Д.Гланц. Операция "Марс".

OPERATION MARS
The Rzhev-Sychevka Operation (November-December 1942): A Case Study in Sources and Research Methodology

The history of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War is replete with the names of famous battles such as Smolensk, Leningrad, Kiev, Moscow, Khar’kov, Stalingrad, Kursk, Belorussia, and Berlin. While these battles are well known even to casual students of the war, others remain partially or totally obscure. Yet fierce combat that occurred in many other regions has been overlooked or forgotten by historians, often either because it lacked the drama or decisiveness of the more familiar battles or because its outcome was downright embarrassing. The roster of cities near which forgotten battles raged is extensive. It includes such names as Zhizdra, Bolkhov, Voronezh, Millerovo, Demiansk, Staraia Russa, Sevsk, Kovel’, and other cities, such as Orel, Vitebsk, Orsha, Bobruisk, and others already famous for known battles. Yet no city has had more of its history and suffering forgotten than the city of Rzhev. This has occurred despite the fact that the city was one of the focal points in the titanic Battle of Moscow in 1941.

While few readers are familiar with the Red Army’s defensive fighting around Rzhev and Kalinin in October 1941, most know of the army’s more famous Kalinin [Rzhev] offensive of December 1941. Many have read about the subsequent Rzhev-Viaz’ma offensive of January-April 1942, but fewer know the details of the Rzhev-Sychevka offensive of July-August 1942. However, the Rzhev-Sychevka offensive of November-December 1942, an operation the Stavka code-named Operation MARS, has languished in near total obscurity. Only today, over 50 years after war’s end, are Rzhev and many other cities near which these forgotten battles occurred and around which thousands of Red Army soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice receiving the recognition they so richly deserve.

Operation MARS is the most glaring instance where the historiography of the German-Soviet War has failed us. Operation MARS was the companion piece to Operation URANUS, the Red Army’s more famous counteroffensive at Stalingrad. The Stavka planned and conducted Operations MARS and URANUS in fall 1942 in order to regain the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front and set the Red Army on its path to victory. Planned and directed by Marshal G. K. Zhukov, conducted by a host of other famous Soviet generals, and appropriately named for the God of War, with Operation URANUS, MARS formed the centerpiece of Soviet strategic efforts in fall 1942. The immense scale and ambitious objectives of Operation MARS matched those of Operation URANUS. In its fickleness, however, history remembered Operation URANUS because it succeeded while it forgot Operation MARS because it failed. Only today can we correct this historical mistake and commemorate properly the sacrifices of the many Red Army soldiers and Germans who fell during the operation.

I have written in detail about the course, outcome, and potential strategic importance of operation MARS in numerous articles and books. Rather than recount those details here, this brief paper simply addresses how and why I chose to study Operation MARS, and more important still, how and why I am studying the many other “forgotten battles” of the Great Patriotic War.

Most Western readers have viewed the German-Soviet War an obscure, mysterious, and brutal struggle between Europe’s most bitter political enemies and largest and most formidable armies. The German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army struggled for almost four years in a theater of operations whose massive size, physical complexity, and severe weather conditions were unprecedented. The war’s massive scale defied easy understanding. On the surface the war seemed to be characterized by prolonged (and often seasonal) advances and retreats and long periods of stationary combat punctuated by dramatic battles near Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Belorussia, and Berlin. Americans and Westerners in general quite naturally considered and often still consider the war as simply a backdrop for more dramatic and significant battles in western theaters, such as occurred at El Alamein, Salerno, Anzio, Normandy, and the Bulge.

This wholly unbalanced view of the war exists because Western historians who wrote about the war based their accounts almost exclusively on German source materials. Understandably, their accounts convey only the German perspective. These historians have tended to portray the Red Army as a faceless and formless mass characterized by its immense size, its limitlessness supply of weapons and manpower, and its callous willingness to squander those human resources in its quest of combat victory. Quite naturally, these historians have written primarily about the Wehrmacht’s victories in 1941, 1942, and early 1943 and have tended to dismiss the Wehrmacht’s subsequent defeats as the consequences of an increasingly demented and meddlesome Adolph Hitler.

Sadly, even those who are more knowledgeable of the German-Soviet War share these common public misperceptions. While they know more about the major battles, such as von Manstein’s Donbas counterstroke, the Cherkassy Pocket, Kamenets-Podolsk, the collapse of Army Group Center, the very names they apply to these operations evidence their German-based perceptions. More important, these readers lack the knowledge and perspective necessary to comprehend the Great Patriotic War’s importance and impact regionally and globally.

