Last time we spoke about the First Great Victory of the Red Army. German forces pushed toward Moscow and Rostov despite severe logistics: scarce trains, fuel, winter gear, and brutal Rasputitsa conditions. The Red Army, under Zhukov and Rokossovsky, resisted with fortified defenses, minefields, and deliberate countermeasures while STAVKA reshuffles command to keep pressure on the invaders and tie down their forces. A minor Soviet opening near Tikhvin stretched German lines; however, reinforcements and stubborn defense around key routes prevent a decisive breakthrough. In the north, German advances slow through forests and swamps, with mounting attrition from Soviet counterattacks and persistent Luftwaffe absence. Tank shortages and exhaustion plagued German units, prompting the emergence of improvised Tank Crew Battalions and a shift in operational risk. On the Soviet side, the Road of Life to Leningrad expanded with multiple convoys delivering supplies and a second road completed by late November, raising throughput to about 128 tons daily. By month’s end, German forces faced catastrophic attrition and growing talk of retreat, whereas STAVKA gained patience and prepared for revenge.

This episode is Pushing the Germans Back

Well hello there, welcome to the Eastern Front week by week podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800’s until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.

What had started as a desperate attempt to push the Germans back from the gates of Moscow has become a full-throated effort to destroy Army Group Center. Ejecting the invaders had become Stalin’s priority. In his blind optimism, Stalin had evaluated the Wehrmacht as a spent force in the wake of Operation Typhoon’s failures. This week would prove that hypothesis false. Meanwhile, Hitler reshuffled his generals. Once-celebrated Wehrmacht heroes fell from grace as younger officers rose to take their places. In Army Group North, the German situation stabilized after the retreats from Tikhvin and Volkhov. Yet the Soviets planned to press their gains. The new Volkhov Front, under Meretskov, was reinforced from Stavka’s reserve. It was worth remembering that, when mentioning unit transfers, we were talking about movements of tens of thousands of men, sometimes hundreds of miles. These changes did not happen instantly. On the Eastern Front, they often took days or weeks to complete. There were occasions when all that was needed was a change at the top, and those adjustments could be made relatively quickly. The 26th Army, under Lieutenant General Sokolov, and the 59th Army, under Major General Galanin, were transferred to Meretskov’s command. They did not arrive in time for the planned offensive, but they provided the Volkhov Front with a solid backing force for future operations if needed. The orders for the planned offensive were signed on 17 December. Shaposhnikov’s order stated: Signed Stalin, Shaposhnikov “The Volkhov Front consisting of the 4th, 59th, 2nd Shock, and 52nd Armies will launch a general offensive to smash the enemy defending along the western bank of the Volkhov river and reach the Liuban-Cholovo station front with your armies main forces by the end of [left blank]. Subsequently, attacking to the northwest, encircle the enemy defending around Leningrad, destroy and capture him in cooperation with the Leningrad Front, and, if the enemy resists, capture or destroy him”.

At the same time that order went out, Stavka also decided on a major expansion of the offensive across the northern sector. The Northwestern Front was instructed to conduct a companion offensive against Novgorod, Dno, and Demiansk. In addition, the Leningrad Front was ordered to mount supporting attacks with the forces they had on hand to assist the Volkhov Front in exploitation. Meretskov would have to break through the Volkhov River line before any of this assistance could be effective. The initial goals were Kirishi and Gruzino. Army Group North was conducting a careful withdrawal and had been preparing positions along the river line. The Germans were being reinforced locally as well. Leeb transferred infantry divisions from the Leningrad line to the Volkhov area as quickly as possible, while avoiding a serious weakening of his position around the Soviet city.

The order for the continued offensive effectively commanded the advance to continue with the new Volkhov Front. By the 17th, the first lines still had not reached the river. It would take the entire third week for the initial units to close in, and Meretskov’s main force would not be in place until the end of the month. Stalin was furious at these delays, and no doubt especially aggravated because he believed the Wehrmacht to be weak. What he did not know was that the Germans were quickly becoming defensive experts. A continuing strength of the Wehrmacht in the early months of the war was the adaptability of small units. Regiments and battalions could shift to defensive operations with relative ease. The German soldier remained a well-trained and capable professional at this stage. Since ancient times, professional infantry had mastered two things: digging and marching. Defensive operations required digging in quantities that were hard to imagine without firsthand experience. The Germans were adept diggers and were well equipped to do so.

