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07-04-2020 11:01 PM
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Welcome to the ass of the World!!
BACKGROUND.
On June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa was unleashed: the invasion of the Soviet Union by Axis forces. Some 200 divisions divided into three Army Groups began the operation on three axes of advance.
Army Group North: towards the Baltic States - Leningrad. Army Group Center: towards Belarus - Smolensk- Moscow. Army Group South: towards Ukraine and the Volga.
Advande of the Army Group North towards Leningrad
As is known, the unstoppable German advance lasted until the first days of December 1941, when at the gates of Moscow, the Soviet counter-offensive stopped the invasion in its tracks.
The Front Line was established on the Volkhov River
For what concerns here, Army Group North reached the outskirts of Leningrad, initiating the siege of the city, which would last about 900 days.
In this sector, the front line was finally stabilized on the banks of the Volchov River.
The Volchov River flows from Ilmen Lake in a northerly direction to drain into Lake Ladoga (the largest in Europe). It is navigable in its entire length. Its flow is highly variable depending fundamentally on the level of Lake Ilmen. The river freezes in late November and thaws in early April.
Although the Soviet counter-offensive against Moscow, which brought the Army Group Center to a halt, is the most important and the best known, the truth is that the Soviet counterattacks spread to all sectors of the front.
"To the surprise of Stalin and his Stavka, the invaders were weaker than expected by pushing them back against Moscow in December, so it was decided to launch a series of ambitious assaults in the new year.
Powerful units attacked at the junction of the Center and North Army groups, threatening to engulf the Ninth Army and take Smolensk, Vitebk, and Rzhev. Only the arrival of a few reinforcements and the charismatic command of General Walter Model, prevented the disaster.
Model Kommt!
But Stalin had planned another assault. Major forces were to cross the Volchov and cut Jamburg, east of Leningrad, directly, to break the siege and isolate and annihilate the Eighteen German Army.”
As the 250th Division of Spanish Volunteers (Blue Division) fought on that front, their actions in the battle that was about to begin are well known to some of us.
General Muñoz Grandes (third from left) with a group of officers from the Blue Division.
What happened was that on January 13, 1942, the Soviets broke the German lines to the left of the Blue Division. The Fifty-Second, Second Shock and Fifty-Nine Armies, which were concentrated along the eastern bank of the river, overwhelmed the German defenses, introducing large contingents of mechanized troops that deepened to the rear, threatening to envelop the entire Army Group North.
In the first attacks, the Germans lost Teremez, and the Spanish counterattacked, suffering significant losses.
The Soviets attacked numerous Spanish positions (“La Ermita”, “El Alcázar”, Chutyni, “El Mogote” ...) while men, horses, cannons and tanks continue to penetrate their bridgehead.
Three Soviet armies came in behind the Volkhov
By January 15, the Russians already had a firm bridgehead with a six-kilometer gap, opened between the 126th and 215th divisions, had cut the Rollbahn and the Novgorod railway.
"Their spearheads deepened west through icy swamps and forests, reaching Eglino, halfway to Leningrad, before February 1"
With the initial momentum lost due to a shortage of supplies, the Soviet wedge turns north and endangers Liuban, on the Chudovo-Leningrad railway line.
Last edited by TabsTabs1964; 07-08-2020 at 06:20 PM.
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Faced with the looming crisis, Stalin sent to the pocket General Andrei A. Vlasov, a young and rising star military man who had distinguished himself in the defense of Moscow, and appointed him Second Chief of the Northwest Front.
The Chief of the German Eighteenth Army, General Lindemann, understood that the German attack had to cut the Soviet line of penetration from its flanks, isolating the enemy from its sources of supply. It was attacked on March 17, and the two German pincers cut the Soviet line on March 19, isolating 130,000 men. That day “a new and subtle sound was heard. A trickle first and then a torrent of black, putrid water that flowed into the river: ¡the rasputitsa!”
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General Andrei Vlasov assumes command of the forces encircled in the pocket on March 21, 1942 - two hundred thousand men - which, at the end of the month, is turned into a quagmire. Swamps and rivers liquefy, and the atmosphere reeks of decomposing corpses and rotting vegetation. Mosquito waves torment the soldiers. It is the season of thawing, the Russian "raputitsa".
During the rest of March and the months of April and May, Vlasov's troops will constantly fight to break the siege with everything they had: T-34 tanks, heavy artillery, airplanes and infantry, the German siege lines are softened but they do not yield, and with great efforts some units of the Second Shock Army (some sixteen thousand men) will be able to infiltrate and escape towards their lines, on the morning of June 23. Vlasov (to whom Stalin sent an airplane to rescue him from the encirclement, to which the general refused), orders: save yourself who can! Organized resistance ceases. Thus ends the battle of the Volchov´s pocket and the operation of elimination of the isolated troops will begin.
From January 13 when the Russians crossed the Volchov with the strategic objective of lifting the siege of Leningrad, until June 28 when the resistance ceased, they lost three armies, had more than 100,000 dead and wounded, and the Germans captured more than 32,000 prisoners.
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July was a month of operations of “search and destroy” of the "green hell" of the pocket. Spaniards and Germans entered the marshes covered by clouds of mosquitoes, breathing dense and nauseating air from the sweet smell of thousands of decomposing corpses. The soldiers chewed quinine pills constantly, and day after day captured hundreds of starving Russian soldiers who surrendered willingly, after spending months fighting in terrible conditions and weeks without supplies of any kind. Falling prisoners was an acceptable prospect, especially if it was from the Spanish soldiers who used to treat Russian soldiers decently.
Skulled and exhausted Russian POWs
On July 12, General Vlasov, denounced by a peasant, is captured by two German information officers. Upon hearing the news of his capture in Moscow, his wife was arrested and executed by the NKVD.
Sent to a German concentration camp, he announced his willingness to defect, proposing to cooperate with the Germans along with other anti-Stalinist Russians. A Russian general who switched sides was a unique occasion for the German propaganda apparatus. Vlasov will lead the so-called Russian Liberation Army (ROA).
In the last days of the war, Vlasov and his men fled west to surrender to Anglo-American troops, who denied him asylum. Sent to Moscow, he was tried and sentenced to death, along with eleven other ROA officers. He was hanged on August 2, 1946. Vlasov's soldiers were taken to the USSR, executed or sent to Gulags, where thousands of them found death.
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