Who then is at fault for propagating this unbalanced view of the war? Western historians who wrote about the war from only the German perspective deserve part of the blame. But they correctly argue that this was so because of the paucity of Soviet sources. Ethnocentrism is also to blame since people tend to appreciate only that which they have experienced. However, these tendencies only partially explain why Westerners have such an unbalanced perception of the war. Another contributing factor to this unbalanced view of the war has been the collective failure of Soviet historiography to present readers with a complete and credible account of the war. In short, ideology, politics, and Cold War shibboleths have inhibited the work and warped the perceptions of many Soviet historians.

Unfortunately, although many Soviet histories of the war are accurate, only the most biased, highly politicized, and least accurate were available to Western readers. Most Soviet histories were vetted for ideological, political, or military reasons. This eroded the works’ credibility (fairly or unfairly) and permitted the accounts and biases of German historians to prevail. Even today, this explains why unfair, wildly inaccurate, and extremely sensational accounts of certain aspects of the war are still so attractive to Western and even Russian readers ¹.

This bleak description of the state of Soviet (Russian) historiography must, of course, be qualified. Depending on the period, Soviet historiography has also produced many sound and lasting works, particularly during the early 1960s and after the mid-1980s. In addition, a handful of Western scholars have challenged the German view and attempted to set the record straight ².

Three barriers exist that tend to retard full appreciation in the West of the Soviet Union’s role in the war. These include a general ignorance of Soviet writing on the subject, an inability to obtain and read what Soviet historians have written (the language barrier), and an unwillingness to accept what those historians have written (credibility). Some Western historians have managed to overcome the first two barriers by preparing histories that incorporate the best Soviet sources. By doing so, they have lifted the veil on Soviet historiography and have candidly displayed its vast scope and its strengths and weaknesses. However, the credibility barrier is more difficult to overcome. To do so, Russian historians must erase the weaknesses in Soviet historiography by filling in the gaps in the historical record and by addressing the infamous along with the famous. This is essential if the Red Army’s role in the war is to achieve the stature that it so richly deserves.

I have now spent over 20 years correcting the historical record, principally by highlighting the Red Army’s wartime accomplishments, particularly during the last two years of the war ³. Like my predecessors, Malcolm Mackintosh and John Erickson, my aim has been to establish a more objective and honest view of the Great Patriotic War and World War II as a whole. When I published my single volume survey, When Titans Clashed in 1994, I considered this job complete. During the past five years I have sought to fill in gaps in the historical record under the rubric of my work on “forgotten battles.” That process began with the publication in 1998 and 1999 of my twin studies on the Red Army’s May 1942 Khar’kov offensive and Operation Mars. I am now completing an eight-volume series of books entitled, Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945). This series, which includes volumes on each of the eight wartime campaigns, should complete the chronology of wartime operations, at least to my satisfaction, and provide a basis for more in-depth work by others.

Detecting and analyzing “forgotten battles” of the Great Patriotic War is difficult and painstaking for a number of reasons. First, Soviet and Russian accounts of the war have generally overlooked these operations, treated them as insignificant, or dismissed them, rightly or wrongly, as feints, demonstrations, or deceptions. Second, since many of these operations failed, they left no major “footprint” in terms of major territorial advance or impact on their opponent that can easily attract one’s attention. Third, the scope and scale of the conflict overwhelmed German historians, and, as a result, they focused primarily on major operations that both they and their Soviet counterparts could identify and describe. As a result, these “forgotten battles” remained hidden within the context of larger and more dramatic operations ⁴. Finally, many of these historical gaps occurred in the waning stages of a major Soviet offensive, when striking overall Soviet offensive successes and German confusion obscure renewed Soviet activity and ultimate Soviet offensive aims.

If historians have ignored or summarily dismissed them as unimportant, how then can the historian identify these “forgotten battles?” The archives are the best place to begin the process of discovery. I do so by carefully examining daily operational and intelligence maps of German army groups, armies, corps, and sometimes even individual divisions. These “pictures of combat” record the nature and intensity of combat in any given front sector by graphically recording the impact, scope, and often intensity of the fighting through the physical configuration of the front and the intelligence picture of concentrated and identified enemy forces. Accompanying written operational and intelligence reports then explain the nature of the fighting.

For example, I detected Red Army operations in Operation MARS simply by discovering “dents” in the front lines of German Ninth Army around the Rzhev salient on the army’s daily intelligence maps, which displayed the daily situation in fall 1942 ⁵. Furthermore, these “dents” expanded and contracted over time. Quite by accident, I also recalled a map that appeared in the Soviet official History of the Second World War, which included the name “Operation MARS,” but whose text failed to provide any substantial explanation as to what Operation MARS meant ⁶.

