Last year I reviewed and recommended Volume I of Douglas E. Nash Senior's new trilogy looking into the combat history of the IV. SS-Panzerkorps. I have now completed Volume's II and III and think you will like them both. Check out the new review of these volumes here!
I've spent the last two months reading the most detailed study you might ever find regarding one of the Second World War's more overlooked but great city sieges. Clocking in at 1,400 pages and two volumes this may end up becoming the definitive study of the 1944-45 Battle for Budapest, and it is well-worth your time. Take a moment to check out the review and why it is I think this two-volume set lives up to the author's ambitious goals.
Traditional accounts of Germany's 1942 summer offensive on the Eastern Front (codenamed Operation Blue) describe the tyranny of time, space, and distance all working together to undermine German efforts. Couple that with the Red Army's wise decision to pull back, draw the Germans in, and only then stand and fight, using its superior size and strength to beat the Axis forces, and you have a conventional wisdom that proved surprisingly enduring.
As it turns out a huge chunk of this conventional wisdom has already been proven to be more myth than reality.
The initial plans for Germany's 1942 summer offensive, code-named "Operation Blue" called for four sequential operations. The first, Blue I, featured the Four Panzer Army, German Second Army, and German Sixth Army all working together to encircle and destroy Soviet forces before the city of Voronezh along the upper Don River. The second part of the campaign, Blue II, called for the German Sixth Army to turn south in hopes of engineering a planned encirclement at Millerovo on the Donets River.
Since the Second World War ended it has been popular to present the Soviet Union as an overwhelming economic and military colossus that was essentially undefeatable by 1942 if not earlier in the war. The groundwork for this belief was laid by German officers who after the war sought to cast blame for their own failures of leadership. American military leaders then latched onto these aguments. Doubtlessly this occured in part as a response to the Cold War era Communist threat.
The German army in the east (Ostheer) had taken a beating during Barbarossa in part but even worse during the Soviet winter counter-offensives beginning in December of 1941. The first six months of 1942 featured a series of massive battles that would continue nearly up to the start of the second large-scale German summer offensive: Operation Blue.
On June 22, 1941 Nazi Germany launched it's invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed Operation Barbarossa). The Germans concentrated the bulk of their effort in three massive Army Groups (North, Center, and South). In this article, we shall take a look at Army Group South's operations during Barbarossa as well as examine the condition in which the Army Group stood as several key points in the campaign. In this way we can better assess how and why Army Group South fell short in terms of taking its objectives for Barbarossa.
Stephen Barratt's two-volume set Zhitomir-Berdichev (sold separately) should go down as the definitive look from the German side of the hill at the critically important combat operations on Army Group South's left flank during the lead up to the far more famous Battle of the Korsun Pocket.
During the spring of 1944 the Red Army finally began wrapping up its enormously expensive eight month campaign to evict German forces from the Ukraine. The linchpin of this effort came against Army Group South's left wing - defended by its First and Fourth Panzer Armies. On March 4th Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov's 1st Ukrainian Front, spearheaded by the 3rd Guards Tank Army and 4th Tank Army, attacked German Army Group South's left wing. Zhukov's men forged numerous penetrations in German defensive lines already heavily weakened following the battle for the Korsun pocket.
Early in 1943 the Red Army had launched a series of massive offensives across the breadth of the German Eastern Front. In particular, and as the German Sixth Army fought to its destruction at Stalingrad, multiple Soviet fronts, spearheaded by General N.F. Vatutin's Southwestern Front, surged across southern Russia. Meanwhile, Erich von Manstein, commanding the whole of the reconstituted German Army Group South, the former Army Groups A, B and Don, fell back before the Soviet advance and regrouped his armies.
Soviet General Cherniakhovsky’s 60th Army, part of Golikov’s Voronezh Front, took
