At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center’s Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany’s Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht’s [Armed Forces] massive invasion of the Soviet Union code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Union’s Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks.
The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Despite destroying two of these armies outright, severely damaging two others, and encircling the remnants of three of these armies in the Smolensk region, quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly-mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead turned his forces southward to engage “softer targets” in the Kiev region. The ‘derailment” of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa.
Appeal: This study exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival materials, including the combat orders and operational of the German OKW, OKH, army groups, and armies and of the Soviet Stavka, the Red Army General Staff, the Western Main Direction Command, the Western, Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts, and their subordinate armies to present a detailed mosaic and definitive account of what took place, why, and how during the prolonged and complex battles in the Smolensk region from 10 July through 10 September 1941. Its structure is designed specifically to appeal to both general readers and specialists by including a detailed two-volume chronological narrative of the course of operations, accompanied by a third volume, and perhaps a fourth, containing archival maps and an extensive collection of specific orders and reports translated verbatim from Russian. The maps, archival and archival-based, detail every stage of the battle.
Structure and contents of Volume 1: Within the context of a fresh appreciation of Hitler’s Plan Barbarossa, this volume reviews the first two weeks of Operation Barbarossa and then describes in unprecedented detail: Introduction: Plan Barbarossa, Opposing Forces, and the Border Battles, 22 June-1 July 1941; Army Group Center’s Advance to the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers and the Western Front’s Counterstroke at Lepel’ 2-9 July 1941; Army Group Center’s Advance to Smolensk and the Timoshenko “Counteroffensive,” 13-15 July 1941; Army Group Center’s Encirclement Battle at Smolensk, 16 July-6 August 1941; The First Soviet Counteroffensive, 23-31 July 1941; The Battles on the Flanks (Velikie Luki and Rogachev-Zhlobin), 16-31 July 1941; The Siege of Mogilev, 16-28 July 1941; Armeegruppe Guderian’s Destruction of Group Kachalov, 31 July-6 August 1941; Armeegruppe Guderian’s and Second Army’s Southward March and the Fall of Gomel’, 8-21 August 1941; The Second Soviet Counteroffensive: The Western Front’s Dukhovshchina Offensive, 6-24 August 1941 and the Reserve Front’s El’nia Offensive, 8-24 August 1941; The Struggle for Velikie Luki, 8-24 August 1941.
David M. Glantz is an American military historian and the editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Glantz holds degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Defense Language Institute, Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and U.S. Army War College.
He began his military career in 1963 as a field artillery officer from 1965 to 1969 and served in various assignments in the United States and Vietnam during the Vietnam War with the II Field Force Fire Support Coordination Element (FSCE) at the Plantation in Long Binh.
After teaching history at the United States Military Academy from 1969 through 1973, he completed the army’s Soviet foreign area specialist program and became chief of Estimates in US Army Europe’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Upon his return to the United States in 1979, he became chief of research at the Army’s newly formed Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
While at the College, Col. Glantz was instrumental in conducting the annual "Art of War" symposia which produced the best analysis of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front during the Second World War in English to date. The symposia included attendance of several former German participants in the operations and resulted in publication of the seminal transcripts of proceedings.
Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 1986, he helped found and later directed the U.S. Army’s Soviet (later Foreign) Military Studies Office (FMSO), where he remained until his retirement in 1993 with the rank of Colonel. In 1993 he established The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, a scholarly journal for which he still serves as chief editor, that covers military affairs in the states of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union.
In recognition of his work, he has received several awards, including the Society of Military History’s prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Prize for his contributions to the study of military history. Glantz is regarded by many as one of the best western military historians of the Soviet role in World War II. He lives with his wife Mary Ann Glantz in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
