Stalin's General (28 page)

It is clear that Mars was much more than a diversionary operation but whether it was the “greatest defeat” dramatized by Glantz is questionable. It was more like Zhukov's latest setback in the Rzhev-Viazma area. Moreover, the first two Rzhev-Viazma operations were as equally disastrous as Mars. At the same time, the positive achievements of Operation Mars should not be underestimated. It kept the Germans busy in the central sector while Operation Uranus cut a swath through their southern campaign. Operation Mars did not succeed in expelling the Wehrmacht from the Rzhev-Viazma area but it did enough damage to prompt the Germans to withdraw of their own accord in spring 1943.

Operation Uranus, launched on November 19, 1942, was a combined three-front offensive mounted by the Stalingrad, Don, and Southwestern Fronts. The Stalingrad and Don Fronts had been formed on September 28 when Yeremenko's Southeastern Front was renamed the Stalingrad Front and Rokossovsky was given command of the old Stalingrad Front, renamed the Don Front. The Southwestern Front, adjacent to the Don Front, was set up on October 31 under Vatutin's command. The basic plan was to execute an encirclement operation, with the armies of all three fronts converging west of Stalingrad at Kalach.

The counteroffensive began with an artillery barrage fired by 3,500 guns and mortars. The main attack north of Stalingrad was conducted by the 21st Army and 5th Tank Army of Vatutin's Southwestern Front. South of the city the Soviets attacked with Yeremenko's 51st and 57th armies. This dual thrust was supported by Rokossovsky's Don Front. The plan was for Vatutin's forces to advance southeast towards Kalach and for Yeremenko's forces to strike northwest toward the same objective. At the same time an outer defensive line would be established along the Chir and Krivaya Rivers. An ambitious double encirclement of both the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army in Stalingrad and enemy forces in the Don bend was envisaged. (See
Map 16
: Operation Uranus, November 1942
.)

The counteroffensive was prepared in utmost secrecy and a number of
maskirovka
(deception and disinformation) measures were effected.
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Front-line areas were cleared of civilians and the main assault forces were not deployed until the last moment. These measures contributed to the stunning success of Uranus in achieving complete operational surprise. By November 23 the encirclement of Paulus's forces in Stalingrad was complete. Stavka had expected to trap 100,000 or so enemy troops. In the event, they caught three times that number and Operation Uranus became the Red Army's first successfully executed grand encirclement maneuver. Among the enemy forces routed during the operation were the armies of Germany's Axis allies whose task was to guard Paulus's flanks. Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for Hitler's Axis alliance. The first country to defect from the Axis was Italy, which deposed Mussolini in July 1943, followed a year later by Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Finland.

Hitler responded to the encirclement of Paulus's forces by attempting to keep the 6th Army supplied by air but to do so the Luftwaffe needed to fly in 300 tons of supplies a day and it did not have enough planes to do that. One reason for the shortage of planes was that the British and Americans had just invaded North Africa and transport was also needed to evacuate Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. The Germans mounted a breakthrough operation to Stalingrad but were stopped by the Soviets twenty-five to thirty miles short of the city. The operation did, however, disrupt Soviet plans for Operation Saturn. This was an ambitious follow-up to Uranus that aimed
to recapture Rostov and isolate Army Group A in the Caucasus. Its counterpart in the central sector was Operation Jupiter—a grand plan to encircle Army Group Center should Operation Mars succeed. Mars failed and Operation Jupiter was shelved. Saturn succeeded but because its execution was delayed by the time the Soviets recaptured Rostov in February 1943 Army Group A had made good its escape. (See
Map 17
: Operations Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus
.)

When the Soviets realized the full extent of the force they had trapped in Stalingrad they prepared a major operation to tighten the encirclement ring. Seven Soviet armies commanded by Rokossovsky attacked on January 10, 1943. By the end of the month the unequal battle was won and only 90,000 Germans remained alive to surrender. Among them was Paulus, one of twenty-four German generals at Stalingrad who went into Soviet captivity.

It is worth dwelling for a moment on the audacity of Stavka's grand strategic design in autumn 1942. The aim was not only substantial encirclements in the Rzhev-Viazma and Stalingrad areas but even more gigantic encirclements of both Army Group Center and Army Group South. As the planetary nomenclature suggested—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus—it was a breathtakingly cosmic strategic design. Stalin, Zhukov, and Vasilevsky intended not only to turn the tide of battle in autumn 1942 but to win the entire war. Such ambition was way beyond the capabilities of the Red Army at that time but the breadth of strategic vision was an augury of the massive offensives of 1943–1944 that were to drive the Wehrmacht out of the USSR and all the way back to Berlin.

