On February 23, 1942, the Soviet Union celebrated Red Army Day, marking the anniversary of the first conscription of Soviet forces during the Russian Civil War. General Secretary Joseph Stalin gave a speech claiming that the Soviet Union now held the upper hand over Germany after stopping the Nazi advance on Moscow. In reality, while Operation Typhoon was a significant failure for the Wehrmacht, the Soviets faced major crises everywhere else. A botched expedition in December 1941 to retake the Crimean Peninsula from the Germans was a huge loss in equipment and men. Attempts to relieve the encircled military personnel and civilians in Leningrad were also unsuccessful, with entire armies lost in the process. Red Army Chief of the Staff Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov and his deputy, General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, favored plans of strategic defense to prepare for the next sustained German assault and to revive their own forces and fortifications.

Stalin, however, remained assured that Moscow was the real German target, and so kept the majority of his strategic reserves centered around the capital. He also encouraged his commanders to put forward proposals for limited local offensives that reversed the defensive orientation of the Red Army. He believed that the German armed forces could not possibly assemble around Moscow while simultaneously holding the line from Leningrad to the Crimea; a decisive victory in at least one region would supply a massive boost to shattered Soviet morale after the repeated humiliations of 1941.

In the middle of March 1942, commander of the Soviet Southwestern Front Marshal Semyon Timoshenko submitted a proposal for a counteroffensive to encircle and destroy German forces around Kharkov in eastern Ukraine before pushing west to the Dnepr River. The main attack would come from Soviet forces centered around the city of Barvenkovo (Barvinkove in Ukrainian) with a secondary attack around Volchansk (Vovchansk in Ukrainian). These forces were part of a large salient around the city of Izium on the western bank of the Donets River. The plan called for around 800,000 Red Army soldiers and around 1,000 tanks to attack the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus. Shaposhnikov in particular was worried about stuffing so many Red Army troops into a “sack” that extended sixty miles behind German lines. The Soviet armies and armored units involved were not in good condition, many of them hastily assembled, and the spring brought with it rasputitsa: the melting of the winter snow, flooding rivers and turning the hard earth into almost unpassable piles of mud. The Stavka reasoned, however, that they were probably facing the same low-strength German divisions they had faced over the previous winter, and that the conditions of the roads would be even more detrimental to the foreign invaders than the native Soviets.

On April 5, Ad olf Hitler issued Directive 41 declaring a summer offensive into southern Russia. Before this could happen, the Wehrmacht would have to eliminate Soviet bulges in the German front line, including the large one around Izium that threatened Kharkov. The commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, drew up a plan for late April called Operation Fredericus. It called for Sixth Army under Paulus and the Seventeenth Army under General Ewald von Kleist to encircle the Soviet salient from the north and south, respectively. Hitler felt that Bock’s plan was too cautious, so Bock devised a bolder, riskier version that would drive further east before swinging southward. It was estimated that the attack would begin on May 18. The later Soviet defeat in the Crimea made available additional units for German commanders to draw on, whereas the depleted Red Army had only minimal reserves on hand to support its forward units. There is no indication that the German troops expected a Soviet attack, despite reports of “confused troop movements” indicating the Red Army was mobilizing for its own attack. The German commanders, including Hitler, did not believe the Red Army would hazard an offensive strategy; in their view, Soviet defeat was, albeit delayed, inevitable.

The Second Battle for Kharkov began on May 12, 1942, with Soviet armor driving almost 40 miles into German territory. The Germans were unprepared for the heavy artillery bombardment followed by more mobile Soviet shock units. Neither the Hungarian 108th Light Infantry Division nor the German 454th Security Division could withstand the heavy armor they were up against. Like the Germans, however, the Soviets learned the hard way that it was difficult to reinforce units that advanced too rapidly for support to catch up. Timoshenko hesitated to insert several tank corps on May 15, leaving an opening for the Germans. As Shaposhnikov feared, the large amount of Soviet forces suddenly west of the Izium salient presented a juicy opportun ity for the German troops.

On May 17 the Wehrmacht implemented parts of Operation Fredericus, striking the southernmost Soviet pincer in its left flank. The tip of the German spear was made up of III Motorized Corps, part of Panzer Group Kleist. Among the Axis forces were several Romanian and infantry and cavalry divisions, but the most vital support came from the Luftwaffe and its fighters and bombers. German pilots secured air superiority and subjected Soviet forces to heavy strafing and bombing. On May 18 the Luftwaffe destroyed 130 tanks and 500 motorized vehicles, with a response time to air strike requests of 20 minutes.

Stalin and the Soviet le adership refused to suspend the offensive even when Panzer Group Kleist had taken the initiative, leading to a waste of material and lives. It was only on May 19, when the German 6th Army struck from further north that Stalin decided to cut his losses. It was too late, and by May 24 the salient was closed, with the Soviet troops surrounded. Even worse, the Luftwaffe had destroyed most of the remaining bridges across the Donets River, meaning that the Red Army units had no clear route of retreat east. Very few escaped the so-called “Barvenkovo mousetrap.” From a forward observation post Bock was stunned watching the “overwhelming scene” of carnage as the trapped Soviet soldiers fought to their deaths without possibility of escape. Kleist would write: “In places of the heaviest fighting, as far as one can see, the ground is so thickly covered with the bodies of men and horses that it is difficult to find a passage through one’s command car.” On May 27 Hitler told his commanders he wanted the surviving Soviet forces around Izium and Volchansk eliminated to secure a jumping-off point for the summer campaign toward the Caucasus, which would go north to south.

By May 28, when Timoshenko finally ended the offensive, the Soviet 6th and 57th armies were totally destroyed. It is believed that the Red Army lost around 300,000 men while German casualties were much lower, only around 20,000-30,000. The Germans would report almost a quarter of a million Soviet POWs taken, most of whom would die in captivity.

The lopsided nature of the German victory can be attested to several reasons. First, it was incredibly risky for Timoshenko to launch a counteroffensive from a salient given the potential for a German encirclement. He did not know that the Wehrmacht was planning Operation Fredericus around the same time as he was planning his operation, although this is hardly a sufficient excuse. Soviet intelligence should have done better at reporting the build-up happening in Army Group South. Additionally, while the Izium salient was a huge disruption in the German front-line, in 1942 it still should have been seen as an opportunity for yet another devastating German pincer attack. The second battle of Kharkov did not even have the positive aspect of making the Soviets realize Germany’s summer focus would be in the south, not toward Moscow. When the push toward the Caucasus began months later, Stalin still believed it was part of a campaign for the capital. It would still take some time for Stavka to understand that Hitler was interested in economic objectives, not political ones, to end the war.

If the failure of Operation Typhoon in the winter of 1941 humbled the hitherto invincible-seeming Wehrmacht, the multiple successive Soviet fiascos along the Eastern Front virtually everywhere other than Moscow did a great deal to bolster German assurance that victory would be theirs. This increased morale, as did faith in Hitler and his coming summer offensive. The Soviet Union would be knocked out of the war and Germany would possess valuable oil refinieries. For the Soviet leadership, its losses disrupted the optimism that followed the German failure to take Moscow in 1941. Internationally, it caused the United States and the United Kingdom to press forward with opening a second front in Europe to relieve the Soviet Union from the full force of the Nazi war machine. Going into June 1942 and the one-year anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, a reasonable observer at the time would have surmised that the Soviet Union was still on the precipice of defeat.

Sources

Bellamy, Chris. 2007. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.