Despite the skill of German infantry in defensive operations, there was still no plan for how to counter the Red Army’s onslaught. Armies that had withdrawn typically did so without a coordinated plan from high commands, and the results were chaotic. Even after Tikhvin, when Army Group North coordinated the retreat, large quantities of equipment were left behind. This would prove a significant hindrance to German defensive operations in the coming weeks. Nazi industry could not fully replace the lost equipment in the near term. Some used this as an excuse for Hitler to delay wide-scale retreats. Many officers argued that the soldiers’ continued existence depended not on artillery, but on the ability to pull back from impending encirclement. These debates were treated as a straw man to justify Hitler’s ongoing reshaping of OKH and OKW into his personal fiefdoms. Throughout the Second World War, the German military and bureaucratic functions grew increasingly beholden to Hitler’s personal command. This dependency not only deepened Nazification but also hamstrung mid-level commanders and managers, who realized little could be done without his personal involvement. Decisions were delayed while awaiting his approval. Hitler had taken the position of Commander in Chief of the Heer after Brauchitsch’s relief, Brauchitsch having been little more than a meek observer in any event. Brauchitsch’s relief occurred on 19 December. More shuffling would follow.

Inside the city of Leningrad, famine continued to claim lives. The Road of Life across Lake Ladoga carried food and supplies, but the needs far outpaced the capacity. Rations had been reduced on September 2, to daily bread allowances of 600 grams for manual workers, 400 grams for state employees, and 300 grams for children and other dependents. After heavy German bombing in August, September, and October 1941, all main food warehouses were destroyed or burned in massive fires, wiping out large stores of grain, flour, sugar, and other foods. In one instance, melted sugar leaked through warehouse floors into the surrounding soil, and desperate citizens dug up the frozen earth to extract the sugar, which appeared for sale in the Haymarket to housewives who attempted to melt the earth to separate the sugar or to others who mixed the earth with flour. The fires persisted across the city for months as the Luftwaffe bombed Leningrad repeatedly with incendiary and high-explosive devices during 1941–1943. In the siege’s early days, people consumed leftovers from “commercial” restaurants, which used up to 12% of the city’s fats and up to 10% of its meat; soon, all restaurants closed, and rationing became the only lifeline, rendering money obsolete.

The shelling and starvation, especially in the first winter, caused appalling casualties, and at least nine staff members of Nikolai I. Vavilov’s seedbank died of starvation while protecting some 200,000 seed items for future generations. On September 12, 1941, provisions for army and civilians were projected to last as follows: grain and flour thirty-five days, groats and pasta thirty-one days, meat and livestock thirty-three days, fats forty-five days, and sugar and confectionery sixty days. On the same day, a further reduction was announced: workers would receive 500 grams of bread daily, employees and children 300 grams, and dependents 250 grams; rations for meat and groats were reduced further, but supplies of sugar, confectionery, and fats were temporarily increased. Emergency rations existed for the army and the Baltic Fleet, but these were insufficient and depleted within weeks. Lake Ladoga’s flotilla, ill-equipped for war, suffered heavy losses from bombing, and several barges carrying grain were sunk in September 1941 and later recovered. Grain was delivered to Leningrad at night and used for bread baking; when reserves of malt flour ran low, substitutes such as cellulose and cotton cake were employed, and oats intended for horses were repurposed for human consumption while horses were fed wood leaves. Upon discovering 2,000 tons of mutton guts at the seaport, a meat galantine was produced from them, and with meat scarce, galantine and even stinking calf skins were used, memories of which stayed with survivors for years.

During the siege’s first year, there were five food reductions: two in September 1941, one in October, and two in November, the latter lowering daily consumption to 250 grams for manual workers and 125 grams for other civilians. Starvation led to the consumption of zoo animals and household pets; wallpaper paste, made from potato starch, was boiled into soup, and old leathers were eaten. Extreme hunger drove some to cannibalism, with reports beginning in the winter of 1941–42 as food sources dwindled, though incidents remained comparatively rare. In November 1941, meat patties made from minced human flesh appeared in the Haymarket, leading to a ban on ground-meat sales, and many bodies brought to city cemeteries were found missing parts. By 1942, starvation-level rationing was alleviated somewhat by the emergence of vegetable gardens covering most open ground in the city.

