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    The Battle for Kharkov, 1941–1943
    The Battle for Kharkov, 1941–1943
    The Battle for Kharkov, 1941–1943
    Ebook192 pages1 hour

    The Battle for Kharkov, 1941–1943

    By Anthony Tucker-Jones

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    About this ebook

    A pictorial history of a series of World War II battles between the Soviet Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht around a city in present-day Ukraine.

    The four battles fought for Kharkov during the Second World War are often overshadowed by the battles for Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, yet they were critical stages in the struggle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army for control of the southern Soviet Union.

    Anthony Tucker-Jones, in this volume in the Images of War series, offers a visual record of the dramatic and bloody conflict that took place there, showing every grim aspect of the fighting. Kharkov became one of the most bitterly contested cities during the war on the Eastern Front, and this book presents a graphic overview of the atrocious conditions the soldiers on both sides had to endure.

    In 1941 Kharkov fell to Hitler’s Army Group South. In 1942 the Soviets tried and failed to retake it, losing 240,000 men in the Barvenkovo Bulge. Then, in 1943, the control of the battered city changed hands twice before the Soviets liberated it for good. The fate of Kharkov during the war reflects the history of the wider struggle between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

    Praise for Battle for Kharkov

    “The collection of original un-published Scott Pick photos are exceptional with such quality and topic coverage that the material visually jumps off the pages. . . . Presents a hard hitting and furious review of the period. . . . The ability of the author to cover the lengthy period in a concise review is very solid, and creates a substantial quality of information versus time of reading commitment.” —Richard Wade, military historian
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 30, 2016
    ISBN9781473874442
    The Battle for Kharkov, 1941–1943
    Author

    Anthony Tucker-Jones

    ANTHONY TUCKER-JONES spent nearly twenty years in the British Intelligence Community before establishing himself as a defence writer and military historian. He has written extensively on aspects of Second World War warfare, including Hitler’s Great Panzer Heist and Stalin’s Revenge: Operation Bagration.

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      Book preview

      The Battle for Kharkov, 1941–1943 - Anthony Tucker-Jones

      Chapter One

      Kharkov: City of the Tractor

      In 1941 Kharkov was one of the Soviet Union’s most important strategic centres due to its vital military factories and its railway and airline links. It was not only a vital communications hub for the whole of Ukraine, but also connected the Crimea, Caucasus, Dnieper and Donbas regions. The Caucasus held vital oilfields, while the Donets was rich in coal. All of these were obvious targets following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

      The city was host to one of the most important tank factories in the country and was where Mikhail Koshkin’s brand new T-34 tank was being built. Hitler was oblivious to the development of the T-34 and it was to be an intelligence blunder that would cost him dearly. The failure to capture the T-34 factory at Kharkov before it escaped was to prove another strategic blunder. In addition to the vital Kharkov tractor and locomotive plants, the city was also host to the Kharkov Aircraft Plant and the Turbine Plant. These were churning out a plethora of military products, including tanks, fighter aircraft, military tractors, mortars, small arms and ammunition.

      Most notably, Kharkov was home to the BT-5 and BT-7 fast tanks and the T-35 heavy tank, which went into production there in the 1930s. It was also involved with the building of the T-26 light tank. The BTs and the T-26 formed the backbone of the Red Army’s tank fleet in 1941, although they had already been proved obsolete during the Spanish Civil War and the Finnish Winter War. Mikhail Koshkin was appointed head of the Kharkov design bureau in the mid-1930s to work on BT improvements; this led to the development of the T-34, which went into production in 1940.

      As well as tanks, Kharkov also manufactured tractors or tracked prime movers. Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union so these tractors were invaluable to Ukrainian agriculture. The first Soviet trucks and cars appeared in the 1920s, coming out of Moscow’s AMO and Spartak factories respectively. GAZ, with the assistance of American Ford technicians, then set up a factory at Gorky in the early 1930s. Tractor and truck production also started in the early 1930s with civilian and military tracked tractors being built in Chelyabinsk, Kharkov, Kirov and Stalingrad. All of the Red Army’s heavy artillery was hauled by full-tracked prime movers. Those produced at Kharkov’s Komintern factory were used to tow the 152mm gun howitzer M1937.

      The Kharkov Aircraft Plant was home to Pavel Sukhoi’s design bureau until its move to Molotov in 1941. His Su-2 short-range bomber went into production in 1939 at Kharkov’s Factory No.135 and by September 1941 this was producing five aircraft a day. This factory was relocated in the face of the German advance, and the aircraft was also constructed in Moscow and Taganrog.

      While Hitler’s main objectives before the winter of 1941 focused on the seizure of Leningrad, Moscow and the approaches to the Caucasian oilfields, Kharkov was clearly a key secondary objective. The German high command appreciated the value of the city as a vital rail hub and industrial centre that should be denied the Soviets. The capture of Kharkov would mean that the Red Army’s Southwestern and Southern Fronts would have to rely on Voronezh and Stalingrad as their transport centres.

      Despite his ignorance of the T-34, Hitler was well aware of Kharkov’s military significance: ‘The second in importance is south Russia, particularly the Donets Basin, ranging from the Kharkov region. There is the whole basis of [the] Russian economy; if the area is mastered then it would inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire Russian economy …’ Hitler’s assessment was right but delays in securing Kharkov meant that its factories slipped from his grasp.

      Following the German invasion, the T-34 was swiftly forced from its birthplace. Fortunately for the Red Army, the Kharkov locomotive factory began to relocate to Nizhny Tagil in August 1941. Following the successful relocation of the Soviet tank-producing facilities east of the Urals during 1941, production of the T-34 was successfully conducted at Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil, as well as at a number of other subsidiary plants well out of the reach of the Luftwaffe.

      While Kharkov is principally remembered as the birthplace of the famous T-34 tank, it is equally famous for its enormous Dzerzhinsky Square, which was photographed on numerous occasions during the war by both sides. The Square is bordered by massive and oppressive Stalinist tower blocks that are a fine example of totalitarian and utilitarian architecture. Perversely, the square was named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka – the Bolshevik police (and forerunners of the KGB). During the course of the fighting it was renamed by its conquerors ‘German Army Square’ and then ‘Leibstandarte SS Square’.

      In the spring of 1941 the population of Kharkov numbered just under a million, but once the Nazi invasion commenced the city became jammed with evacuees and refugees fleeing the fighting. Ironically, Hitler’s invasion helped concentrate Soviet weapons manufacture. For example, at the outbreak of war T-34 production was in fact far from centralised and was spread over vast distances. Leningrad’s Kirov Factory manufactured the L-11 anti-tank gun while electrical components were made at the Dynamo Factory in Moscow. The tanks themselves were initially built in 1940 in Kharkov but numbers were supplemented by production at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory (STZ) in early 1941, then in the middle of that year the Krasnoye Sormovo Factory No.112 in Gorky also began to build

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