Last time we spoke about the end of the first year of the eastern front. The Red Army pressed on Army Group Center, while Meretskov’s Volkhov Front prepared a Leningrad breakout despite crippled supply lines. In Leningrad, famine worsened; cannibalism surfaced and NKVD records show arrests, even as the Kirov Tank Factory kept producing tanks. The Baltic/Sevastopol fronts saw stubborn resistance: the Soviet submarine fleet, though hampered by ice and poor training, managed limited successes; five transports, a submarine, and two tankers sunk by year’s end. Army Group North protected the Leningrad corridor against repeated Soviet attempts to sever it, while Meretskov’s 4th and 54th Armies attempted operations west and south of Lake Ladoga to relieve the siege. In Army Group Center, Hitler’s retreats were banned, but local withdrawals continued, fueling a leadership crisis as Zhukov exploited gaps and the 1st Guards Cavalry Corps disrupted Kaluga and Sukhinichi. Guderian’s retreat sparked relief demands and Guderian’s removal. On the southern and Crimean fronts, Sevastopol withstood heavy pressure; Kerch and Feodosia saw mixed Soviet landings and German counterattacks, with Petrov’s defense holding deep into late December. Overall, December 1941 ended with Soviet momentum, strained German logistics, and a desperate balance as winter intensified.

This episode is New Year, New Offensives

Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. 

January 1st arrived with a nation in flux. After 193 days of campaigning, a remarkable turn of events had unfolded: a shocking invasion pushed the Wehrmacht toward the gates of Moscow, and the closing weeks of 1941 saw the Red Army mounting a determined counteroffensive. Stalin had managed to keep the communist state intact against overwhelming odds, while his generals scrambled to reorganize both army and industry on the fly, improvising plans as new realities emerged on every front. By December, with German forces only kilometers from the Kremlin, the Red Army had carefully marshaled its resources and prepared to strike back. The invaders found themselves facing a reeling front and signs of growing disarray, and there was a rising sense that the long, grinding struggle might tilt in favor of the Soviets. Yet the Germans managed to hold the line. Despite being defeated in detail in several engagements, they reorganized around a new set of defensive positions and steadied their posture for the year ahead, ready to resist the anticipated Soviet push and to exploit any moment of weakness in the enemy’s momentum.

In Army Group North, what would come to be known as the Lyuban Offensive had been in the planning stages since the third week of December. The original start date was set for December 25, but delays in preparations pushed it back to after the new year. Meretskov was nominally in command of the offensive’s main effort with the Volkhov Front, yet Stalin had dispatched a coordinator from the Stavka to oversee the operation. This was Commissar Mekhlis, a figure infamous for his ruthless reputation and a readiness to discipline anyone he believed might be disobeying orders in spirit as well as in letter. According Khrushchev “He had a particularly strong influence over Stalin ... I had once been on very good terms with him ... But by the time he took over as chief of the Political Directorate I considered him a nitwit, and I was appalled that someone like him could enjoy Stalin's unbounded confidence. Mekhlis's influence did the army and the country no good.” 

He was certainly a colorful character. From 6 September 1940 to June 1941, he served as People’s Commissar of State Control (Goskontrolya). During the 1939–40 war with Finland, Mekhlis was sent to the front to report to Stalin on why the Red Army was being driven back by the Finns. He attributed the defeats to treachery and had Alexei Vinogradov, Vinogradov’s chief of staff, and the chief of the political department shot in front of the troops.  In June 1941, Mekhlis was reassigned to his former post as head of the Main Political Administration and as deputy People’s Commissar of Defense. He was with Stalin on the day the Germans invaded the USSR, marking the start of Operation Barbarossa. Mekhlis received the rank of army commissar of the 1st rank, equivalent to General of the Red Army. In 1942 he acted as the Stavka’s representative, serving with the high command. As part of the effort to find someone to blame for the Red Army’s disastrous setbacks in 1941, Mekhlis ordered the artillery commander on the North Western Front, Vasily Sofronovich Goncharov, to be shot at the front headquarters on 11 September 1941. Goncharov was posthumously exonerated in 2002.

