2nd shock army

2nd Shock Army - XXXX -
National badge of the armed forces of the USSR
active	October 24, 1941 to April 1946
Country	USSR
Armed forces	RA 1941-1946 CA 1946
Armed forces	Land forces (in the sense of army)
Type	Large association
Subordinate troops	several divisions, various independent brigades, regiments and battalions
Location	1946 Schwerin in Mecklenburg
commander
Important commanders	see list

The 2nd Shock Army ( Russian 2-я ударная армия ) was one of five shock armies set up by the Red Army during World War II . It emerged from the renaming of the 26th Army at the end of December 1941 and fought on the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts until the end of 1944 , before being transferred to the 2nd Belarusian Front . She took part in the Ladoga Battles , the Leningrad-Novgorod Operation , the Baltic Operation and the Battle of East Prussia , and remained stationed in Mecklenburg until January 1946 , before being disbanded in April 1946. She remained in special memory through the Battle of the Volkhov in early 1942, in which her Commander-in-Chief Andrei Vlasov was captured, who then set up the Russian Liberation Army for the Germans .

history

Map of the Battle of the Volkhov

The 2nd Shock Army was set up on December 25, 1941 by renaming the 26th Army (1st Formation) in the area north of Lake Ilmen on the Volkhov Front. Your neighbors were the 52nd Army on the left and the 59th Army on the right . On 7 January 1942, she began an operation to exceed the Volkhov with the goal deep in the back of the Leningrad besieging troops of Army Group North to arrive and this abort the Leningrad blockade to force ( Battle of the Volkhov , in the Russian / Soviet military history known as the Ljubaner Operation ). Only after several days of fighting succeeded in forming a bridgehead on the western bank of the river, which was secured until the end of January, and the railway line Leningrad - Novgorod was interrupted . In March 1942, the army that had broken through on Ljuban was isolated from its own front by German counterattacks on the Volkhov, but had to hold out in the positions it had reached on higher orders before it was ordered to withdraw from the pocket in April 1942. However, only up to 16,000 men were able to break through the lines of the Germans or the temporarily created corridors by the end of June, the rest fell or were captured.

From mid-July 1942, the practically completely destroyed army was reorganized from remains and newly supplied reinforcements in the area south of Lake Ladoga . From September 8, 1942, the still strongly weakened army was thrown into the First Battle of Ladoga . It had to be pulled out of the lines again at the end of the month and was reassembled again. By December 1942 it grew again to a strength of around 165,000 men, over 2000 guns and more than 200 tanks. Your next deployment took place in the Second Ladoga Battle in January 1943 (in Russian military historiography Operation Iskra ). By the end of the month, the union of the 67th Army and the 2nd Shock Army in the area north of Sinyavino opened a narrow corridor to Leningrad. A capture of the heights of Sinyavino, which was attempted in February 1943, failed, however. Most of the rest of 1943 was spent in trench warfare.

At the end of October 1943, in preparation for an attack operation, the army headquarters was secretly pulled out of the front from the bridgehead at Oranienbaum, west of Leningrad, and transferred there by sea. In the course of the Krasnoye Selo-Ropsha operation , the 2nd shock army broke out of the Oranienbaum bridgehead on January 14, 1944, and a week later it merged with the 42nd Army of the Leningrad Front southeast of Ropsha . This was the prelude to the Leningrad-Novgorod operation of the Leningrad and Volkhov Front, in the course of which by the beginning of March the Northern Army Group was thrown back from the Leningrad and Kalinin area to the " panther position " and the Leningrad blockade was finally ended. This was followed by participation in the battle for the bridgehead of Narva until the summer of 1944 . The city and the hinterland of Narva could be recaptured at the end of July in cooperation with the troops of the 8th Army . Unsuccessful attempts to overcome the German " Tannenberg position " followed by the beginning of September . The army was then moved to the southwest side of Lake Peipus in preparation for the Baltic operation .

On September 17th, as part of the Tallinn operation , the 2nd Shock Army attacked from their positions east of Tartu and within a few days reached the merger with the 8th Army advancing from the Narva area in the Rakvere area . By the end of the month, all of mainland Estonia was again under Soviet ownership.

At the turn of the year 1944/45, the 2nd Shock Army was transferred to the 2nd Belarusian Front, where it was assembled on the Narew in the Różan area . From January 14th she attacked in the context of the Mlawa-Elbingen operation in a north-west direction and reached Marienburg on January 26th . Elbing could be taken on February 10th . In the course of the Battle of East Pomerania , Dirschau fell on March 11th to the army, which continued its advance on Danzig , which was captured on March 30th. A week later the march to the Oder began , where the army was deployed in the Stettin area. From the end of April the army took part in the Stettin-Rostock operation of the 2nd Belarusian Front and captured Anklam , Stralsund and the islands of Wollin , Usedom and Rügen .

Post-war period

After the end of the war, the army was stationed as part of the group of Soviet occupation troops in Germany with headquarters in Schwerin in Mecklenburg . The army headquarters was withdrawn from Germany in early 1946 and converted into the headquarters of the new Arkhangelsk military district in April.

Commander

• Grigory Grigoryevich Sokolov - December 25, 1941 to January 10, 1942
• Nikolai Kuzmich Klykov - January 10 to April 16, 1942
• Andrei Andreevich Vlasov - April 16 to July 1, 1942
• Nikolai Kuzmich Klykov - July 24 to December 2, 1942
• Vladimir Sakharovich Romanovsky - December 2, 1942 to December 23, 1943
• Ivan Ivanovich Fedyuninsky - December 24, 1943 to April 1946

See also

List of Soviet military bases in Germany

literature

• Вторая ударная в битве за Ленинград. Лениздат, 1983.
• Юлий Квицинский: Генерал Власов: Путь предательства. Современник, 1999. ISBN 5-270-01284-7 .
• Григорий Севастьянов: Мои воспоминания и размышления.
• Военный энциклопедический словарь. Воениздат, 1984.