NKVD records on the subject of cannibalism were not published until 2004; until then, most evidence about cannibalism was anecdotal. Anna Reid notes that for most people at the time, cannibalism was “a matter of second-hand horror stories rather than direct personal experience.” Indicative of Leningraders’ fears, police would often threaten uncooperative suspects with imprisonment in a cell with cannibals. Dimitri Lazarev, a diarist during the siege’s worst moments, recalls his daughter and niece reciting a terrifying nursery rhyme adapted from a pre-war song:

Sung to the tune of Mary Had A Little Lamb

A dystrophic walked along

With a dull look

In a basket he carried a corpse's arse.

I'm having human flesh for lunch,

This piece will do!

Ugh, hungry sorrow!

And for supper, clearly

I'll need a little baby.

I'll take the neighbours',

Steal him out of his cradle.

NKVD files show the first use of human flesh as food on 13 December 1941, with nine cases; a report ten days later tallies thirteen cases ranging from a mother smothering her eighteen-month-old child to feed her older children, to a plumber killing his wife to feed his sons and nieces. By December 1942, the NKVD had arrested 2,105 cannibals, categorized as corpse-eating and person-eating. The latter were usually executed, while those who fed on corpses were sent to prison. The Soviet Criminal Code had no explicit cannibalism provision, so convictions proceeded under Article 59–3, “special category banditry.” Instances of person-eating were markedly rarer than corpse-eating; of the 300 people arrested in April 1942 for cannibalism, only 44 were murderers. Demographics showed that 64 percent were female, 44 percent unemployed, 90 percent illiterate or with only basic education, 15 percent rooted inhabitants, and merely 2 percent with prior criminal records. Cannibals tended to come from the city’s peripheral districts and were often unsupported women with dependent children and no prior convictions, factors that conferred a degree of clemency in proceedings. Given the scale of mass starvation, cannibalism remained relatively rare. By contrast, murder for ration cards was far more common; in the first six months of 1942, Leningrad recorded 1,216 such murders, even as the city endured mortality rates as high as about 100,000 people per month. Lisa Kirschenbaum observes that “rates of cannibalism provided an opportunity for emphasizing that the majority of Leningraders managed to maintain their cultural norms in the most unimaginable circumstances.”

Feeding the city competed with defending it in the siege’s logistics. Inbound trucks delivered ammunition, heating fuel, and raw materials for reconstruction. Yet many of the city’s factories pressed on with production. The most notable was the Kirov Tank Factory. There were moments when the factories could not operate, as electricity, raw materials, and fuel ran short. The buildings endured constant artillery and aerial bombardment. Despite these obstacles, production persisted. Amazingly, Leningrad’s factories not only supplied the city’s defenders but also supported other sectors of the front. Both air and land routes across Lake Ladoga ferried ammunition and small arms to the wider Soviet Union. These supplies proved critical in the defense of Moscow. Through December, at least 490 tanks rolled off Leningrad’s production lines, with most heading directly to the city’s front lines. Most of the production at the Kirov Plant had focused on KV-1 tanks, though some KV-2s were produced as well. While these models suffered from serious mobility and reliability issues on the march, they proved to be excellent in the defense of the city.

Around Moscow, the retreat of Army Group Center continued. Hoepner had taken command of the remnants of Reinhardt’s 3rd Panzer Army. He ordered all subordinate units to counter-attack any further Soviet penetrations immediately, and to allow retreats only at the last possible moment. By the 18th, the panzers had pulled back to a coherent line roughly 100 kilometers west of their furthest advance. This shortened Army Group Center’s front and allowed for better concentration of the available troops. Yet this was no guarantee of defensive success. The Red Army pressed on, throwing men and tanks at the Nazi forces. On the 18th, three divisions were attacked and broke through. The 11th Panzer Division managed to push the Soviets back, but only after an incredibly hard fight. The division was so exhausted that its commander reported it as combat-ineffective. The 255th Infantry and the 20th Panzer Division also suffered Soviet breakthroughs along their fronts and struggled to repel the tanks. The Germans were in awe that the Red Army could sustain an offensive of this scale, and that nearly every assault was backed by tanks. It wasn’t just the numbers of tanks that surprised the Wehrmacht, but the Soviets’ ability to fight in coordination. The Red Army was learning. The Germans now faced large-scale combined-arms assaults for the first time in Army Group Center. Communist division and corps leaders still had much to learn about coordination and reconnaissance, but they were improving day by day.