Mekhlis personally encouraged the killing of German prisoners of war, contributing to the Feodosia massacre. Later on in March 1942, Mekhlis was dispatched to organize the defense of the Kerch peninsula on the Crimean Front, where he clashed with General Dmitry Timofeyevich Kozlov. In May 1942 the Red Army was driven out of Crimea by a numerically smaller German force. In his report to Stalin, Mekhlis attempted to shift blame onto Kozlov, but received a scathing telegram in response “Crimean front, t. Mekhlis: Your code message #254 (I) received. Your position of a detached observer who is not accountable for the events at the Crimean Front is puzzling. Your position may sound convenient, but it positively stinks. At the Crimean Front, you are not an outside observer, but the responsible representative of Stavka, who is accountable for every success and failure that takes place at the Front, and who is required to correct, right there and then, any mistake made by the commanding officers. You, along with the commanding officers, will answer for failing to reinforce the left flank of the Front. If, as you say, "everything seemed to indicate that the opponent would begin an advance first thing in the morning", and you still hadn't done everything needed to repel their attack instead limiting your involvement merely to passive criticism, then you are squarely to blame. It seems that you still have not figured out that we sent you to the Crimean Front not as a government auditor but as a responsible representative of Stavka. You demand that Kozlov be replaced, that even Hindenburg would be an improvement. Yet you know full well that Soviet reserves do not have anyone named Hindenburg. The situation in Crimea is not difficult to grasp, and you should be able to take care of it on your own. Had you committed your front line aviation and used it against the opponent's tanks and infantry, the opponent would not have been able to break through our defenses and their tanks would not have rolled through it. You do not need to be a 'Hindenburg' to grasp such a simple thing after two months at the Crimean Front. Stalin”. So yeah he was a pretty bad guy. Back to our story, Mekhlis wasted no time in tightening the screws, ensuring that maximum effort was directed toward getting the field forces assembled and fully prepared for the offensive. His involvement signaled a shift toward tighter central control and intensified pressure to press the initiative despite the logistical and strategic challenges that had slowed preparations.

After days of delay, the first attack began on January 4th near Kirishi. The 1st Infantry Corps managed to hold the line, and soon the 12th Panzer Division arrived to counterattack. The 12th Panzer Division had been withdrawn from the line for a little under two weeks of refitting in Estonia. That short lull proved fruitful: the division’s repair depots managed to bring roughly seventy tanks back into service. Reconstituted and ready, the unit was then sent back into the line to act as a mobile reserve, poised to respond to changing battlefield conditions. The Soviet 4th Army was pushed back to its starting positions. By the end of the day, Meretskov had pleaded with Stalin for a three-day pause, but the request was rejected. Stalin had become convinced that the Wehrmacht was little more than a shell, and that the only thing preventing its destruction was a failure of will on the part of his commanders. In this, he was echoing the mistakes of Hitler from a few weeks earlier. Hitler remained confident that victory would come from sufficient willpower alone. Commanders were judged not on battlefield performance, but on whether their resolve satisfied Hitler’s mania for unwavering obedience. In a striking psychological mirror, Stalin proved similar in the war’s early years. One way historians summarize the Eastern Front is to say that Hitler trusted his Generals less and less, pulling ever more control into his own hands, while Stalin sought to rely on his commanders more, gradually delegating authority even as he tightened political oversight. If the Soviet Union was to win on the battlefield, more flexibility needed to be granted to the field commanders.

Things were going so badly for Germany, a large commotion about adopting chemical warfare heated up. The difficulties on the eastern front, together with rising nervousness within the Ministry for Armaments and Munitions and other leading industrialists’ doubts about Germany’s war prospects, gave gas-warfare advocates their first real opportunity to promote their ideas. This was not the war’s first mention of gas as an offensive or defensive agent, but Germany’s continued rapid success had kept the debate on the margins. Hitler insisted on a gas capability should Germany be attacked first, but he showed little serious interest in its offensive use. At the outset of Barbarossa, fears persisted that a gas war might ensue. The British intercepted reports that the Germans planned to use gas in the east and threatened retaliation if they did. Simultaneously, Goebbels sought to calm fears of a Soviet gas attack by promising swift retaliation. A pamphlet instructed German troops to expect poison-gas and bacterial attacks in combat with the Red Army. Germany’s battlefield successes, however, sustained the hope of final victory over the Soviet Union and sidelined discussions of gas warfare.

