In many respects, it seemed as if the year of 1943 commenced with the war in Eastern Europe finely poised. The German Sixth Army was surrounded in Stalingrad and much of the southern sector of the long front line was highly fluid, with Soviet units attempting to push west and southwest to reach the shores of the Sea of Azov or the great bend of the Dnepr River – if they achieved either objective, they would isolate an even greater number of German troops and almost guarantee the rapid collapse of the Wehrmacht. But both logistic constraints and the wear and tear of constant high-tempo operations were beginning to bite, steadily eroding the fighting power of the Red Army’s formations. By contrast, the Germans had started the winter fighting in a configuration that was completely unsuited to defending against a major Soviet offensive; through a mixture of forced and voluntary retreats, they were pulling back and reducing their own overstretched supply lines. Together with fresh troops arriving from the west, the armies that the Red Army was striving to destroy were steadily moving into positions from where they would be able to mount a powerful counteroffensive to restore integrity of the front line. It seemed as if much would depend on which side could achieve its objectives first.
Elsewhere on the Eastern Front, the battlefield was far less fluid. The last weeks of 1942 saw bitter fighting around the Rzhev salient to the west of Moscow as the Red Army threw wave after wave of troops at the German lines. The attempts to destroy the salient were predicated upon a belief that it formed a potential starting point for a new German offensive against Moscow, but the Soviet attacks were at least partly driven by the stubborn determination of Marshal Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, deputy commander-in-chief of the Red Army, to crush German positions that had repeatedly defied his earlier attacks. Struggling forward through hilly, densely forested terrain, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers perished in repeated, futile assaults on intact German defences.
Further north too, there was a depressing familiarity to the positions occupied by the two sides. The Germans continued to hold a line that ran from the Gulf of Finland past the southern outskirts of Leningrad to the Neva River and on to Lake Ladoga; from here, their lines ran south to the Volkhov River and on to Novgorod in the south. Immediately to the west of Leningrad, on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, was the Oranienbaum bridgehead, a small area held by the Red Army and dependent upon seaborne supplies for its survival. Leningrad, the second city of the Soviet Union, had been besieged since the autumn of 1941 when the Wehrmacht first reached Lake Ladoga and cut off contact by land. During the winter of 1941–42, the city’s inhabitants and defenders endured almost indescribable suffering in the midst of a bitterly cold winter as the Germans attempted to starve them into submission. Throughout 1942, the Red Army tried in vain to break through to the siege perimeter in order to lift the siege, suffering terrible casualties in the process.
To a large extent, the areas where Soviet forces would mount their attacks were easy to predict. The road and rail network of the region was poor, limiting the ability of the Red Army to concentrate the resources needed for a deliberate attack against strong defences, and the positions of the front lines meant that there was no potential for surprise or innovative manoeuvre. Twice in 1942, small breaches in the German defences were achieved and on both occasions the Soviet Second Shock Army was inserted through these gaps in attempts to push on through the depths of the German positions. Each time, the narrowness of the initial penetration was exploited by the Wehrmacht to launch counterattacks that resulted in the isolation and almost complete destruction of Second Shock Army.
But although the front line from Lake Ladoga in the north to the southern limits of the German Army Group Centre seemed to be relatively static, the situation was significantly different from when the siege lines were first established.
The heavy fighting of 1942 all along this vast front resulted in major changes in the two armies. The reality was that there was no longer any prospect of the Wehrmacht being able to assert itself and to dictate events in the same manner as before. The losses suffered by German forces through 1942 might have been far smaller than those suffered by the Soviet units facing them, but in many respects they were more serious.
Prit Buttar is a historian and the author of , published by Osprey.
