WW2 The Eastern Front

Manstein won the battle. The Red Army won the war.

Kharkov, March 1943, is still taught in staff colleges as an operational masterpiece, and some historians call it Germany's last victory in the East.

But what did it actually change?

The Red Army rebuilt its shattered tank corps within months. In July it broke the German offensive at Kursk. On 23 August 1943 it liberated Kharkov for good.

Part 4 of my series looks at the legend and what it leaves out: how Manstein's own memoir shaped the story, how each country's historians have told it differently, and the war crimes committed during the fighting, including the massacre of some 865 to 872 villagers at Yefremovka and Semyonovka.

Read it on Substack ! ( link in the comments )

Ivan Bagramyan was the only Armenian to attain the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He commanded the 1st Baltic Front and was twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

In 1973, Marshal Ivan Bagramyan sat down with young reporters from the Orlyonok television studio and answered their questions for a full hour.

He spoke about his first decoration, earned while leading the front headquarters out of encirclement in 1941, the secret regrouping that cut off 33 German divisions during the Memel Operation, and why marshals never retire.

English subtitles added by me .

His name was Ivan Hariš, but people called him Ilija Gromovnik, Elijah the Thunderer, because his mines came down on the occupiers like lightning. He began on the railway line to Rijeka, where he blew up an Italian train near Lič and, ten days later, a second train near the Sungerski Tunnel, reportedly carrying about 750 soldiers.

He also brought down the railway bridge over the Maja near Glina.

On 15 August 1942, a mine he laid beside the bridge over the Česma wrecked a train of 21 wagons, which, according to the Partisans, was carrying 376 Wehrmacht officers.

On 19 July 1944, his group infiltrated the Kurilovec airfield south of Zagreb and destroyed 800 tonnes of bombs and three aircraft. Some 300 soldiers were reportedly killed. On 28 December 1944, his men destroyed five aircraft at Borongaj airfield in Zagreb itself.

He is credited with destroying 150 enemy trains and 27 bridges on behalf of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia during the war.

Hariš was one of eleven children born into a poor peasant family. A trained joiner, he emigrated and worked as a labourer and trade union activist in Canada, Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina, where he joined the Communist Party in 1934.

He returned to Europe and fought in Spain as a saboteur during the Civil War, training others for the Republican International Brigades. He escaped from a French internment camp in March 1941, returned to Yugoslavia and established the sabotage service of the Croatian Partisans, first as head of its section and later as commander of the sabotage group attached to the General Staff of Croatia.

He was decorated while the war was still being fought.

He was proclaimed a People's Hero of Yugoslavia on 25 September 1944 and survived the war.

After the war, he graduated from the Higher Military Academy, served on the General Staff and eventually retired with the rank of major general.

On 12 January 1940, an SS detachment of about 30 men murdered about 440 Polish patients of the psychiatric hospital in Chełm in a single Aktion .

Among them were 128 women and 18 children. The detachment was led by an officer named Bielisch.

West Germany’s Central Office for the investigation of Nazi crimes, in Ludwigsburg, examined the case in a file dated 1990. Not one of the killers is known to have stood trial for it.

20 years after Stalingrad in 1963, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Chuikov and Sergeant Yakov Pavlov sit at the same table again, on the Soviet television show "Goluboy Ogonyok" .

Marshal Chuikov introduces him as "the house owner of Stalingrad," Pavlov names every man who held Pavlov's House with him for 58 days, and Marshal Chuikov tells how he found Pavlov after the war in Weimar and got him the Hero of the Soviet Union star.