The Second Battle of Kharkov or Operation Fredericus was an Axis counter-offensive in the region around Kharkov against the Red Army Izium bridgehead offensive conducted 12–28 May 1942, on the Eastern Front during World War II. Its objective was to eliminate the Izium bridgehead over Seversky Donets or the "Barvenkovo bulge" (Russian: Барвенковский выступ, romanized: Barvenkovsky vystup) which was one of the Soviet offensive's staging areas. After a winter counter-offensive that drove German troops away from Moscow but depleted the Red Army's reserves, the Kharkov offensive was a new Soviet attempt to expand upon their strategic initiative, although it failed to secure a significant element of surprise.
On 12 May 1942, Soviet forces under the command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko launched an offensive against the German 6th Army from a salient established during the winter counter-offensive. After a promising start, the offensive was stopped on 15 May by massive airstrikes. Critical Soviet errors by several staff officers and by Joseph Stalin, who failed to accurately estimate the 6th Army's potential and overestimated their own newly raised forces, facilitated a German pincer attack on 17 May which cut off three Soviet field armies from the rest of the front by 22 May. Hemmed into a narrow area, the 250,000-strong Soviet force inside the pocket was hit from all sides by German armored, artillery and machine gun firepower as well as 7,700 tonnes of air-dropped bombs. After six days of encirclement, Soviet resistance ended, with the remaining troops being killed or surrendering.
The battle was an overwhelming German victory, with 280,000 Soviet casualties compared to just 20,000 for the Germans and their allies. The German Army Group South pressed its advantage, encircling the Soviet 28th Army on 13 June in Operation Wilhelm and pushing back the 38th and 9th Armies on 22 June in Operation Fredericus II as preliminary operations to Case Blue, which was launched on 28 June as the main German offensive on the Eastern Front in 1942.
Background
General situation on the Eastern Front
By late February 1942, the Soviet winter counter-offensive had pushed German forces from Moscow on a broad front and then ended in mutual exhaustion. Stalin was convinced that the Germans were finished and would collapse by the spring or summer of 1942, as he said in his speech of 7 November 1941. Stalin decided to exploit this perceived weakness on the Eastern Front by launching a new offensive in the spring. Stalin's decision faced objections from his advisors, including the chief of the Red Army General Staff, General Boris Shaposhnikov, and generals Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, who argued for a more defensive strategy. Vasilevsky wrote "Yes, we were hoping for [German reserves to run out], but the reality was more harsh than that". According to Zhukov, Stalin believed that the Germans were able to carry out operations simultaneously along two strategic axes, he was sure that the opening of a spring offensives along the entire front would destabilise the German Army, before it had a chance to initiate what could be a mortal offensive blow on Moscow. Despite the caution urged by his generals, Stalin decided to try to keep the German forces off-balance through "local offensives".
Choosing the strategy
After the conclusion of the winter offensive, Stalin and the Soviet Armed Forces General Staff (Stavka) believed that the eventual German offensives would aim for Moscow, and also with a big offensive to the south, mirroring Operation Barbarossa and Operation Typhoon in 1941. Although the Stavka believed that the Germans had been defeated before Moscow, the seventy divisions which faced Moscow remained a threat. Stalin, most generals and front commanders believed that the principal effort would be a German offensive towards Moscow. Emboldened by the success of the winter offensive, Stalin was convinced that local offensives in the area would wear down German forces, weakening German efforts to mount another operation to take Moscow. Stalin had agreed to prepare the Red Army for an "active strategic defence" but later gave orders for the planning of seven local offensives, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. One area was Kharkov, where action was originally ordered for March.
Early that month, the Stavka issued orders to Southwestern Strategic Direction headquarters for an offensive in the region, after the victories following the Rostov Strategic Offensive Operation (27 November – 2 December 1941) and the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya Offensive Operation (18–31 January 1942) in the Donbas region. The forces of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Lieutenant General Kirill Moskalenko penetrated German positions along the northern Donets River, east of Kharkov. Fighting continued into April, with Moskalenko crossing the river and establishing a tenuous bridgehead at Izium. In the south, the Soviet 6th Army had limited success defending against German forces, which managed to keep a bridgehead of their own on the east bank of the river. Catching the attention of Stalin, it set the pace for the prelude to the eventual offensive intended to reach Pavlohrad and Sinelnikovo and eventually Kharkov and Poltava.
By 15 March, Soviet commanders introduced preliminary plans for an offensive towards Kharkov, assisted by a large number of reserves. On 20 March, Timoshenko held a conference in Kupiansk to discuss the offensive and a report to Moscow, prepared by Timoshenko's chief of staff, Lieutenant General Ivan Baghramian, summed up the conference, although arguably leaving several key intelligence features out. The build-up of Soviet forces in the region of Barvenkovo and Vovchansk continued well into the beginning of May. Final details were settled following discussions between Stalin, Stavka and the leadership of the Southwestern Strategic Direction led by Timoshenko throughout March and April, with one of the final Stavka directives issued on 17 April.
Prelude
Soviet order of battle
By 11 May 1942, the Red Army was able to allocate six armies under two fronts, amongst other formations. The Southwestern Front had the 21st Army, 28th Army, 38th Army and the 6th Army. By 11 May, the 21st Tank Corps had been moved into the region with the 23rd Tank Corps, with another 269 tanks. There were also three independent rifle divisions and a rifle regiment from the 270th Rifle Division, concentrated in the area, supported by the 2nd Cavalry Corps in Bogdanovka. The Soviet Southern Front had the 57th and 9th armies, along with thirty rifle divisions, a rifle brigade and the 24th Tank Corps, the 5th Cavalry Corps and three Guards rifle divisions. At its height, the Southern Front could operate eleven guns or mortars per kilometre of front.