As a result of the Stalingrad debacle the Germans and their Axis allies lost fifty divisions and suffered 1.5 million casualties. By early 1943 the Wehrmacht had been driven back to the positions they had started from when they launched Operation Blau in June 1942. The Red Army's losses were even higher, with 2.5 million casualties sustained during the course of the Stalingrad campaign. As a follow-up to Stalingrad, Stavka attempted another full-scale winter offensive. Voronezh was recaptured in January 1943 and Kharkov in February, but the Red Army was unable to hold the latter when the Germans counterattacked. By this time Soviet operations along the front were grinding to a halt as the spring
Rasputitsa
set in.

While all this was happening Zhukov was busy elsewhere. In January 1943 he retuned to Leningrad to supervise an operation by the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts intended to break the German blockade of the city. Operation Iskra (Spark) began on January 12 and by the 18th had succeeded in reestablishing road and rail links to Leningrad. Since the land bridge to Leningrad was only a few miles wide and the constant target of German artillery, it was a case of a blockade cracked rather than broken, as David Glantz puts it.
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But that same day Zhukov was promoted to the rank of marshal of the Soviet Union—two months before Stalin had the same rank bestowed upon himself. An editorial in
Izvestiya
, the government newspaper, entitled “Skill of Red Army Leaders,” put Zhukov's name at the head of the list of new marshals and generals and acclaimed him a “highly talented and brave leader” who had carried out Stalin's plans for repulsing the Germans at Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. On January 28 Zhukov was decorated with the Order of Suvorov 1st Class for “successfully carrying out the counteroffensive at Stalingrad.”
²⁶

Toward the end of January Zhukov returned to Moscow to begin planning Operation Polar Star. This was a grandiose plan for an offensive by the Volkhov, Leningrad, and Northwestern Fronts to encircle Army Group North in the Leningrad area. At the heart of the plan was an advance by Timoshenko's Northwestern Front to Pskov and Narva, with the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts in a supporting role. Pivotal to the operation was a Special Group of Forces consisting of a tank army and a field army commanded by General M. S. Khozin, whose job was to close the inner ring of encirclement around Army Group North in the Lake Il'men and Staraya Russa area. (See
Map 18
: Zhukov's Plan for Operation Polar Star
.)

Zhukov's name appeared below Stalin's in the operational directives to the three Fronts—orders issued as a result of an intensive series of meetings between the supreme commander and his deputy in late January and early February.
²⁷
When the operation started Zhukov returned to the northwest to supervise its implementation. Zhukov's role in this operation was almost as important as the one he played in Mars and Uranus, yet he gave it barely a passing mention in
his memoirs. That may have been because like Mars, Operation Polar Star was not a success, and Zhukov did not like to dwell on his failures, which is a pity because the operation illustrated the power and authority he now wielded as Stalin's deputy.

Zhukov acted more like a multi-Front commander than a Stavka coordinator and Stalin's confidence in him was evident in the alacrity with which he agreed to Zhukov's various proposals and recommendations for the prosecution of the offensive. But perhaps more significant is the evidence of Zhukov's growing flexibility as a general, his greater willingness to change tack when faced with new conditions.

The key to the success of Polar Star was liquidating the German 16th Army in the Demyansk salient. This task was entrusted to the 1st Shock Army, instructed to encircle the Germans in the salient and then destroy it. The 1st Shock failed in its mission because by the time Operation Polar Star was launched in mid-February the Germans had already begun to withdraw from Demyansk to more defensible positions along the Lovat River. Responding to the new situation, Zhukov cabled Stalin on February 28 that Polar Star should be limited to the capture of Staraya Russa with a view to preparing the ground for a further offensive in the spring.
²⁸
Stalin agreed and Zhukov pursued the capture of Staraya Russa for the next few weeks, but without success. The Red Army's approximate losses as a result of Polar Star were 250,000, including 50,000 dead.

In mid-March Stalin recalled Zhukov to Moscow and sent him to the Voronezh Front to investigate the situation there following the recapture of Kharkov by the Germans. It was from this vantage point that Zhukov penned a long note to Stalin on April 8, 1943, giving his estimate of the Germans' next move and how the Soviets should respond. Zhukov did not think the Germans had the reserves to renew their southern campaign or, indeed, to conduct any broad front operations. Instead, they would attack on a narrower front, where they already had forces concentrated and where an offensive would contribute to their ultimate goal of taking Moscow. Therefore, predicted Zhukov, the Germans would attack in the direction of Kursk, which lay at the center of a salient defended by the Central, Voronezh, and Southwestern Fronts. In this attack the Germans would rely heavily on their tank divisions and might pitch as many as 2,500 tanks against the
Soviets at Kursk. To counter this threat Zhukov recommended boosting antitank defenses and the transfer of as many aircraft as possible to Stavka's reserve to create the capacity to smash the enemy's tank attack. Zhukov concluded by saying that he did not think it necessary to mount a preemptive offensive: “It will be better if we wear the enemy out in defensive action, destroy his tanks, and then … by going over to an all-out offensive we will finish off the enemy's main grouping.”
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