In the second half of 1941, as German armaments production deepened its crisis, lobbyists for gas warfare failed to defend their programs from cuts. In early December, Hitler received a report on new nerve gases—Trilon 83 (Tabun) and Trilon 46 (Sarin), the latter six times more deadly. The main gas production facility at Dyhernfurth, with a capacity of 1,000 tons per month, could reach full production by spring 1942. The report concluded: “Neither captured documents nor other intelligence sources indicate that the enemy will use these or similar gases with the same effects. This means that Germany is clearly superior in gas warfare, and this superiority must be maintained.” Hitler agreed. He would not initiate a gas war, but he insisted that German capabilities and superiority be maintained at whatever cost. This stance imposed another burden on Germany’s overstrained war economy, yet it also encouraged those in the chemical industry and armaments agencies who continued to advocate an offensive gas option, especially on the eastern front. On 7 January 1942, Halder noted in his diary: “Colonel [Hermann] Ochsner is trying to talk me into a gas war against the Russians.” These advances were rejected by the German high command, not from timidity about chemical killing agents but from genuine fear of Allied reprisals. After all, the experimental killing of Jews with gas was already progressing, 1,200 Jews were killed at a clinic in Bernburg on 25 November 1941. Strategic weapons and German planning were important to the wider war, but they bore little immediate relevance to Army Group Centre’s soldiers. Importantly, no decision had been made to halt the offensive, so the advance had to continue despite bleak prospects. As Hellmuth Stieff wrote: “We have launched this attack largely with infantry regiments and can give them little tank protection. Our high command has urged us forward with an almost unreal sense of optimism. I instinctively feel this cannot work. We have assembled everyone we can find, even bringing up security detachments and putting them in the front line. These men are unsuited to intense combat, and when their commanders were killed in the first hour of the offensive, the rest refused to continue. They have been driven forward only because our artillery units threatened to open fire on them.”

 In January 1941, that lesson remained unlearned. Against Meretskov’s objections, the Lyuban Offensive pressed on. The 59th Army was thrown into the fighting, closely followed by the 2nd Shock Army. The German infantry resisted with a well-organized defense that spanned multiple lines of trenches, bunkers, barbed wire, and mines. The 59th Army attacked on January 6, crossing the Volkhov River in an attempt to seize and expand bridgeheads for the follow-on assault by the 2nd Shock Army. By the end of the day, the 59th Army had managed to push three divisions across the river. On January 7, the 2nd Shock Army was committed to the battle, tasked with taking Posadnikov Ostov, a small village west of Kirishi. The troops trudged through swampy terrain, conducting uncoordinated and unsupported assaults in a grueling struggle. For their efforts, three thousand men died in the first half hour; more perished as the day wore on.

As the first week drew to a close, it became clear that the Soviets had sacrificed thousands of lives for little tangible gain. There was still no sign that the lines held by the 18th or the 16th Army were anywhere near breaking point, though the pressure on those sectors remained severe. The German infantry, for their part, endured their own hardships. The swampy, frozen forests along the Baltic coast offered a brutal siege: lice were pervasive, food was scarce, and rations—ranging from rifle ammunition to clean clothing, were tightly controlled. Frostbite remained a persistent threat, and the few vehicles of Army Group North labored under shortages of lubricants and fuel, limiting mobility and tempo across the front. The first week of the year for Army Group Center was far from easy.