Forces regrouping in the sector ran into the rasputitsa, which turned much of the soil into mud. This caused severe delays in the preparations and made reinforcing the Southern and Southwestern Front take longer than expected. Senior Soviet representatives criticised the front commanders for poor management of forces, an inability to stage offensives and for their armchair generalship. Because the regrouping was done so haphazardly, the Germans received some warning of Soviet preparations. Moskalenko, the commander of the 38th Army, placed the blame on the fact that the fronts did not plan in advance to regroup and showed a poor display of front management. (He commented afterwards that it was no surprise that the "German-Fascist command divined our plans".)
Soviet leadership and manpower
The primary Soviet leader was Timoshenko, a veteran of World War I and the Russian Civil War. Timoshenko had achieved some success at the Battle of Smolensk in 1941 but was eventually defeated. Timoshenko orchestrated the victory at Rostov during the winter counter-attacks and more success in the spring offensive at Kharkov before the battle itself. Overseeing the actions of the army was Military Commissar Nikita Khrushchev.
The average Soviet soldier suffered from inexperience. With the Soviet debacle of the previous year ameliorated only by the barest victory at Moscow, most of the original manpower of the Red Army had been killed, wounded or captured by the Germans, with casualties of almost 1,000,000 just from the Battle of Moscow. The typical soldier in the Red Army was a conscript and had little to no combat experience, and tactical training was practically nonexistent. The Red Army also began to suffer from the loss of Soviet industrial areas, and a temporary strategic defence was considered necessary.
The General Chief of Staff, Marshal Vasilevsky, recognised that the Soviet Army of 1942 was not ready to conduct major offensive operations against the well-trained German army, because it did not have quantitative and qualitative superiority and because leadership was being rebuilt after the defeats of 1941. (This analysis is retrospective and is an analysis of Soviet conduct during their strategic offensives in 1942, and even beyond, such as Operation Mars in October 1942 and the Battle of Târgul Frumos in May 1944.)
German preparations
Unknown to the Soviet forces, the German 6th Army, under the newly appointed General Paulus, was issued orders for Operation Fredericus on 30 April 1942. This operation was to crush the Soviet armies within the Izyum salient south of Kharkov, created during the Soviet spring offensives in March and April. The final directive for this offensive, issued on 30 April, gave a start date of 18 May.
The Germans had made a major effort to reinforce Army Group South, and transferred Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, former commander of Army Group Center during Operation Barbarossa and Operation Typhoon. On 5 April 1942, Hitler issued Directive 41, which made the south the main area of operations under Case Blue, the summer campaign, at the expense of the other fronts. The divisions of Army Group South were brought up to full strength in late April and early May. The strategic objective was illustrated after the victories of Erich von Manstein and the 11th Army in the Crimea. The main objective remained the Caucasus, its oil fields and as a secondary objective, the city of Stalingrad.
The plan to begin Operation Fredericus in April led to more forces being allocated to the area of the German 6th Army. Unknown to the Soviet forces, the German army was regrouping in the center of operations for the offensive around Kharkov. On 10 May, Paulus submitted his final draft of Operation Fredericus and feared a Soviet attack. By then, the German army opposite Timoshenko was ready for the operation towards the Caucasus.
Soviet offensive
Initial success
The Red Army offensive began at 6:30 a.m. on 12 May 1942, led by a concentrated hour-long artillery bombardment and a final twenty-minute air attack upon German positions. The ground offensive began with a dual pincer movement from the Volchansk and Barvenkovo salients at 7:30 am. The German defences were knocked out by air raids, artillery-fire and coordinated ground attacks. The fighting was so fierce that the Soviets inched forward their second echelon formations, preparing to throw them into combat as well. Fighting was particularly ferocious near the Soviet village of Nepokrytaia, where the Germans launched three local counter-attacks. The Luftwaffe's fighter aircraft, despite their numerical inferiority, quickly defeated the Soviet air units in the airspace above the battle area, but without bombers, dive-bombers and ground-attack aircraft they could only strafe with their machine guns, drop small bombs on Soviet supply columns, and pin down infantry. By dark, the deepest Soviet advance was 10 kilometres (6.2 mi). Moskalenko, commander of the 38th Army, discovered the movement of several German reserve units and realised that the attack had been opposed by two German divisions, not the one expected, indicating poor Soviet reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering before the battle. A captured diary of a dead German general alluded to the Germans knowing about Soviet plans in the region.
Next day Paulus obtained three infantry divisions and a panzer division for the defence of Kharkov and the Soviet advance was slow, achieving little success except on the left flank. Bock had warned Paulus not to counter-attack without air support, although this was later reconsidered, when several Soviet tank brigades broke through VIII Corps (General Walter Heitz) in the Volchansk sector, only 19 kilometres (12 mi) from Kharkov. In the first 72 hours the 6th Army lost 16 battalions conducting holding actions and local counter-attacks in the heavy rain and mud. By 14 May the Red Army had made impressive gains, but several Soviet divisions were so depleted that they were withdrawn and Soviet tank reserves were needed to defeat the German counter-attacks; German losses were estimated to be minimal, with only 35–70 tanks believed to have been knocked out in the 3rd and 23rd Panzer divisions.