The retreat of the Panzers was hampered by the weather, though the cold was not unseasonably severe, the troops were utterly unprepared for operations in such conditions. In the third week of December, temperatures dropped even further, and at minus forty degrees Celsius the invaders struggled, many still in ragged summer uniforms. As they pulled back, they burned villages and seized every item of clothing they could find to stave off the cold. The dead, German and Soviet alike, were plundered for coats, boots, and anything else that might help someone survive the freezing weather. The few remaining working trucks and half-tracks had oil that froze, radiators that burst, and grease that seized in the bearings, leaving little artillery to be moved with the retreat. On the18th of December, Bock was relieved of command. Halder’s diary makes it clear that Bock had been in poor health for days before the relief. He was replaced by Kluge, who assumed command of the 4th Army in a dual-hat role. It wasn’t only the Panzers that struggled. The German 9th Army found it hard to hold the line as the Kalinin Front pressed the attacks. On 16 December, the city of Kalinin fell to the Soviets. For Colonel General Strauss, the problem was that there was nowhere obvious to fall back to. The terrain behind him offered no natural lines like rivers, and Army Group had not prepared any defensive works to anchor a retreat. Ordered to hold the line by Hitler, Strauss gradually ceded ground and moved westward in an effort to stabilize the front.

Due east of Moscow, Kluge’s 4th Army was in worse condition. As Hoepner pulled his men back, he opened up gaps that the Soviets poured into. By the end of the second week of December, the 9th Infantry Corps had been trying to withdraw from its advance alongside Hoepner’s panzers. The 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps harassed this movement and actively blocked it. The battles continued into the third week of the month, with the 78th Infantry Division at the core of the attacks. In the middle of the month, Dovator learned that the 78th Infantry was acting as a Vanguard for a column including the 9th Corps’ supply units, headquarters troops, and artillery. He immediately set about planning an ambush for this column. The 78th’s units assigned to the vanguard abandoned their posts and fled west toward Ruza. This happened on the 15th, after reconnaissance elements spotted Dovator’s men moving into position. He allowed them to escape, concentrating his energy on surrounding the column. By the end of the day, his trap was in place. Early on the 16th, the 22nd Tank Brigade attacked the head of the column just west of the small village of Safonika. To the east, in the Germans’ rear, the 20th Cavalry Division struck. The 4th Guards Cavalry screened to the west of the assault to prevent any escape. The result was a total slaughter. Over the course of the day, the Germans resisted at first but panicked when they realized they were completely surrounded. Even the 78th Infantry, which had tried to escape, ran into the cordon established by the 4th Guards Cavalry. The support troops in the column were butchered, but the 78th Infantry managed to escape with heavy losses. They managed to call in Luftwaffe support, driving the cavalry back from finishing the job. When the Germans reached Ruza, they reported to higher command that they had lost every vehicle in the division, all of its towed artillery, six StuGs, and around two hundred men killed or missing.

In the wake of the earlier success, Dovator did not celebrate. He turned his men westward and pursued the 78th Infantry Division all the way to Ruza. On the 19th, he caught up with the Germans. The 252nd Infantry Regiment acted as the divisional rearguard about twelve kilometers northwest of Ruza. As the 2nd Guards Cavalry arrived on the 19th, Dovator assessed the situation. The Germans had anchored their lines on the west bank of the frozen Ruza River. He promptly dispatched the 20th Cavalry Division to attack across the river and encircle the defenders. As the cavalry charged, they were met with devastating machine-gun and mortar fire, and the two regiments of the division were pinned down, unable to retreat or advance. Dovator decided to shift his focus north in a relief effort and personally led the assault. He was cut down in front of his men. The 20th Cavalry managed to withdraw, but only at a heavy cost in lives and ammunition. The 78th Division appeared to gain a new lease on life as the now-leaderless 2nd Guards Cavalry Corps attempted to reorganize. The rest of the 4th Army struggled to pull back in good order, but they managed to avoid a complete mauling like that endured by the 9th Corps. To the south, Guderian faced pressure. He had been defeated in detail during the second week and was not able to extract his nearly broken 2nd Panzer Army. It was largely Guderian’s fault that the 4th Army under Kluge was forced to contend with the possibility of encirclement on its right flank while retreating. Guderian had left a gap between the 24th Panzer and the 43rd Panzer Corps northwest of Tula.