After identifying Operation’s Mars’ presence on German intelligence maps, I searched for German and Soviet accounts of the action, first in the archives, if accessible, and then in other written works. I then located a detailed assessment of the operation, complete with postulated Red Army order of battle, commanders, and strengths and losses in the German Third Panzer Army’s records and shorter accounts in the archival records of many participating German divisions and in several unit histories.

The most important challenge then became finding references to the battle in Soviet sources. While most of these sources were utterly silent on the operation, some works published in the 1960s contained remarkably candid and accurate accounts of the action, although most covered separate operational sectors and provided little or no operational or strategic context. For example, the memoirs and biographies of most senior Red Army officers who participated in the operation, such as G. K. Zhukov, I. S. Konev, M. A. Purkaev, and I. F. Dremov, were either silent about it or, as in Zhukov’s case, distorted it beyond recognition. Others like M. E. Katukov, A. Kh. Babadzhanian, and D. A. Dragunsky offered only shallow vignettes on the operation. On the other hand, M. D. Solomatin wrote a detailed account of the role of his 1^st Mechanized Corps and his parent 41^st Army in the operation, and A. P. Getman fairly represented his 6^th Tank Corps’ role in the operation. So also did A. D. Kochetkov, in his history of the 5^th Tank Corps and A. N. Sekretov in his history of the 17^th Cavalry Division, which fought as a part of the 2d Guards Cavalry Corps. Finally, the memoirs of V. S. Boiko and K. A. Malygin offer glimpses of the 39^th Army’s role in the operation.

I also found a superb short account of the role and performance of the 20^th Army’s cavalry-mechanized group in one volume of the Red Army General Staff’s series entitled Sbornik materialov po izucheniiu opyta voiny. These I supplemented with fragmentary documents from TsAMO, which included operational orders and reports from the 20^th Army, 8^th Guards Rifle Corps, the 1^st Mechanized Corps, and other formations. The Red Army’s official Order of Battle (OB) found in the series Boevoi sostav Sovetskoi Armii 1941-1945 gg. verified and completed the order of battle assembled from other sources. Finally, the schedule of Marshal Zhukov’s daily wartime activities, which the Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal published in 1991, confirmed Zhukov’s presence in the region throughout the operation and substantiated what other sources stated regarding his role in the operation.

The mosaic formed from these all of these sources left no doubt whatsoever about the size, scale, and combat potential of the forces that took part in these operations. It also left no doubt about how the operation was conducted and its outcome. To be sure, notable gaps still exist in the available source materials. These gaps include most of the Stavka and front directives and the orders and reports prepared by the 22d, 39^th, 30^th, 31^st, and 29^th Armies and most of the participating tank and cavalry corps. It is, however, abundantly clear that it would have been far easier to study Operation Mars and reach firmer conclusions if this material had been available.

Historians can write truly definitive account of Operation MARS and other forgotten battles only after Russian and western scholars have more complete access to the Russian military archives. Until that occurs, historians have no other recourse but to write the history as best they can with the sources that are available. In this sense I applaud the efforts of General V. A. Zolotarev and others who are actively involved in preparing the imposing and valuable series of documents being published by the “TERRA” publishing house under the rubric of Russkie arkhiv. I was particularly pleased to read the recent volume in this series entitled Prelude to Kursk since this was to be the subject of my next book on “forgotten battles.” My congratulations also to General M. A. Gareev, whose recent articles have addressed other “forgotten battles” fought by the Western Front in fall 1943 and winter 1944. These new works set the standard others should meet in new scholarship on the war.

The Red Army played an immense, if not leading, role in the wartime defeat of Nazi Germany. It did so in appalling political circumstances and at immeasurable cost in terms of material and human loss and suffering. Truth is not the enemy of that feat. It cannot diminish what the Red Army achieved. In fact, to deny the world and the Russians and other peoples who took part in that struggle all the details of their trials and tribulations would be a crime, particularly against the memories of those who perished.

Some have perceived my work as an attack on the memory of Soviet Great Captains who led the Red Army to victory, in particular, Marshal Zhukov. This could not be farther from the truth. After all, Great Captains are men, and as such none are free from human faults and frailties. Acknowledging those human characteristics make these figures more human and hence more credible. In this case, Zhukov resembled the American General Grant, a superb strategist and practitioner of operational art who, nevertheless, was human and displayed some tactical blemishes. Just as bloody military defeats at Cold Harbor and Spotsylvania (1864) during the American Civil War did not diminish Grant’s fame, so also Operation MARS should not diminish Zhukov’s. No doubt this reassessment process will also accord other Soviet Great Captains the greatness denied them by the worship of only a few.

