Battle of Smolensk (1941)

Battle of Smolensk (1941); First Battle of Smolensk
	Part of Operation Barbarossa during the Eastern Front of World War II
	; German and Soviet movements near Smolensk, 10 July – 4 August
Date	8–31 July 1941; (German historiography); 10 July – 10 September 1941 ; (Soviet historiography)
Location	Smolensk (Russian SFSR) vicinity, Soviet Union54°46′58″N 32°02′43″E
Result	German Victory
Belligerents
Germany	Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Fedor von Bock; Hermann Hoth; Heinz Guderian; Adolf Strauss; Maximilian von Weichs;	Semyon Timoshenko; Fyodor Kuznetsov; Andrei Yeremenko; Ivan Gorbachyov †; Konstantin Rokossovsky;
Strength
430,000 men; 1,000 tanks; 1,500 aircraft ; 6,600 guns and mortars	Initially on 10 July:; 581,600 men or 883,000; 1,545 tanks ; 6,000 guns ; Total: 1,991,000 men
Casualties and losses
~115,500 (KIA, WIA, MIA) (10 July – 10 September); Other data:; 135,659 men (21 July – 10 September): 29,650 killed; 100,327 wounded; 5,682 missing; 214 tanks destroyed	Modern Western estimate: ; 724,000 KIA and WIA (including 565,000 POW), ; 274,000 WIA ; Total: 998,000; Krivosheev's official soviet data: ; 759,974 wounded or dead: 486,171 irrecoverable losses (KIA, MIA, POW); 273,803 wounded; 1,348 tanks and SPGs destroyed; 903 aircraft destroyed; 3,120 guns destroyed

The first Battle of Smolensk (German: Kesselschlacht bei Smolensk, lit. 'Cauldron-battle at Smolensk'; Russian: Смоленская стратегическая оборонительная операция, romanized: Smolenskaya strategicheskaya oboronitelnaya operatsiya, lit. 'Smolensk strategic defensive operation') was a battle during the second phase of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, in World War II. It was fought around the city of Smolensk between 10 July and 10 September 1941, about 400 km (250 mi) west of Moscow. The Ostheer had advanced 500 km (310 mi) into the USSR in the 18 days after the invasion on 22 June 1941.

The Soviet 16th, 19th and the 20th armies were encircled and destroyed just to the east of Smolensk, though many of the men from the 19th and 20th armies managed to escape the pocket. While the battle was a stunning operational success for the Germans, the rapid advances into Soviet territory led to supply and logistics crises of increasing severity, as German supply lines were stretched to their limit. Following the Smolensk encirclement, much of Army Group Centre became mired in positional warfare, suffering significant losses in defensive battles throughout the late summer of 1941. These factors seriously depleted the offensive strength of the German divisions, and contributed to the disastrous setbacks later suffered in the Battle of Moscow in December 1941.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[a]