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

After the German defeat outside Moscow in December 1941, Stalin ordered a general 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 to Dnepropetrovsk and then south toward Melitopol.²

Izyum itself, they 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.³

Two fronts, one blow

The Soviet encyclopedia of the war describes the plan: the adjoining wings of the Southwest Front under Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko and the South Front under Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky would break through at the junction of the German Sixth and Seventeenth Armies between Balakleya and Artemovsk, strike toward Zaporozhye, cut off the German forces in the Donbas and press them against the Sea of Azov. The main blow fell to the Soviet 6th and 57th Armies, with the 9th Army and cavalry corps in reserve to exploit success.⁴

The Soviet account claims that the Germans had more infantry and tanks than the two fronts, by a factor of 1.3, and more guns and mortars, by 2.6. Ziemke and Bauer describe the other side of the line: a German defense so short of men that it had been reduced, in the winter weather, to a chain of strongpoints.⁵

The breakthrough

On the morning of 18 January, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko launched the Soviet 57th and 6th Armies across the Donets on a sixty-mile front on both sides of Izyum, from Slavyansk to Balakleya. Bypassing some strongpoints and overrunning others, the attackers broke through in several places on the first day. By noon on the 19th the German Seventeenth Army had committed its last reserves, and a Soviet spearhead with tanks was heading for Barvenkovo, on the army's main supply railroad.⁶

Field Marshal Fedor von Bock arrived that day to take over Army Group South, and on the ride to his headquarters he was told that the Russians had broken through at Izyum and were streaming west almost unhindered; the army group had no reserves. By 25 January, after a week, the Soviets had cut a bulge of some 3,600 square miles out of the German front and covered more than half the distance from Izyum to Dnepropetrovsk.⁷

A corridor, not a breach

Then the offensive began to lose its way. The Germans held on to Slavyansk and Balakleya, the shoulders of the breach, and the Soviet armies were squeezed into a corridor about fifty miles wide. Ziemke and Bauer write that the Stavka now turned the operation into a set of tank-supported cavalry raids: the VI Cavalry Corps was to drive west through Lozovaya toward the Dnieper, and the I and V Cavalry Corps south toward the coast.⁸

German reinforcements arrived through snowstorms. On 31 January, forty miles south of Barvenkovo, the leading tanks of General von Mackensen's group met the Soviet cavalry spearheads, which had outrun their own tanks, and the cavalry turned back. By 11 February the Germans had drawn a reasonably tight line around the bulge.⁹

Results

The Soviet encyclopedia counts an advance of 90 to 100 km on a 100 km front and 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 notes that German infantry divisions were left at 30 to 50 percent of their strength, but admits that the fronts did not fully achieve their tasks, citing the lack of overall superiority, the slow exploitation, the failure to widen the breach at the flanks, too few tanks and guns with the cavalry and poor coordination.¹⁰

The bulge outlived the battle. In the spring both sides eyed it: Bock wanted it removed before the summer campaign, and Timoshenko planned to attack Kharkov out of it. On 12 May 1942 the Soviet offensive began from the bulge, and within days the German counterstroke turned it into a trap in the Second Battle of Kharkov.¹¹