BlairWitch749
Banned
Largely off topic, but I don't want to start another topic about it, yet.
Zhukov's Operation Mars. I'm curious are there any other historians supporting Glantz's interpretation? Because his "revelations" completely redrew that state of East Front in '42. And a lot of articles about that battle cite his book as only source.
Now, Russians did always consider AGC to be greatest threat. But Zhukov's failure there is (allegedly) so great that I would consider Stalin would at very least sideline him after that. (afaik very small number of officers got purged for failures after '41). I understand how operation would be accepted if it was Stalin's idea and insistence, but one, he never mattled in military stuff that much, second, after his death there would certainly be someone piling the blame on him for such dismal failure.
Back to general Mars related musings. Assuming the story is all true. How better are Soviets in exploiting the Stalingrad victory, and all together status in '43 if they decide to call off Operation Mars sooner than in OTL and cut their losses greatly?
Glantz statistics are meticulously well researched in the Moscow archives; and he had full access to Model's Kluge's and Army Group Center's papers
They are more or less coroberated by both sides, and by Kruschev. There are battles where the body count/prisoner count was questionable like Kiev or Bryansk... but Mars doesn't seem to have fallen into this category
Plus Mars was not an isolated incident... parallel to Mars and Uranus was the second battle of Lake Ladoga (where Manstein was before he was called away to command Army Group Don) and Kuchler absolutely handed the Russians their ass in that battle as well.
The truth of the matter was that when the Germans where in good defensive positions (like they where on the northern and central parts of the front) the Soviet Army of 1942 couldn't beat them. Uranus was a unique case because the Germans had concentrated all of their good divisions in a tiny section of the front and recklessly left their flanks in the air, inviting encirclement
Calling off mars is a mixed blessing. Army Group Center still had several high quality divisions that could be transferred to Army Group B if the seat of the fighting was all in the south (including but not limited to Grossdeuchland and 5th panzer, to name just a couple of the 1st class formations).... it would depend on how Hitler was willing to allocate divisions which where not engaged (although in the Russian case it would suredly be better because attacking the Germans in fixed positions in 1942 generally cost them 5-9x more men than the Germans)