This study investigates the nature and consequences of the Battle for Smolensk, a series of military operations which took place in the Smolensk region of central Russia during the period from 10 July to 10 September 1941. The struggle as a whole began three weeks after Adolf Hitler’s Third German Reich commenced its invasion of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Code-named Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion sought to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union’s Red Army, overthrow Stalin’s Communist regime, conquer large portions of the Soviet Union, and exploit these regions for the benefit of Nazi Germany. The ten weeks of fighting in the Smolensk region pitted the forces of German Army Group Center against the forces of the Red Army’s Western Main Direction Command, initially, the Red Army’s Western Front, but, subsequently, its Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts. As such, the battles involved over 900,000 German troops, supported by about 2,000 tanks, against roughly 1.2 million Soviet soldiers, supported by as many as 500 tanks.
During the over 60 years since war’s end, most memoirists and military historians viewed the battles in the Smolensk region during July, August, and early September 1941 as little more than bothersome “bumps in the road” of an otherwise seamless offensive operation code-named Barbarossa. Hitler’s Wehrmacht [Armed Forces] commenced Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 along a massive front extending from the Barents Sea southward to the Black Sea. Employing time-honored Blitzkrieg strategy and the tactics of high-speed panzer thrusts, the invading German forces smashed the Red Army’s forces defending the western border regions of Stalin’s Soviet Union in a matter of weeks. Thereafter, they spread out northeastward and eastward into the Soviet Union’s vast strategic depths.
The battle for Smolensk proper began on 10 July 1941, when the forces of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center crossed the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers and, in accordance with Plan Barbarossa, began a rapid exploitation operation eastward toward the city of Smolensk. The battle ended on 10 September 1941, the date when Army Group Center’s Second Army and Second Panzer Group began their southward advance which culminated in the encirclement and destruction of its Southwestern Front in the Kiev region, one of the Red Army’s most infamous wartime defeats. Therefore, the battle for Smolensk constituted the ten-week-long struggle for possession of and victory in the Smolensk region.
Unlike previous histories of the fighting in Russia during the summer of 1941, this is a strictly “documentary” study. This is so, first and foremost, because, for the first time since the end of the Soviet-German War, this study exploits “ground truth,” specifically, the daily strategic, operational, and tactical records of the forces that participated in the fighting. Therefore, this study is also unique because most histories of the Soviet-German War, in general, or its component operations, in particular, have lacked the sound basis of “ground truth.” It is especially important since the struggle in the Smolensk region during the high summer of 1941 has also generated considerable controversy. In particular, this controversy involves heated debate over the wisdom of the decision by Adolf Hitler, Germany’s dictator, to delay Army Group Center’s advance on Moscow from early September to early October 1941 for the sake of destroying large Red Army forces fighting in the Kiev region.
This study has to be “documentary” in nature because it challenges conventional wisdom, which maintains that the fighting in the Smolensk region was nothing more than a “bump in the road” to Moscow. In sharp contrast, on the basis of these fresh archival materials, this study argues that the battle for Smolensk was much larger-scale than previously believed, it damaged Army Group Center far more than previously thought, and, ultimately, it contributed significantly to the army group’s embarrassing defeat at the gates of Moscow in early December 1941. Finally, the study is also “documentary” because it restores a significant “forgotten battle” to the historical record, specifically, the Red Army’s massive September counteroffensive in the Smolensk region.
Since this study relies heavily on “ground truth” to describe the fighting and reach its conclusions, its structure and contents rests heavily on the sound “shoulders” of extensive and direct documentation. Therefore, the first two volumes contain an unvarnished narrative of the course and outcome of military operations in the Smolensk region based largely on paraphrased versions of period directives, orders, reports, and critiques prepared by the headquarters of the forces which participated in the operations. In particular, these include documents prepared by the respective High Command (OKW and Stavka) and headquarters down to army and, sometimes, division level.
Because accuracy is absolutely essential to validate the study’s many conclusions, a separate volume will contain unexpurgated and accurate literal translations of virtually all of the documents paraphrased in the two narrative volumes. These are referenced in the text of the volume’s narrative by notes in the margin citing the appropriate appendix and specific document number within each appendix. The inclusion of these documents is critically important for two cogent reasons. First, the verbatim documents are necessary to confirm the accuracy of the study’s contents. Second, the structure and contents of these directives, orders, reports, and critiques, as well as the language used, provide uniquely personal portraits of the commanders who prepared them. Specifically, the crispness, conciseness, logic, and wording of these documents, or lack thereof, reflects the intelligence, skill, and effectiveness of the leaders (or absence thereof), as well as such less tangible but equally important personal traits such as their egos, their ruthlessness, and their morale.
In addition, the extremely detailed contents of the two-volume-narrative, which must be studied as well as read, makes maps absolutely vital to any understanding of the strategic and operational “flow” of the Battle for Smolensk. Therefore, by exploiting actual German and Soviet archival maps of the period, I have included just enough general operational and regional maps in the narrative volumes to permit readers to follow the general course of operations. However, since these maps do not provide enough tactical detail to reflect and explain the contents of the archival documents (either paraphrased in the narrative or un-expurgated in the supplements), I have also included an extensive array of detailed daily maps from the official records of many German and Red Army formations to support the supplemental volumes. A fourth volume in this series is also planned, featuring specially-commissioned colour maps tracing the progress of the operations described.
Considering the vast amounts of new archival materials upon which this study is based, I must give special thanks to the government of the Russian Federation, which has released the documents essential for its creation. More important still, in light of the considerable work necessary to prepare these volumes, as in the past, my wife Mary Ann, deserves immense credit. First, it was she who correctly predicted that my anticipated 30-day effort to revise and expand a brief 100-page study of the Battle for Smolensk into a slightly more lengthy study of 200 pages would inevitably degenerate into this far more massive effort. Nonetheless, she deserves special thanks for her unconditional moral support during what turned out to be six months of virtual siege. Second, in addition to enduring the idiosyncrasies of her “hermit” husband, who sequestered himself midst his beloved books in his office for ceaseless hours, she also suffered through interminable hours proofing these volumes on behalf of someone (read me) whose impatience to move on to fresh topics and tasks routinely prevents him from engaging is such Herculean, mundane, and tedious tasks as proofing.
In the last analysis, however, I alone am responsible for any errors found in these volumes, either in fact or translation.
David M. Glantz
Carlisle, Pennsylvania