Word: rzhev
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...Shoigu's call for the new law came after Russian television channel NTV broadcast a documentary about the Battles of Rzhev, a series of offensives launched by Soviet forces against the Germans between January 1942 and March 1943. The documentary raised popular anger, especially among WWII veterans, after it exposed the number of Soviet soldiers killed, which was much higher than most Russians believed - around a million compared to around 500,000 on the Nazi side - and presented a negative interpretation of Soviet tactics by, for example, showing how shocked German soldiers who had fought in the battles were...
...Road Back. In that winter of disaster, the Germans retreated some 400 miles, lost (according to Moscow) 1,200,000 men and 5,000 planes, gave up Vyazma, Rzhev, Kharkov, Belgorod, Rostov, a foothold in Voronezh. Manstein, retreating along the southern fringe of Russia, shrewdly caught advanced Russian tank columns in the March mud and out of fuel, recaptured Belgorod and Kharkov, subsequently wrote a sometimes brilliant, sometimes mistaken, always futile chapter in the tactics of retreat...
...above. The net strategic effect has been to leave the Germans on something very like the line from which they started a year ago, except that they now hold all Crimea and the Novorossiisk bridgehead. The map also pointed up the smallness of Russian gains in the north. The Rzhev salient was reduced and the Leningrad siege lifted, but nothing like the hoped-for offensive eating into the Baltic states had been realized...
...Wehrmacht hoped to strike again at Moscow and central Russia this year, the Red Army's gain and the German loss were enormous. If the Germans had already abandoned such hopes, and intended only to hold some tenable line in central Russia, the successive losses of Rzhev and Vyazma, and even the looming threat to Smolensk, did not matter so much to them...
Southeast of Rzhev other Russian columns captured Gzhatsk, the German position nearest (125 miles) to Moscow, and converged on the railway-junction town of Vyazma. Its fall would enable all the Red armies on the Central Front to combine for a drive toward Smolensk. The whole German position in central Russia was crumbling away...