Предвестники катастрофы на юге: поражения РККА в Крыму и под Харьковом в мае 1942 г

Abstract

In the spring of 1942, the Soviet-German front - from Leningrad to the Kerch Peninsula in the Crimea - became a theater of operations that proved the epilogue to the Red Army’s strategic offensive conducted in the winter of 1941-1942, and served as the overture to the summer campaign of 1942. The summer advances of Wehrmacht troops and troops of Germany’s allies on the southern wing of the Soviet-German front was preceded by large spring 1942 battles on the Volkhov Front where near Myasnoi Bor the 2nd Shock Army of general A. A. Vlasov was encircled and crushed; in the Northwest Front, the powerful counterthrust of the German troops through the settlement of Ramushevo deblocked the main forces of the 16th Field Army at Demyansk. The 33rd Army of general M. G. Efremov was beaten near Vyazma, in the rear of the Army Group Centre, military forces of the 1st Guards Rifle Corps and 11th Cavalry Corps of the Western Front were encircled. During the operations, due to the errors of the commanders of troops aggravated by scarce supplies and replenishment, a number of armies of the Volkhov, Northwest, Kalinin and Western Fronts were crushed. The catastrophic defeats of the armies of the Crimean and Southwestern Fronts in May 1942 had especially heavy effects on the Soviet troops in the south. The main reasons for the failure of the Soviet offensive operations in the southern wing of the Soviet-German front were as follows: mistakes at the planning stage, insufficient strengthening of flanks of the shock groups, absence of fortified belts in the rear of the armies and fronts with obligatory placement of troop reserves, artillery and military engineering units on such rear boundaries. The neglect of meteorological conditions (forecasts) in the zone of action of the Southwestern, Southern and Crimean Fronts, the insufficient information regarding the counter-forces and their actual assets, reserves and action plans resulting from the poor performance of the army reconnaissance and secret agent intelligence, frequent losses of control over the troops due to continuous wire communications failures within the ‘front - army - corps - division’ chain, weak and inept use of radio communication resulting in overdue reaction of the commanders to sudden changes in combat situations - all these factors contributed to the catastrophic result of the battles in the Crimea and at Kharkov in May of 1942. The tragedies dramatically worsened the strategic situation on the southern wing of the Soviet-German front and let the German generals recapture the strategic initiative. Materials and evidence for the article were searched for in the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense; memoirs and articles by Soviet and German military commanders as well as scholarly works of the post-war (Soviet) and modern periods also proved sources of data for the paper. The historical and situational, comparative and narrative methods were applied in the work; those imply studies of certain facts in the context of the era under consideration - in conjunction with the “adjoining” events and facts on the principles of “historicism”.