Ever prone to prevarication when faced with a decision, von Kluge was now nearing the point of forcing one. In a long and diffuse telephone conversation, he told Halder, that the time had come to consider whether it was necessary to pull back his army group’s entire front. Lateral movement, von Kluge added, had become impossible, so reinforcing a highly threatened sector from a less-threatened area was not feasible. The army group’s sector was completely snowed in. Generaloberst Hans-Georg Reinhardt had tried to take command of the 4th Army before Kübler arrived, but could not move south from his current command, the 3rd Panzer Army, by road, air, or even by sled. The area’s roads were being buried by drifts as quickly as they were cleared. The troops could not obtain food, and without food they could not fight. If the Soviets struck at his lines of communication, he could not move troops quickly enough to counter it. Von Kluge told Halder that Hitler now had to emerge from his “castle in the clouds” and plant both feet on the ground. Halder replied with Hitler’s standard refrain against retreat, namely that once started, retreat was very hard to halt. Von Kluge finally admitted that he had not reached any firm conclusion about the depth of the retreat he was advocating and would have to think it over.

In the early hours of January, Kluge endured a raging tirade from Hitler, who demanded that he hold the line while forbidding any withdrawal. For days, Kluge had pressed for permission to pull back the suffering 9th Army, but the Führer remained obstinate. The morning of the first proved tortuous for the Army Group Center commander: after enraging the dictator by reporting that Schmidt was retreating without orders, Kluge finally conceded defeat. Before dawn, he telephoned Schmidt to communicate the setback, a moment that underscored how even a field marshal could do little to sway the Bohemian Corporal’s will. Meanwhile, the Soviet 39th and 29th Armies continued to hammer at the 9th Army, as Hitler extolled willpower and a sense of purpose, casting himself and his commanders as the saviors of the situation. By January 2nd, Halder was writing that the front of the 9th Army had been breached in front of Staritsa. Kluge once more went to Hitler, a familiar pattern in which leadership attempts to influence decisions met with stubborn resistance. Halder noted this exchange in his diary, capturing the tension between strategic pressure from above and the limits of those beneath: “In view of  these situations; Field Marshal von Kluge demands withdrawal also of the adjoining sections. Very stormy discussions with the fuehrer who persists in his own views. So, the front will remain where it is, regardless of consequences”. The 9th Army retreated without permission, pulling back to Rzhev as the week drew to a close. There were no recalls, no courts-martial in this instance. The Soviets moved in, and the Germans dug deeper, bracing for what would soon become known as the Meat Grinder of Rzhev, the brutal, grinding battle that would unfold at the heart of Army Group Center’s sector.

On the opposite sector, Zhukov also wrestled with the obstinacy of his dictator. Stalin could not—or would not, grasp that the Wehrmacht was not hollowed out; in fact, German defenses were capable and resilient. These actions allowed the Soviets to absorb greater casualties while the Germans shortened their lines, rebuilt, and prepared for renewed operations. More than anything, December’s outcomes exposed overextension and a failure to rest and refit the troops, a predicament that Kalinin’s and Bryansk’s fronts would soon exploit with renewed vigor. Yet the Wehrmacht’s shortened front lines brought them closer to their supply depots, and while the rail advance progressed slowly, it did advance. Vehicles, freed from constant offensive pressure, could be repaired and replenished. Stalin, however, sought a complete encirclement of Army Group Center and reinforced the Kalinin and Bryansk Fronts accordingly. Zhukov opposed this, arguing that the Red Army’s offensive strength should be concentrated for a more modest push aimed at driving the invaders back behind Smolensk. Like Kluge, Zhukov accepted a degree of defeat early in the year.

The offensive was scheduled for January 10, with the days leading up to it devoted to preparation and coordination. The late December attacks lingered into the new year, continuing to drain life from both sides. The 9th Army remained hard pressed in the north, while the 2nd Army in the south bore the heaviest burden. The southern flank of Army Group was anchored before Kursk, where the 299th Infantry Division held firm against bitter winds and savage assaults. To its north stood the 16th Motorized Infantry Division under Lieutenant General Henrici. The Red Army wasted no time pressing Henrici’s lines on the morning of the first, bringing with them roughly thirty tanks of various types, among the largest concentrations of armor that would be assembled for the winter. Yet both sides suffered from armor shortages, and the little that existed was often spread thin across small-scale engagements like this. Pushing back a German division remained a crucial objective, but the failure of the Stavka and OKH to concentrate their armor ensured that no wide breakthrough was possible.

