Bernd
04/17/2021 (Sat) 20:25:06
No.43331
del
Strategic situation between 1941 June 21 and 1943 spring.
Szálasi regards Operation Barbarossa as a campaign which will be taught in military schools (I wonder if this is true). They shattered the connecting link at Brest-Litovsk, beat the two parts of the Red Army, north and south, then forged together the front east from the Rokitno marshes, and pushed close toward the Soviet crisis-line. Here by winter of 1941-42 the front stabilized.
He compares two hypothetical scenarios of what should have happened with the actual campaigns that what happened.
During 1942 summer the Germans should have aim their strike against the above described Soviet crisis-area, to knock them out from the war. But instead they pushed toward the south and opened the Caucasus front. This he did not understand, he wonders about the rationale, did not see the reason behind the decision.
Then he expected a Soviet counter-attack from their power triangle towards west, the marshes. This he considers as a strategically decisive move, tearing the German lines in two, and from that place the Red Army could have annihilate the overly opened (like a fan) southern part, leaving the whole South East Europe ripe to conquest. But this did not happen either. The Soviet struck south-west from the power base onto the weaker Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian armies (in fact they started with the 2nd Hungarian army at Voronezh, on 1943 January 13, as discussed on this board elsewhere). No matter how impressive was the success, he considered this a tactical victory, without strategic importance - which the Soviet leadership has to correct if they want to achieve more.