In any event, he had been trying to pull his panzer army back since the middle of the second week. His men were harassed by Soviet ski units, just as his comrades to the north around the Volkhov River faced pressure. The 1st Guards Cavalry Corps operated in the area and had previously caused serious issues for the 47th Panzer Corps’ withdrawal earlier in the month. As Guderian solidified his lines, their effectiveness diminished. Cavalry, since the dawn of warfare, had been best used as an exploitation force, with rare exceptions for heavy cavalry. The Red Army understood this, and although they equipped the Cavalry Corps with some armor, they were not intended to break through well-defended, organized lines. As Guderian pulled his men back, the vehicles and tanks stored in division and corps depots awaiting repair had to be destroyed, since they could not be towed back. This further increased the losses within the Panzer units and effectively paralyzed the Panzer Army for offensive action for weeks.

On December 12th, the 2nd Army was subordinated to Guderian. He began calling this arrangement Army Group Guderian, but it was nothing more than an expediency. The 2nd Army teetered in acute danger, with two entire divisions now trapped behind the Soviet advance. Schmidt was humbled, after days earlier disobeying orders to halt and pressing on far into the wilderness. His reckless personal mission of conquest was costing his army dearly as the Red Army’s winter counter-offensive pressed hard. The 134th and 45th Infantry Divisions found themselves surrounded. On the 15th they were told there would be no help forthcoming, and they would have to fight their way out of the encirclement on their own. Not even air support could be guaranteed in light of the Luftwaffe’s overextension.

Guderian did spare some troops to help patch the lines, ironically even as he argued with Kluge about the hole in his own lines near Tula. On the 17th, the 34th Infantry Corps reached Livny and established defensive lines. The 48th Infantry Corps halted about sixty kilometers east of Kursk to maintain a straight line with the 34th Infantry to the north. Kursk marked the dividing line between Army Groups North and South, and the 6th Army’s 29th Corps held the line to the south. This remained largely in the hands of the overstretched 299th Infantry Division under Major General Moser. Guderian had been unable to hold anything near the Don River and had continued retreating. Now, with most of his men on the Stalinogorsk-Shat-Upa line, he was forced to retreat again. The situation was intensely confused as commanders withdrew on their own authority, only to be countermanded by the next higher officer, who then argued with Guderian about how far to pull back. Guderian bypassed the chain of command and tried to plead his case directly with Hitler, but this too failed. On the 18th, Hitler issued an order that no further withdrawals would be considered. Colonel Günther Blumentritt, chief of staff of the 4th Army “Hitler believed that he personally could ward off the catastrophe which was impending before Moscow, and it must be stated quite frankly that he did in fact succeed in doing so. His fanatical order that the troops must hold fast regardless in every position, and in the most impossible circumstances, was undoubtedly correct.”The only situations that might warrant consideration were if infantry had been brought up behind the would-be retreating forces. This effectively ruled out any chance, as there was no reserve anywhere in the Wehrmacht and certainly no substantial reserves in the eastern Army Groups. Bock, assessed the situation on his most perilous sectors and concluded in his diary that “units will possibly pull back without orders.” The same day Guderian wrote privately to his wife: “The people from the OKH and OKW, who have never seen the front, have no idea of these conditions; they merely wire impossible orders and reject all requests and submissions. The feeling of not being understood and being helplessly at the mercy of the circumstances is simply nerve-wracking.”