On January 2, Schmidt reacted to the deteriorating situation by sending the 3rd Panzer Division south to bolster Heinrici. In the fighting that day and the following, German units recaptured a substantial portion of equipment that the Red Army had pressed into service after the setback at Typhoon. This captured equipment ranged from radios, binoculars, and machine guns to trucks and anti-tank guns. The breadth of gear the Soviets pressed into service underscored their ingenuity in making do with whatever was at hand, even as it underscored the ongoing supply difficulties that persisted into this phase of the war. Throughout the week, the seesaw battle persisted. By January 7, the Germans were barely clinging to their positions, and serious discussions began about a possible withdrawal. Yet January 7 also marked the last day of the Soviet offensive in the south, and the Germans hoped this week would prove to be the winter’s final breath of fury. They would soon be proved wrong, for intelligence reports indicated that the Red Army was repositioning for an offensive to the north.

Between the 2nd Panzer Army and the 4th Army, an enormous gap lingered from Guderian’s hasty retreat. The Red Army could have exploited it, were it not for a lack of armor and the vast distances involved. Nevertheless, infantry and cavalry hammered at the 4th Army’s southern flank. General Kübler had been appointed in December and had only just arrived, still assessing his situation when it became clear he would need help to close the breach. Kluge pressed Hoepner to release the 30th Panzer Corps for this mission, under General of Panzer Stumme. They were reinforced with the first contingents of the 216th Infantry Division, arriving from France and assigned to hold the town of Suchinitschi, positioned in the middle of the gap between the two formations. It was a dangerous assignment for fresh German troops who were about to learn the difference between occupation duties in the Loire region and the Oka river basin. The infantry arrived on January 4.

They were encircled that same day by a mass of attackers, and Stumme proved unable to help. His forces were compelled to defend Yukhnov and the 4th Army command post there, while to the south Schmidt offered little relief. Kübler warned Kluge that the 216th could not hold Suchinitschi for long, and that their scarce supplies must support a fighting withdrawal. Hitler intervened, insisting Suchinitschi be held to the last man. The men of the 216th were not permitted to retreat, and the 50th Army ensured the outpost remained unreachable. By week’s end, Schmidt was attempting to assemble a relief force, but time dragged on and reserves were nonexistent. Every man redirected from the defense had to be covered by the comrades to his left and right, thinning the German lines with alarming speed. So far, the Soviets had largely failed to breach the Wehrmacht’s forward positions; they had pushed back the lines, but aside from the Suchinitschi gap, there were no decisive breakthroughs. The danger was that German defenses would become so stretched that the Red Army’s limitations, rifle and machine-gun fire notwithstanding, might be overwhelmed by sheer pressure, even without concentrated armor. The persistence of wasteful frontal assaults continued even as Stalin, Zhukov, and the rest of the Stavka ordered them to stop, a pattern that reflects the political atmosphere built during the purges. Inexperienced and frightened commanders often sent hundreds, or even thousands, of men into attacks that proved costly and largely useless, a phenomenon some scholars attribute to a climate of distrust and risk aversion fostered by the regime. Many officers felt compelled to demonstrate loyalty or boldness within the confines of rigid directives, fearing that any deviation toward “clever” tactics would be interpreted as anti-communist intellectualism. The result was repeated, high-casualty engagements where manpower faced fortified positions, producing heavy losses without corresponding strategic gains. Interpretations vary, with historians weighing the influence of strategic constraints and political oversight against operational friction between the Stavka and field commanders.

