In the 1989-1990s. the feat of our people in the Great Patriotic War was dumped in the mud, they tried to deprive them of holiness and meaning. They say, "they fought badly," "they filled up with corpses," "they won in spite of the command and the supreme commander-in-chief." At this time, the "secret" Battle of Rzhev became one of the main symbols of the low professional level of the Soviet command, Stalin's mistakes, huge senseless losses of the Red Army, etc.
A movie about how Soviet soldiers were shot for leaflets
For the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory, Russian cinema again tried to produce a corresponding product. In early December 2019, the film "Rzhev" was released. Obviously, the filmmakers tried to combine the incompatible. On the one hand, the Great Patriotic War is again, as in the Union, sacred. In the absence of real victories, they are trying to distract the people by the exploits of their ancestors. At the same time, they keep silent that we were defeated in 1991-1993. in the "cold" (third world) war. That in relation to the Russian state and the people, the plans that were hatched by the leaders of the Third Reich were realized. Great Russia (USSR) was dismembered, Kiev was taken away from us - the ancient Russian capital, Little and White Russia, the Baltic States, Bessarabia-Moldavia, Transcaucasia, Turkestan. Russian culture and language, education and science, social infrastructure, economy suffered such losses, as if Hitler's hordes passed through Russia several times. The Russian people are rapidly dying out, losing their Russianness, their "I".
On the other hand, it is not customary to praise the socialist system and Stalin. The Soviet Union is still considered by most of the political elite, liberals and intellectuals to be the "damned time", when there were repressions, the GULAG, queues and galoshes (V. V. Putin: "The USSR did not produce anything except galoshes!").
Hence the split. The Great Patriotic War can no longer be denigrated as before. A whole cult of the Great War has been created. Large-scale parades are held, they try to educate young people on the examples of war heroes, films and TV series "about the war" are streaming. True, mostly hackwork, there is nothing similar to Soviet masterpieces. On the other hand, during the Victory Parade, the Mausoleum is shyly covered with plywood, the country is dominated by a capitalist pro-Western system hostile to the socialist, popular system, under which the people defeated Hitler's "European Union". The Victory Banner is incompatible with "responsible business", big capital, which is engaged in trading, deprives the state and people of the future.
Hence films like Rzhev. There is a traditional anti-Soviet mythology here: “we won in spite of the command,” “they filled up with corpses,” “we are fighting unprofessionally,” “it was better before” (in old, tsarist Russia, they say, they fought “according to reason”). Special officers, political instructors are engaged in the struggle with their own soldiers. The soldier who took the German leaflet is ordered to be shot, etc. Although in reality special officers, counterintelligence made a great contribution to the overall victory, solved the most important tasks, identified enemy agents, saboteurs and traitors. Shooting for a leaflet is outright nonsense. But still there are positive aspects: our soldiers stand to the death for the Motherland; it is shown why Soviet people died and suffered such sacrifices in order to win (villagers found in the basement of the church, killed by the Nazis); there are battle scenes and emotions, etc.
Soviet "Verdun"
The battle of Rzhev (January 1942 - March 1943), contrary to the liberal, anti-Soviet mythology, was not "classified". In reality, the battles in the Rzhev area were not secret; they simply did not focus on them, as in the battle for Moscow, the defense of Leningrad or Stalingrad. In Soviet historiography, the Battle of Rzhev was viewed not as one battle that lasted for more than a year, but as several different operations. In addition, despite the duration, perseverance and heavy losses, the battles for Rzhev have never been of key importance on the Russian front.
The fact was that neither side was able to achieve decisive success here, which could have changed the situation on the entire front. World War II as a whole was a war of engines, agile, based on tank strikes and rapid breakthroughs. And the battle for Rzhev was in many ways similar to the positional battles of the First World War. No wonder the Germans themselves compared this battle with Verdun in 1916.
One of the participants in the summer battle near Rzhev, the commander of the Hocke battalion from the German 6th Infantry Division, later recalled these battles:
“It was no longer a war of machine guns and machine guns, hand grenades and pistols, like in winter. It was "Materialschlacht", a battle of the First World War technology, a battle in which the attacker tried to destroy the enemy with steel, a shower of steel flying in the air and rushing on tracks, when a man intervened only at the last moment to destroy, in this lunar landscape, then what else survived in the meat grinder."
