Company Advent
Enterprise Advent was the code name of a German attack operation in December 1943 in the Soviet Union .
prehistory
With about 730,000 soldiers attacked the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army , the Army Group South of the German Wehrmacht in the section east of Kiev on. Kiev was retaken by the Red Army on November 6, 1943. During this ten-day offensive operation, Soviet troops advanced around 150 kilometers to the west. A German counterattack initially failed. By November 30, 1943, however, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein managed to stabilize the front in front of Kiev using all available reserve forces.
The enterprise
On December 6, 1943, Manstein ordered the XXXXVIII. Panzer Corps , which at that time only had around 200 armored vehicles, launched the attack to retake Kiev. In a complex zigzag attack operation, three German armored divisions managed to break through the Soviet front and begin a pincer movement that resulted in the entrapment of three Soviet armored and four rifle corps in the area around Meleni ("Sack of Meleni") . During this operation, situation maps were discovered on a fallen Soviet officer showing the preparation of a major Soviet attack in this sector. In order to prevent the annihilation of the German containment troops, the Meleni sack was not cleared and a retreat was initiated. The military historian Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin coined the term miniature Tannenberg for this bold tactical attack, based on the operational course of the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia in 1914. It was the last tactically successful military operation by Manstein in the German-Soviet war .
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Die Welt online from December 12, 2013 , accessed on December 12, 2013