Operation Mars

• 1. A Defeat Without a Name

  ›

  Operation Mars consumed tens of thousands of Soviet lives in under four weeks, then disappeared from official Soviet history for decades. The offensive ran from the 25th of November to the 20th of December 1942, fought around the Rzhev salient west of Moscow. Together with related engagements near Rzhev, Sychevka, and Vyazma, it became part of what soldiers called the "Rzhev meat grinder." That name expressed the scale of the casualties more plainly than any official account did. Military historian David M. Glantz eventually described Operation Mars as the "greatest defeat of Marshal Zhukov." A competing interpretation holds that the battle was never designed to succeed on its own terms. In that reading, its true purpose was to protect a victory unfolding hundreds of kilometers to the south, at Stalingrad. That argument, and the silence that surrounded the battle, lasted for generations. The Soviet government's official designation was the Second Rzhev-Sychevka Offensive Operation. That formal name outlasted the story of what the operation actually cost.

  15157

• 2. Encirclement by Design

  ›

  Stalin and Zhukov gave the Kalinin and Western Fronts explicit orders: to crush the "Rzhev-Sychovka-Olenino-Bely enemy grouping." The target was the German Ninth Army, which occupied a large salient protruding toward Moscow. Multiple coordinated thrusts from all sides of the salient would converge to destroy that army. Keeping German forces fixed in the centre would also prevent them from reinforcing other threatened areas.

  Each objective came with a firm deadline. The Western Front was to take Sychovka no later than the 15th of December. The Kalinin Front's 39th and 22nd Armies were ordered to take Olenino by the 16th of December and Bely by the 20th.

  If Mars succeeded, a follow-up operation named Jupiter was to begin two to three weeks later. Jupiter would launch the Western Front's 5th and 33rd Armies along the Moscow-Vyazma highway, supported by the 3rd Guards Tank Army. After linking up with the victorious Mars force, the 9th and 10th Tank Corps would drive deep into the rear of Army Group Centre. The ultimate objective was the destruction of all German forces east of Smolensk. The offensive had been planned to start in late October, a deadline that slipped by weeks before the first attack was launched.

  1158

• 3. Fog and Frozen Ground

  ›

  Fog and snow met the Soviet advance at the start of the offensive, grounding the planned air support before the first wave attacked. The weather also prevented forward artillery observers from seeing their targets. The massive barrages meant to soften the German defences lost much of their effect before the assault had properly begun.

  The northern thrust stalled quickly. Across the frozen Vazuza River, the eastern attack ground forward but slowly. The two western thrusts cut deeper into the salient, especially near the key town of Belyi, but none of the advances matched what the plan required.

  German defenders had organized their strongpoints around the small villages scattered across the salient. Some of those positions kept fighting even after Soviet troops had pushed past them, creating problems in the Red Army's own rear. Anti-tank guns and the small number of German tanks available picked off Soviet armour. Pre-planned German artillery concentrations cut down Soviet infantry before it could close with the defenders. The small bridgeheads the Soviets managed to seize left little room to bring forward reinforcements. The artillery needed to crack the German strongpoints could not get through. German commanders shifted units inside the salient to pinch off Soviet spearheads wherever they threatened to advance.

  Eventually supply failures and mounting casualties gave the Germans the upper hand. They retook much of the ground they had yielded. Counterattacks near Belyi and near the Vazuza River trapped several thousand Soviet soldiers behind German lines. Some fought in the German rear for weeks before breaking through to their own positions. Those who escaped had to leave behind almost all their vehicles and heavy weapons. Zhukov later identified unexpected German reinforcements, moved in from other sectors of the front, as one of the reasons the offensive had failed.

  115133

• 4. Failure and Its Shadow

  ›

  "The Western Front failed to penetrate enemy defences," Zhukov wrote when he assessed the battle afterward. Major General MD Solomatin's Mechanized Corps was surrounded by German forces and held for three days before being relieved. Operation Mars achieved none of its stated objectives.

  Estimates of the Soviet casualties differ. Historian A.V. Isayev puts the losses at 70,373 killed and 145,301 wounded. David M. Glantz arrives at higher figures: 100,000 killed, 235,000 wounded, and 1,600 tanks lost. German casualties are estimated at around 40,000.

  Generalfeldmarschall Gunther von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre, recommended that the Germans abandon the Rzhev salient after the battle. Withdrawing would conserve manpower and let the army occupy more defensible positions. Adolf Hitler refused. His decision to hold ground in the winter of 1941-1942 had stabilized a faltering front. That lesson had made him reluctant to take his commanders' advice afterward. He also viewed the salient as a potential launch point for a future drive on Moscow. He was unwilling to surrender territory he had won.

  By the spring of 1943, the need to free up forces for operations elsewhere changed his thinking. A staged German withdrawal from the Rzhev salient began at the start of March 1943 and was complete by the 23rd of March. Historian A.V. Isayev later argued that the Ninth Army's losses at Rzhev had left it short of infantry. Assigned to the northern shoulder of the Kursk offensive in July 1943, it could not muster the force its task required.

  13115216

• 5. Failure or Sacrifice

  ›

  David M. Glantz spent years recovering Operation Mars from Soviet-imposed silence. His conclusion was that Mars was the primary Soviet offensive of that winter, not a diversion. The forces assembled for Mars were substantially larger than those deployed in Operation Uranus around Stalingrad, Glantz noted. He called the narrative that Mars was a calculated sacrifice propaganda, spread by the Soviet government to excuse a military failure.

  British historian Antony Beevor challenged that reading. Beevor observed that Zhukov spent less time planning Mars than he spent on Uranus. The artillery allocations pointed in the same direction. Soviet guns at Stalingrad received between two and a half and four and a half ammunition loads per weapon. Mars guns received fewer than one.

  Russian historian Makhmut Akhmetovich Gareyev consulted Stavka orders directly and concluded that Mars was designed to pin German forces in the Rzhev sector. Keeping them fixed there would prevent them from reinforcing Stalingrad, protecting the success of Operation Uranus in the south. German Colonel General Kurt von Tippelskirch confirmed the German side of that story after the war. Three panzer divisions and several infantry divisions earmarked for the south were held back in the central sector. Their task was to close gaps in the front and retake lost ground.

  Glantz pressed the point: if Mars was a diversion, no diversion in history had been so large, so costly, or so clumsily run.

  1514865

• 6. The Double Agent

  ›

  NKVD agent Pavel Anatoliyevich Sudoplatov disclosed after the war that Soviet intelligence had deliberately fed the Germans the plan for Operation Mars. The leak was not an accident. It was part of a series of deception operations run through controlled radio channels, collectively called "Monastery."

  At the centre of the relevant Monastery operation was a Soviet double agent: Aleksandr Petrovich Demyanov, who worked under the code name "Heine." Demyanov passed his German handlers detailed information about a major Soviet offensive in the Rzhev area. The aim was to convince the German command that the Red Army's next large blow would fall in the central sector. Apart from the intelligence officers running the operation, only Joseph Stalin himself knew that Monastery existed.

  91110