February 17, 2025

1 thought on “WWII Inches Closer

  1. Americans and NATO are going to fight to protect a fascist dictatorship in Ukraine against the Russians, who we were supporting with lend-lease in WWII, who were fighting a fascist dictatorship in Germany with a good portion of that war occurring in Ukraine:

    The Battle of Kiev (1941), which was the German name for the operation that resulted in a huge encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev (Kyiv) during World War II, which encirclement is considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare (by number of troops), with the operation running from 7 August to 26 September 1941, as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.

    Then the 1st Battle of Kharkov, so named by Wilhelm Keitel, it being the 1941 battle for the city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR, during the final phase of Operation Barbarossa between the German 6th Army of Army Group South and the Soviet Southwestern Front where the Soviet 38th Army was ordered to defend the city while its factories were dismantled for relocation farther east, and the German 6th Army needed to take the city in order to close the widening gap to the German 17th Army.

    Followed by the Second Battle of Kharkov or Operation Fredericus, an Axis counter-offensive in the region around Kharkov (now Kharkiv) against the Red Army Izium bridgehead offensive conducted 12–28 May 1942, on the Eastern Front during World War II, with its objective being to eliminate the Izium bridgehead over Seversky Donets or the “Barvenkovo bulge” 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 exterminated 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.

    And then there was the Third Battle of Kharkov, which was a series of battles on the Eastern Front of World War II, undertaken by Army Group South of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Red Army, around the city of Kharkov (today Kharkiv) between 19 February and 15 March 1943.

    Known to the German side as the Donets Campaign, and in the Soviet Union as the Donbas and Kharkov operations, the German counterstrike led to the recapture of the cities of Kharkov and Belgorod.

    As the German 6th Army was encircled in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army undertook a series of wider attacks against the rest of Army Group South.

    These culminated on 2 January 1943 when the Red Army launched Operation Star and Operation Gallop, which between January and early February broke German defenses and led to the Soviet recapture of Kharkov, Belgorod, Kursk, as well as Voroshilovgrad and Izium.

    The Soviet victories caused participating Soviet units to over-extend themselves.

    Freed on 2 February by the surrender of the German 6th Army, the Red Army’s Central Front turned its attention west and on 25 February expanded its offensive against both Army Group South and Army Group Center.

    Months of continuous operations had taken a heavy toll on the Soviet forces and some divisions were reduced to 1,000–2,000 combat effective soldiers.

    On 19 February, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched his Kharkov counterstrike, using the fresh II SS Panzer Corps and two panzer armies.

    Manstein benefited greatly from the massive air support of Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen’s Luftflotte 4, whose 1,214 aircraft flew over 1,000 sorties per day from 20 February to 15 March to support the German Army, a level of airpower equal to that during the Case Blue strategic offensive a year earlier.

    The Wehrmacht flanked, encircled, and defeated the Red Army’s armored spearheads south of Kharkov.

    This enabled Manstein to renew his offensive against the city of Kharkov proper on 7 March.

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    And n0w, we are the ENABLERS of the FASCIST REGIME of Valadimer Zelensky in Ukraine?

    Hitler must love this!

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