This month's book review delves into StuG Abteilung 191. The book provides rich insight into the German usage of assault guns during the Second World War, all while paying attention to the kind of details that other works may overlook.
If one is seeking to understand how and why the Second World War ended as it did it's instructive to take a look at Soviet planning during the fall of 1942. It represented everything German planning was not. First, unlike the chaos at OKH during the fall of 1942 (the third full year of war for the German high command and a time when you would have thought a competent leadership team would have been nailed down and in place), the Soviet Union had a stable military and political high command.
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.
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.
Last year I published a series of articles examining some of the significant but often overlooked Soviet counterstrokes directed against the Sixth Army's flanks outside Stalingrad. To this day, when one thinks of the exposed northwestern shoulder of Germany's drive into the Caucuses, and Soviet efforts to penetrate that flank, they think first and foremost of events exactly like those. However, what one needs to understand is that from Case Blue's first days the Red Army proved far from a passive defender.