Gate to Moscow
At the same time, the Battle of Rzhev, of course, was of strategic importance. German troops captured Rzhev in October 1941. But then it was a common event, another city fell. The fate of Moscow, possibly the entire war, was being decided.
Rzhev gained importance after the successful counteroffensive of the Red Army in December 1941. The Soviet Headquarters, overestimating its successes and underestimating the enemy, conceived in the winter of 1942 to conduct a broad strategic offensive in order to defeat the German Army Group Center. Part of this offensive was the Rzhev-Vyazemskaya operation (January 8 - April 20, 1942). The headquarters of the Supreme High Command (VGK), in its directive of January 7, 1942, ordered sweeping strikes by the armies of the right wing of the Kalinin Front under the command of I. S. Zhukov from the Kaluga region in the direction of Yukhnov, Vyaz, while the remaining armies of the Western Front attacked Sychevka and Gzhatsk, encircle, dismember and destroy the main forces of Army Group Center in the Rzhev, Vyazma, Yukhnov, Gzhatsk area.
This was the most successful stage of the Battle of Rzhev. Soviet troops were able to push back the enemy in the western direction by 80-250 km, completed the liberation of the Moscow and Tula regions, and recaptured many areas of the Kalinin and Smolensk regions. The result of the operation was the formation of the Rzhev-Vyazma ledge. At the same time, both sides suffered heavy losses in the course of stubborn battles. The German Army Group Center lost about half of its personnel.
Our troops also suffered heavy casualties. So the strike forces of the Western Front (33rd Army, 1st Guards Cavalry Corps and 4th Airborne Corps) were blocked by the enemy and fought surrounded. Acting behind enemy lines, units of the 33rd Army, in cooperation with cavalry, paratroopers and partisans until the summer of 1942, fought in encirclement, held a large area and diverted significant enemy forces to themselves. During heavy fighting, the wounded commander Mikhail Grigorievich Efremov died in the encirclement (he shot himself to avoid capture). Many parts of the army were able to break through to their own. The troops of the Kalinin Front (39th Army and 11th Cavalry Corps) were partially blocked by the Germans in the Kholm-Zhirkovsky area. In July 1942, the German 9th Army conducted Operation Seydlitz. The 39th Soviet Army and the 11th Cavalry Corps ended up in the "cauldron", were cut into pieces and destroyed. Part of the Soviet troops broke through to their own.
Thus, during the fighting - winter - spring 1942, the Rzhev-Vyazemsky ledge was formed: a bridgehead up to 160 km in depth and up to 200 km along the front. On the territory of the Rzhev-Vyazemsky ledge there were two major railways: Velikiye Luki - Rzhev and Orsha - Smolensk - Vyazma. The Rzhev area was one of the key ones for the Germans. It was located between besieged Leningrad and Moscow. Here the Germans planned to break through further east, cut off Leningrad and north from Moscow, and again attack the Russian capital. Therefore, the Germans called the Rzhev-Vyazemsky ledge "the gateway to Moscow." And they held on to this bridgehead with all their might. Up to 2/3 of the forces of Army Group Center were concentrated here.
All this was well understood in Moscow. Therefore, the Soviet command with such stubbornness tried to "cut off" this ledge. For this, three more offensive operations were carried out: the First Rzhev-Sychev offensive operation (July 31 - October 20, 1942); The second Rzhev-Sychev offensive operation or Operation Mars (November 25 - December 20, 1942); Rzhev-Vyazemskaya offensive operation of troops (March 2 - March 31, 1943). As a result, the victory remained with us. On March 3, 1943, our soldiers liberated Rzhev.
