In the images and pictures of the former Soviet Union, we can often see that some people are hung with medals, if you pay attention, it is not difficult to find that many people will have a small star of pure gold on their chests, which is the "Hero of the Soviet Union" medal. "Hero of the Soviet Union", the title is the highest honor in the Soviet Union's awarding and commendation system. The Regulation on the Title of Hero of the USSR used to stipulate that a person could not receive the title more than three times, until Zhukov had made great achievements, and the Soviet Union had modified this regulation specifically for him. In the history of the Soviet Union, only Zhukov and Brezhnev were finally awarded four "Hero of the Soviet Union" medals.
Zhukov's resume during the Soviet-German War was extremely shiny, and in 1941 he commanded the Defense of Leningrad, which determined the life and death of the Soviet Union, and after the Defense of Moscow, he became the supreme deputy commander of the Soviet Army. It is well known that the Soviet-German War, which broke out on June 22, 1941, once overwhelmed millions of Soviet troops, but after Zhukov's successive victories, it suffered a crushing defeat in the subsequent counterattack.
In November 1943, when the Soviet Army, which had been organized for many years in Siberia and the Far East, arrived, the Soviet High Command decided to organize two counterattacks, one code-named "Operation Mars" and the other known as Operation Uranus. Operation Mars refers to the defense of Moscow, the goal of the Soviet army is to expel the German army to the place of moscow through the counterattack of the Western Front, and even kill the German army in one breath; operation Uranus is the defense of Stalingrad, but Stalingrad is still under the attack of the German army, and most Germans do not know that their 6th Army of the playing panzer division is about to be encircled.
The Battle of Stalingrad has been described by many countries as a turning point in World War II, and its process is well known to many. After annihilating more than 300,000 invading German troops, the Soviets took advantage of the victory to pursue and almost ended the war in 1943. During the counterattack, the various armies rushed forward, and within a month or so, they advanced to Kharkov in Ukraine, where they were blocked by Manstein, and the Germans were able to save the situation. Judging only from the month of the Stalingrad counterattack, until the Soviet army entered the territory of Ukraine, it was overwhelming.
The defeat from Stalingrad was the first real defeat of the German army, and the previous battles of Leningrad and Moscow, although the Soviet army claimed to be victorious, but in essence it only withstood the German attack, and the victory of the Soviet Union did not mean that Germany lost. Operation Uranus greatly frustrates the confidence of the Nazi Germans and boosts the confidence of the Soviets. If, by this time, Operation Mars, which had been carried out at the same time, could have achieved similar results, the Germans would have been forced to withdraw from the Soviet Union in 1943. But the result of the Mars operation became a past that the Soviet Union did not want to mention, and for the sake of Zhukov's prestige and the entire war situation, Soviet history deliberately played down this fiasco:
On January 8, 1942, the Soviets began to attack the German defenses on the west side of Moscow, including more than 500,000 troops. Zhukov's biography mentions that in March-April 1942, the Soviet army, which was short of ammunition, suspended its counterattack. In November of that year, when Operation Mars began, Zhukov suffered the most painful defeat of his life, and historians commented that "the Battle of the Gerlev Salient embodies Zhukov's typical style." ”
In this war, Zhukov successively commanded the Soviet army to attack the position of the German Marshal Modell's salient position of the Zhelev salient command many times, resulting in heavy losses of the Soviet army and the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, so Zhukov was criticized by history after the war for not cherishing the lives of soldiers. Modell also won the title of defensive master, and his defensive talent was out of control from then on, and even later in the war, Hitler, who had vowed not to award marshals to the living, finally gave Marshal Modell the Order of Marshal.
So what was it that caused the results of the two great wars fought in the same period to be so different? Many believe that Marshal Modell, who defended the direction of Moscow, had more talent than Manstein in the direction of Stalingrad. Of course, there are strengths among military experts, and it is an indisputable fact that Manstein himself is better at attacking. But the reason for the huge difference in the outcome of the two counterattacks is that the background of the two battles is completely different:
First of all:
The Stalingrad counterattack began directly after the end of the Stalingrad defense, and before it was repeated, the Soviets had even mobilized a large army to reach the rear of the German army, not only to leave the 6th Army in Stalingrad, but even to draw up plans for the encirclement of Army Groups A and B. Due to the rapid transformation of attack and defense, Manstein's first task after the failure to rescue the 6th Army was to escape the encirclement that might be formed on him. Therefore, he does not have the conditions for local resistance.
The Moscow counterattack was fought 1 year after the end of the Moscow Defense War, where the German Army Group Center had been in place for a full year and a half, with bunkers, trenches and fortifications already in place, and at this time it would never have been able to win without the ferocious firepower of the time, relying only on the sheer numbers. In Guderian's memoirs, a number of fortifications were built on the Soviet Middle Road long before he joined the siege of Kiev, Ukraine, in September 1941. Modell inherited and greatly expanded these defense systems, just waiting for Zhukov to rush, and has been waiting for a year.
secondly:
During the Stalingrad counterattack, the Soviets invested a large number of advanced heavy weapons. The famous Katyusha rocket launched on the stage of history, a motor vehicle can fire 48 rockets at the same time, these rockets landed only 1 meter, there was no target to escape, ordinary bunkers and fortifications can not withstand the pace of the Soviet counterattack. And from the beginning of this war, the Soviet army began to gradually transform the assistance received by the United States and Britain into combat power, and new tanks and aircraft were put into battle, which reduced the difficulty of victory in the war.
Although the Moscow counterattack was only two months before the Stalingrad counterattack, these powerful new weapons did not appear on the battlefield, and in the face of the barbed wire, trenches and bunkers prepared by Marshal Modell, Zhukov could only let the tanks and soldiers attack, and it was expected that he would suffer huge losses.
Although Operation Mars ended in failure, its significance was enormous. After this battle, Modell believed that the Germans had won the Battle of Zhelev but lost the Grand Strategy. He thought he should rescue the 6th Army at Stalingrad, not defend Zhelev, west of Moscow.