Word: rzhev
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...Wehrmacht's scheme of defense Rzhev was the main forward hedgehog protecting the Germans in north or central Russia. For 14 months Red armies had hammered the city, until last week had never managed to break its defenses. According to the Russians, Hitler himself once told his generals that Rzhev's fall would be equal to the "loss of half of Berlin...
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...