Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July-10 September 1941 - Volume 1: The German Advance, The Encirclement Battle And The First And Second Soviet Counteroffensives, 10 July-24 August 1941

Smolensk’s defiant resistance, forged by Soviet forces amid relentless German pressure from July through September 1941, halted the Blitzkrieg’s advance and reshaped the course of Operation Barbarossa.At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center’s Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany’s Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht’s [Armed Forces] massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union’s Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Despite destroying two of these armies outright, severely damaging two others, and encircling the remnants of three of these armies in the Smolensk region, quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly-mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa.Structure and contents of Volume 1: Within the context of a fresh appreciation of Hitler’s Plan Barbarossa, this volume reviews the first two weeks of Operation Barbarossa and then describes in unprecedented detail: Introduction: Plan Barbarossa, Opposing Forces, and the Border Battles, 22 June-1 July 1941; Army Group Center’s Advance to the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers and the Western Front’s Counterstroke at Lepel’ 2-9 July 1941; Army Group Center’s Advance to Smolensk and the Timoshenko “Counteroffensive,” 13-15 July 1941; Army Group Center’s Encirclement Battle at Smolensk, 16 July-6 August 1941; The First Soviet Counteroffensive, 23-31 July 1941; The Battles on the Flanks (Velikie Luki and Rogachev-Zhlobin), 16-31 July 1941; The Siege of Mogilev, 16-28 July 1941; Armeegruppe Guderian’s Destruction of Group Kachalov, 31 July-6 August 1941; Armeegruppe Guderian’s and Second Army’s Southward March and the Fall of Gomel’, 8-21 August 1941; The Second Soviet Counteroffensive: The Western Front’s Dukhovshchina Offensive, 6-24 August 1941 and the Reserve Front’s El’nia Offensive, 8-24 August 1941; The Struggle for Velikie Luki, 8-24 August 1941. Read more