Barvenkovo-Lozovaya offensive, 1942: the winter drive that made the Izyum bulge

The offensive lasted only two weeks, but it redrew the front in eastern Ukraine for the next four months. The bulge it left behind became the starting point of one of the worst Soviet defeats of 1942.²

Who won the Barvenkovo-Lozovaya Offensive and why?

Neither side got all it wanted, but the Red Army came out ahead on the map. The Southwest and South Fronts broke the German line on a 100 km front and won a deep bulge west of the Donets, yet never took the shoulders at Balakleya and Slavyansk, because they exploited the breach slowly and their supplies fell behind.³

Background

By the late autumn of 1941 the German advance in the south had come to a halt along the Donets and Mius rivers. After the German defeat before Moscow in December, the Soviet leadership turned to the offensive along almost the whole front. Earl Ziemke and Magna Bauer, in the US Army's history of the campaign, describe four great encirclements planned for the winter; one of them was to reach west from the Donets near Izyum toward the Dnieper.⁴ › The Battle of Moscow, 1941

Izyum itself, Ziemke and Bauer write, was an insignificant town on the Donets, but the lay of the front made it a focal point. It was closer than any other point to the main southern crossings of the Dnieper, at Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye; it was the key to the southern approaches to Kharkov; and it was a springboard into the rear of the German Seventeenth Army and First Panzer Army.⁵

The Soviet General Staff began working out the operation at the end of December 1941. The plan, as the Soviet encyclopedia of the war describes it, was for the adjoining wings of two fronts to break through at the junction of the German Sixth and Seventeenth Armies between Balakleya and Artemovsk, strike toward Zaporozhye, get behind the German forces in the Donbas, cut off their retreat to the west and press them against the Sea of Azov.⁶

Armies and commanders

The attack was to be made by the Southwest Front under Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko and the South Front under Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky, above them Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the Southwestern Theater. The main blow fell to the Soviet 6th and 57th Armies, with the 9th Army and cavalry corps held back to exploit a breakthrough.⁷

Facing them stood the German Sixth and Seventeenth Armies and the First Panzer Army of Army Group South. The two sides tell very different stories about the odds. The Soviet encyclopedia holds that the Germans were the stronger side in infantry, tanks and guns, and names the lack of overall superiority as one reason the offensive fell short. Ziemke and Bauer describe the other side of the line: a German defense so short of men that, in the winter weather, it had been reduced to a chain of strongpoints.⁸

The commanders' decisions

The Soviet plan committed a great part of both fronts. The Soviet encyclopedia lists the 38th and 6th Armies and the 6th Cavalry Corps of the Southwest Front, and the 57th, 37th, 12th and 9th Armies and the 1st and 5th Cavalry Corps of the South Front. The 6th and 57th Armies were to make the main attack, with the 9th Army, the theater's reserve, ready to follow into the breach; another part of the Southwest Front was to strike toward Krasnograd to cover the operation from the north and open the way to Kharkov. Ziemke and Bauer name most of the same armies and cavalry corps in the fighting.⁹

For the Germans the danger was plain. Once the line broke on both sides of Izyum, the US Army's study of the German campaign records, the way to Poltava and Dnepropetrovsk stood open, exposing the flank of the Sixth Army and the bridges that carried the lifelines of the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies. Buriak, writing from the Soviet railway records, likewise notes that the advance threatened the rail link between the First Panzer and Seventeenth Armies.¹⁰

The German answer was to hold on to the shoulders of the breach at Balakleya and Slavyansk. Because the Russians did not exploit their advantage quickly, the same German study says, Army Group South had time to strengthen the shoulders in a makeshift way; the Soviet encyclopedia blames exactly that slowness for letting the enemy reinforce the base of the breakthrough.¹¹

The battle in phases

On the morning of 18 January the Soviet 57th and 6th Armies attacked across the Donets on a front of some sixty miles on both sides of Izyum, from Slavyansk to Balakleya. Bypassing some strongpoints and overrunning others, they broke into the German line in several places on the first day.¹²