Fighting heavy battles here, we diverted the attention and forces of the enemy from both Leningrad and the Volga, where preparations for the general engagement had already begun. The more the Germans clung to Rzhev, to the illusion of again going to Moscow from here, the more difficult it was for them to conduct offensive operations in other sectors and directions of the front, near Stalingrad and in the Caucasus. Therefore, all the arguments about "a waste of time and energy", "a meat grinder", "wasted Soviet soldiers" are either stupidity of people who do not understand anything in military affairs, or outright lies and misinformation aimed at denigrating the Great War, the Red Army.
German victory?
What are the reasons for such a protracted and bloody battle? First, the German high command ordered to stand to the death, cherishing the hope of returning to the operation to seize Moscow to the last. The Rzhevsky bridgehead made it possible to resume the battle for Moscow. Therefore, 2/3 of all the forces of the German Army Group Center were concentrated here. Selected German units were located here, for example, the elite division "Great Germany". German troops were not diluted by the European "international" (Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, etc.). The German generals as a whole were qualitatively better prepared than the Soviet (quality of management). The Germans had powerful mobile formations here, plus the reserves of Army Group Center (tank divisions) were located in the area of the ledge. An important factor was the preponderance of the Germans in artillery, especially heavy. In the summer of 1942, the USSR's military industry had not yet fully recovered from the disasters of 1941 and the evacuation. In terms of ammunition, production was still far behind the German one. For one heavy projectile fired towards the German positions by Soviet artillery, two or three flew in response. The superiority in artillery firepower allowed the Germans to successfully hold back the onslaught of the Red Army. The Germans created a powerful defense, skillfully used reserves, and launched strong counter-attacks.
For a long time, the Soviet command could not create a decisive advantage in forces and means to crush the enemy. This allowed the Germans to successfully repulse Soviet offensives. The Red Army suffered greater losses than the enemy. In general, this is a common situation when there is no decisive advantage in forces and means, and the enemy relies on a strong defense. So you can remember the defense of Port Arthur, when the Japanese lost many more people than the defending Russians; or the first stage of the Winter War, when the Red Army washed itself in blood on the Mannerheim Line. In general, the losses in the Battle of Rzhev did not differ too much from the losses of the Soviet troops in the initial period of the Great Patriotic War. The science of war was bloody. To break the "invincible" Wehrmacht and become the best army on the planet, the Red Army had to pay a high price.
The battle of Rzhev created the myth of the defeat of the Red Army. They say that the Germans were "overwhelmed with corpses", and the 9th German Army under the command of Model was not defeated and in the winter of 1943 successfully left the Rzhev-Vyazemsky ledge (Operation Buffalo). This is a clear distortion of the facts. The model is definitely a military talent. However, why did the Germans leave the "Moscow bridgehead"? They were defeated at Stalingrad, the shock 6th Army was killed. The German headquarters had to urgently reduce the front line (from 530 to 200 km), liberate parts of the 9th Army and reserves tied up in the central direction and arriving from Europe in order to eliminate the consequences of the Stalingrad catastrophe. The Wehrmacht had no other way out, except for the abandonment of the Rzhevsky bridgehead. On the other hand, the success in Stalingrad was associated with the battles in the Rzhev area. The powerful formations of the Wehrmacht were tied up in the Moscow direction and did not participate in the battles in the south.
Thus, the victory was for the Red Army. The enemy's plans to renew the onslaught on Moscow were thwarted. The losses were high, but to call them meaningless is stupidity or sneaky deception. Despite the presence of a "gateway to Moscow", the German command was never able to carry out a new offensive on the Soviet capital. So the Germans, with the inaction of the Red Army in the Moscow direction, could well have made a rush to Moscow in the summer and autumn of 1942, which could cause grave consequences for us. However, this was simply impossible due to the constant pressure on the enemy of the Red Army. All reinforcements and reserves of Army Group Center were burned in the Soviet Verdun. This bloody battle near Rzhev led to the fact that the fate of the war was decided in other sectors of the front. The Battle of Stalingrad, which became the first part of a strategic turning point in the war, would have been impossible without the battle for Rzhev. Also, the experience of battles in the Rzhev area allowed the Soviet command to gain experience in breaking into a strong enemy defense, tactics and methods of using and interacting with artillery, tanks and infantry, tactics of using assault groups were formed.
