General Von Manstein wanted to trap the Red Army’s southern wing in the Donets Basin by tricking them into pursuing the desperately reforming Sixth Army, but the OKH dismissed the idea, and instead focused on the enormous and obvious bulge in the frontlines between Orel and Kharkov 200 kilometres wide and 120 kilometres deep. The Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942/’43, resulting from Soviet general Zhukov’s counteroffensive code-named Operation Uranus, had inflicted devastating losses and US entry in December 1941 promised little good in the longer term.Īfter the failure to take Stalingrad, Hitler uncharacteristically left the initiative for decision making with the German Army High Command ( Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH) and made Guderian prominent again by making him Inspector of the Panzer Troops. This changed with the invasion of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941 which had met great initial successes until Case Blue to take the Caucasus. The legendary panzers with massive air support had then crushed the French army, destroying its image as the strongest army in the world. France had been subjected to the so-called Sickelschnitt plan in which a brilliant move through the Ardennes had cut Allied forces in half. Denmark and Norway had then fallen in swift paratrooper and naval action. Poland had been crushed in weeks and as per the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact the Soviet Union had occupied the eastern part of Poland. The invasion of Poland, however, had crossed a line. Austria and Czechoslovakia had been annexed without French or British responses, same for the remilitarization of the Rhineland. The dictator controlled Germany by 1939 after having used demagoguery and propaganda to arouse popular sentiment against the Jews and the hated Treaty of Versailles which Hitler had relegated to the dustbin by rebuilding Germany’s armies. It was 1943 and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had conquered Europe. Chapter I: Victory Snatched from the Jaws of Defeat, May-September 1943.
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