The breach widened fast. By the next day a Soviet spearhead supported by tanks was heading for Barvenkovo, on the German Seventeenth Army's main supply railroad, and between 22 and 24 January the Red Army cut the railway between Kharkov, Lozovaya and Slavyansk. Ziemke and Bauer reckon that after one week the Soviets had cut a bulge of some 3,600 square miles out of the German front.¹³

The attackers had difficulties of their own. Yuriy Buriak, who studied the archives of the Donetsk railways, sees supply that lagged behind the advancing troops as the main reason the offensive soon ran down; the Soviet encyclopedia blames the slow exploitation of the breakthrough.¹⁴

Turning point

The decisive failure was at the edges of the breach. The Germans held on to Slavyansk and Balakleya, the shoulders of the breakthrough, and kept their lines north and south of those places firmly anchored. The Soviet armies were squeezed into a corridor, and the encyclopedia itself names the slow exploitation and the failure to widen the breach toward the flanks, which let the Germans reinforce the base of the bulge.¹⁵

The Soviet command now sent its cavalry corps deep into the German rear, to the west through Lozovaya toward the Dnieper and to the south toward the coast. The encyclopedia concedes that the cavalry had too few tanks and guns, and Ziemke and Bauer describe what happened when German armor arrived through the snowstorms at the end of January: the cavalry spearheads, which had outrun their own tanks, faltered and turned back. The offensive ended on 31 January.¹⁶

Ziemke and Bauer judge that by then the Stavka and Timoshenko's headquarters had in effect turned the offensive into a clutch of tank-supported deep cavalry raids, with the 9th Army thrown in alongside the 57th to push south. The Soviet encyclopedia, for its part, lists the reasons the fronts fell short: no overall superiority over the enemy, slow exploitation of the breakthrough, belated efforts to widen it toward the flanks, cavalry corps too weak in tanks and guns, and poor coordination between the fronts and between the armies. Ziemke and Bauer describe the same failures on the ground, with one Soviet army stuck before Balakleya and another failing to pinch off Slavyansk.¹⁷

Aftermath

The two sides counted the result differently. The Soviet encyclopedia records an advance of 90 to 100 km on a front of 100 km, an operational bridgehead from which the Red Army could strike at the flanks and rear of the German forces around Kharkov and in the Donbas. It also admits that the fronts did not fully achieve their tasks.¹⁸

The bulge west of the Donets stayed in Soviet hands. For four months the front around it hardly moved.¹⁹

In the spring both sides looked at the bulge. Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group South, wanted it wiped out before the summer campaign, and his staff planned Operation Fridericus, a pincer from north and south to cut it off at Izyum. Timoshenko planned the opposite: a drive on Kharkov out of the bulge.²⁰

The Soviet attack came first, on 12 May 1942. On 17 May the Germans struck at the southern face of the bulge from the area of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, and by 23 May they had closed the trap south of Balakleya around the Soviet armies inside it.²¹ › The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942 to 1943

Counting the losses

The cost of the January fighting is hard to fix. The sources used here give no reliable totals of the dead and wounded for either side in the offensive itself: the Soviet encyclopedia speaks only of heavy German losses, and the US Army histories describe German divisions stretched thin and Soviet armies losing momentum without counting the casualties.²²

The losses in May dwarfed anything gained in January. The Germans counted some 240,000 prisoners, more than 1,200 tanks and 2,600 guns. Soviet figures, as given by Iryna and Oleksandr Avtushenko, put the losses of the Southwestern Direction between 10 and 31 May at 266,927 men, of whom 207,047 were encircled.²³

Legacy and memory

The January offensive is remembered mostly through what followed it. Ziemke and Bauer note that the May battle was made to disappear from Soviet history while Stalin lived and was later used in turn against him and against Khrushchev. The Avtushenkos see in the bulge the strategic aims of both commands colliding, and the salient that the winter attack had won became the trap that the spring attack walked into.²⁴

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