht kept Ukraine, the Baltic states, Belarus and most of the territory taken in 1941, and in the summer of 1942 it was still able to launch a great offensive in the south.

The directive of 10 January

The Stavka recognised that the armies had attacked badly in December: they spread their forces evenly across the whole width of their sectors, struck head-on at fortified villages and used artillery only in a short preparation before the assault. On 10 January the Stavka sent the fronts and armies Directive Letter No. 3, signed by Stalin and the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Aleksandr Vasilevsky. It ordered the formation of shock groups – concentrating most of an army’s strength on a narrow breakthrough sector of a dozen or so kilometres instead of dispersing it along the whole front – and introduced the concept of the artillery offensive: the artillery was not merely to prepare the attack but to support the infantry with its fire throughout its advance into the depth of the enemy defences.

These were sound conclusions, and the Red Army applied them in the later years of the war. In the winter of 1942, however, it lacked the means to put them into practice. Many armies had nothing with which to form shock groups, and the artillery received only part of the shells it needed; according to Soviet figures, in January and February the Western Front received between a third and just over half of the mortar rounds it required. Tanks were few and the air force was weak.

Lines of attack

The general offensive broke up into several large operations, conducted almost simultaneously and with no common direction other than the Stavka itself. In the north General of the Army Kirill Meretskov’s Volkhov Front began the Lyuban offensive on 7 January, which was to break the blockade of Leningrad by way of Lyuban; after a failed start, the 2nd Shock Army broke through the Volkhov line near Myasnoy Bor in the second half of January and drove deep into the forests and swamps behind the German 18th Army. Lieutenant General Pavel Kurochkin’s North-Western Front attacked at Staraya Russa and Demyansk on 7 January, and on 9 January its left wing – the 3rd and 4th Shock Armies – began the Toropets–Kholm offensive, aimed deep into the rear of Army Group Centre.

In the centre the main blow was to be the Rzhev–Vyazma operation of the Kalinin and Western Fronts, supported from the south by the Bryansk Front. In the south the South-Western and Southern Fronts were preparing an offensive between Balakliia and Artemivsk, which opened on 18 January as the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya offensive. In the Crimea the troops of Lieutenant General Dmitry Kozlov’s Caucasus Front were to advance from the Kerch bridgehead to the relief of Sevastopol, but before they could do so the Germans counter-attacked.

Place in the war

The decision of 5 January was one of Stalin’s costliest mistakes of the war. The offensive brought a string of successes in January: the Red Army recovered Mozhaisk, Medyn, Toropets and dozens of other towns, encircled German garrisons at Demyansk and Kholm, and its cavalry and paratroopers reached the approaches to Vyazma. None of the great objectives, however, was achieved. The Crimean Front, as the Caucasus Front was renamed, lost Feodosia in mid-January; at Leningrad the 2nd Shock Army got stuck in the swamps and was destroyed in the summer, and its commander, General Andrey Vlasov, was taken prisoner. Barvenkovo gave the Red Army a salient on the Donets, from which the failed offensive against Kharkiv was launched in May 1942. At Rzhev and Vyazma the fronts of Konev and Zhukov failed to encircle Army Group Centre, and their forward armies were themselves trapped in pockets.

By April 1942 the winter offensive had petered out along the whole front. Large areas had been recovered and the threat to Moscow pushed back for several months, but at the cost of enormous losses and the dispersal of reserves that were missing in the summer, when the Germans struck towards Voronezh, Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Historians, David Glantz among them, point out that the Stavka overestimated its own strength and underestimated the Wehrmacht, and that instead of smashing one grouping it scattered its forces in many directions. Zhukov wrote years later that in the winter of 1942 the Red Army’s capabilities had been overestimated and that an offensive on all fronts had had no chance of success from the start. At the same time that winter showed that the war in the east would be a long one: the Germans had lost the 1941 campaign, and the Red Army was only just learning how to win the ones that followed.