In conclusion, I will repeat an axiom that I quoted to a group of Soviet historians at a Soviet Academy of Science conference which I attended in 1987. That axiom states, “It is far better to relate one’s own history accurately than to have someone else do so.” If Russian and Western historians work together in that spirit, perhaps we can lay to rest the many myths, stereotypes, and shibboleths that still plague the history of the Great Patriotic War. Only then will those who perished in these forgotten operations and the war in general receive due credit for their sacrifices.

Soviet Counteroffensive Operations within the Context of German Operation Blau June-July 1942)

Soviet Offensive Operations within the Context of the Stalingrad Counteroffensive (November-December 1942)

Soviet Offensive Operations Along the Northwestern Axis and Operation "Polar Star"

Soviet Offensive Operations within the Context of the Battle of Kursk: The Donbas Offensive (17 July-2 August 1943)

The Battle for Leningrad: Operations along the Northwestern Axis (September 1943)

Soviet Offensive Operations along the Western Axis: The Belorussian Strategic Offensive (3 October-31 December 1943)

Soviet Offensive Operations along the Southwestern Axis: The Battle for the Dnepr, Stage 2, The Kiev Strategic Offensive (1-24 October 1943)

Soviet Offensive Operations along the Southern Axis (Lower Dnepr): The Battle for the Dnepr, Stage 2, The Lower Dnepr Strategic Offensive, (26 September-20 December 1943)

The 1st and 2d Baltic Fronts' Idritsa-Novosokol'niki Offensive (12-24 January 1944)

The 1st and 2d Baltic Fronts' Novosokol'niki Offensive (20 January - 15 February 1944)

The 1st and 2d Baltic Fronts' Offensives to Penetrate the German Panther line (28 February-3 March, 6-17 March, 7-20 April, 29 April-2 May 1944)

The 3d Belorussian Front's East Prussian (Tilsit and Gumbinen-Goldap) Offensives (16-27 October 1944)

The 1st, 2d, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts' Eastern Carpathian Offensive (8 September 28 October 1944)

The 1st, 2d, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts' Slovakian (Miskolc-Kosice) Offensive (7-28 November 1944)

The 1st, 2d, and 4th Ukrainian Fronts' Slovakian (Miskolc-Kosice) Offensive 10-20 December 1944)

For example, see Viktor Suvorov (ne Rezin), Ledokol [Icebreaker] and Den'-M [M-Day], whose preposterous claims about war guilt pervert history for political purposes and profit.

See, for example see such superb military analyses as those done by A. M. Samsonov on Stalingrad and Belorussia, G. A. Koltunov on Kursk, D. M. Proektor on the Dukla operation, A. A. Sidorenko on the Mogilev operation, V. Matsulenko on the Iassy-Kishinev operation and others. Generals K. K. Rokossovsky, K. S. Moskalenko, K. N. Galitsky, I. Kh. Bagramian, M. D. Solomatin, M. E. Katukov, Batov, and many others have written equally valuable memoirs. Finally, General Gareev and others have begun to address former forbidden themes, such as Red Army operations in Belorussia in fall 1943. Meanwhile, Malcolm Mackintosh, John Erickson, and several others have raised the veil on German Eastern Front operations for Western readers.

I have been studying the Great Patriotic War for over 20 years. In 1979, when preparing for a military historical exchange with Japanese military historians, at the suggestion of the Japanese, I researched and wrote a two-volume study on the Red Army's August 1945 offensive in Manchuria. This research led me to conclude that the Manchurian operation was a virtual post-graduate exercise for the Red Army. This, in turn, kindled my interest in the earlier periods of the war. Having read the last chapter of the book, I felt compelled to read what came before. More important still, the research caused me to challenge the stereotypical view of the war fostered by the written works of such figures as von Mellenthin, Guderian, and von Manstein, which dominated Western historiography.

For example, the Barbarossa offensive, the Battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and the immense Soviet operations later in the war, such as the Red Army advance to the Dnepr, the Right Bank of the Ukraine operation, and the Belorussian operation.

This was fortuitous, since I located this series on maps in German Army Group North's records. As you know, most of the Ninth Army's records are still in the Russian archives.

See A. A. Grechko, et. al., Istoriia Vtoroi Mirovoi voinyv dvenadtsati tomalh, Tom shestoi [A histroy of the Second World War in twelve volumes, Vol. 6] (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1976), Map 2.