In Army Group South, the week remained relatively quiet. The 6th Army closed up the last penetrations from the prior week, and the 1st Panzer Army held the line against light enemy pressure. In Crimea, the 11th Army found itself facing a two-front predicament. Manstein bore intense pressure as his second attempt to seize Sevastopol had stalled, while Soviet forces had landed substantial troops at Kerch. The situation deteriorated even before the new year’s first dawn: a battalion of Soviet paratroopers dropped behind the German lines, striking the rear of the 46th Infantry Division, sowing havoc and confusion. Sponeck grew increasingly nervous as two Soviet armies continued to come ashore at separate beachheads, and his efforts to counter the northern threat led to a loss of confidence. In the turmoil, Manstein had Sponeck relieved and cashiered, with charges of retreat without authorization levied by the Nazi state. The sentence, death, later commuted to a prison term, highlighted the stark, inequitable justice that rank-and-file soldiers often perceived. The episode underscored a broader sense of absurdity within the Heer, as leadership and accountability collided in a war that spared none. To complicate matters further, Army Group South’s commander, Field Marshal Reichenau, issued an official declaration that the 46th Infantry was “forfeit of all soldierly honor,” suspending all promotions and awards within the division until further notice.

In the middle of the week, the Red Navy launched a landing at Yevpatoriya, meant as a raid that could be expanded into a diversionary operation to split the 11th Army. A reinforced Marine battalion set out from Sevastopol near midnight on the fourth, arriving offshore in the port’s early hours of the fifth. Manstein had warned all coastal forces to be on high alert after the Kerch debacle, and the Germans quickly spotted the approaching ships as spotlights swept the harbor. The Marines were caught in the crossfire of the ensuing landing; machine guns and light mortars shredded the assault, and for a time chaos reigned as casualties mounted under the stars. German observers directed artillery fire onto the pier, piling on the losses. Amid the deterioration, a Marine lieutenant rallied a small force to strike at the Crimea Hotel, a key German command center for the defense. By zero-five hundred, the hotel lay in Soviet hands, but securing it only intensified disaster when the flotilla’s command ship ran aground on a sandbar after taking hits from German artillery, prompting the rest of the flotilla to flee as dawn broke. The VVS failed to provide cover, and the Luftwaffe was expected to arrive soon. The Marines spent the day trying to extend their foothold, but progress was hampered by a lack of heavy weapons and heavy casualties from the landing. German defenses remained stubborn, with reinforcements en route, while the Soviets could not land additional troops during the fifth night due to a severe storm that prevented small-boat landings. The invading force included 10.5 cm howitzers, flamethrowers, and an infantry regiment. By the morning of the sixth, only about 120 of the original 740 Marines remained, and a breakout attempt ended in heavy fighting, with most killed and a handful captured; six sailors survived, one swimming out to sea and being rescued, while the rest struggled to return to Sevastopol.

The Kerch offensive was progressing slowly. Under Major General Pervushin, the 44th Army at Feodosiya had surprised the Germans and pushed them back, but he chose to hold the line and wait for Lieutenant General Lvov’s 51st Army to arrive from Kerch so the two could advance together and crush the defenders. Facing them were the German 42nd Infantry Corps and the Romanian Mountain Corps, reinforced by arrivals from Manstein’s main force at Sevastopol. The 30th Infantry Corps brought in the 132nd and 170th Infantry Divisions, while Manstein dispatched the last of his armor support, at least half a dozen StuG IIIs and two battalions from the 72nd Infantry Division. The Romanians contributed the 18th Infantry Division to bolster the 42nd Infantry Corps. 

The Trans-Caucasus Front remained responsible for the forces after the landing, with Lieutenant General Koslov on the scene. He sought to properly prepare his troops and pressed to build them up for a large, unified strike across the Kerch narrows to destroy the 11th Army. Yet his assessment betrayed several mistakes; he did not fully grasp who he was facing. Manstein was many things, but passive he was not. He would not sit idle or overanalyze numbers before attacking. The Soviets had granted him a measure of time, and he used it to good advantage. The Germans were well dug in and had prepared plans to strike the Soviets as soon as feasible. It would not occur that week, but Manstein was by no means idle with the extra time.

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The Lyuban Offensive near the Volkhov faces brutal attrition and stalemate, hampered by supply issues, harsh conditions, and political micromanagement by Mekhlis. In the north, German defenses shorten lines but face costly Soviet assaults; in the south and Crimea, pockets of fighting persist around Sevastopol, Kerch, and the Caucasus. Overall, German momentum wanes, Soviet momentum grows, and winter survival shapes strategic choices.