Halder was scraping the proverbial barrel for replacements. He arranged for the NCO school to be temporarily shut down to provide no more than fourteen hundred men. This was a drastic move for little gain. Professional armies had depended on a steady supply of well-trained and disciplined Noncommissioned Officers for centuries. Now, after less than six months of operations, the Germans were willing to degrade that supply for a single regiment’s worth of men. Little else can be said to emphasize how desperate the manpower situation was becoming for the Wehrmacht. In Army Group South, Kleist managed to steady his situation as December entered its third week. The 6th Army in the north faced no immediate pressure, as the forces in that region had been concentrating on the 2nd Army and Guderian. The 17th Army was under pressure but had not been seriously threatened by the Soviets yet. Overall, the southern sector of the front remained quiet during this week. The Red Army was attempting to prepare for a second, more ambitious phase of their winter counter-offensive. The Germans did not suspect this, instead believing that the Red Army had worn itself out. Halder shifted to winter- and spring-planning, focusing on supply and industry details rather than preparing a defense against a renewed winter attack.

In the Crimea, Manstein’s 11th Army remained poised for another assault on Sevastopol. He had directed most of his forces toward the siege, yet he could not ignore the Kerch peninsula or the rest of the peninsula. He did not abandon the area, but what was available stood at the edge: the 46th Infantry Division, the Romanian 8th Cavalry, and the Romanian 4th Mountain Brigade. In the second week of the month, the Trans-Caucasian Front had been ordered to prepare for a landing at Kerch. Major General Tolbukhin served as the chief of staff for that front and was tasked with planning the operation. In a rare situation for Red Army planners in 1941, he had plenty of everything he needed—shipping, naval support, air support, and manpower. What he lacked were experienced commanders capable of executing such a highly complex plan. The operation called for five transport groups to land at five different beaches simultaneously, with naval and air support dedicated to each beach. Even this intricate opening phase was only the beginning. After the Germans responded to the landings, Tolbukhin intended to land another group at Feodosiya in the German rear. The forces involved would include two infantry armies, the Black Sea Fleet, and the independent VVS command for the region. The Red Army had little experience in coordinating these large-scale joint operations across services. Still, preparations for the assault continued throughout the week.

At Sevastopol, Manstein scheduled the 17th as the start of his second assault on the city. Petrov had not anticipated another assault before year’s end and was caught off guard when German artillery opened fire with a full-scale bombardment at 06:00 on the morning of the 17th. The guns were supported by Stukas and medium bombers. The attack was spearheaded by elements from four infantry divisions and portions of the Romanian 1st Mountain Brigade. The German infantry had devised a set of tactics to breach barbed wire and bunkers, reminiscent of stormtrooper methods from the First World War. First, buddy teams of pioneers would rush the wire and throw smoke grenades to conceal the subsequent pioneers who would bring Bangalore torpedoes to breach the wire. They would then be followed by grenadiers who hurled up to a dozen grenades into the breach. Only after all of this would the actual assault groups push through the wire. The approach was slow, but it kept German casualties down and secured the trench lines more reliably.

Over the next few days, the Coastal Army was slowly pushed back. See-saw fighting occurred at a few critical positions, but the Germans and their Romanian allies made steady progress. On the twentieth, a fresh rifle division was dispatched to reinforce Sevastopol from the Trans-Caucasian Front. This division would not arrive within the week, but the impending arrival gave the defenders hope. They were also told of the incoming Kerch landings and were told to hold out until the end of the month. The Stavka believed that operation would overwhelm the German occupiers and force Manstein to pull back from Sevastopol. Until then, Petrov’s Sector Four defenses on the city’s northern side faced the real danger of collapse. On the night of the twentieth, reinforcements finally arrived in the form of the 79th Marine Brigade with three thousand five hundred men, bringing with them ammunition and supplies. In addition, two cruisers and four destroyers arrived and began providing much-needed naval gunfire support. As December’s third week came to a close, both sides fighting Sevastopol were exhausted. Yet the Soviets were the ones receiving reinforcements, and they enjoyed the advantage of strong defenses. Only time would tell whether the Kerch landing would force Manstein to abandon the siege, but there remained a glimmer of hope for the defenders.

I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.

Stalin’s leadership shake-ups and Stavka’s front-shifts unlock renewed Soviet offensives, notably on the Volkhov and around Leningrad, while German adaptability in defense complicates Soviet plans. The siege of Leningrad deepens amid famine, with drastic rationing and cannibalism reports; yet production continues at the Kirov Plant, supplying tanks for the defense. In the south, Guderian’s withdrawals tighten the German lines, while Sevastopol endures a renewed German assault. Kerch landings loom as the Red Army plans a second winter counter-offensive.