Operation Little Saturn

Soviet advances during Operations Uranus, Mars and Saturn.

Operation Saturn was a Red Army operation on the Eastern Front of World War II that led to battles in the northern Caucasus and Donets Basin regions of the Soviet Union from December 1942 to February 1943.

The success of Operation Uranus, launched on 19 November 1942, had trapped 300,000 troops of General Friedrich Paulus's German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army in Stalingrad. To exploit this victory, the Soviet general staff planned a winter campaign of continuous and highly ambitious offensive operations, codenamed "Saturn".

Operation Little Saturn: December 1942

The first stage — an attempt to cut off the German Army Group A in the Caucasus — had to be rapidly revised when General Erich von Manstein launched Operation Winter Storm on 12 December in an attempt to relieve the trapped armies at Stalingrad. While General Rodion Malinovsky's Soviet 2nd Guards Army blocked the German advance on Stalingrad, the modified plan Operation Little Saturn was launched on 16 December.

This operation consisted of a pincer movement which threatened to cut off the relieving forces. General Fyodor Isidorovich Kuznetsov's 1st Guards Army and General Dmitri Danilovich Lelyushenko's 3rd Guards Army attacked from the north, encircling 60,000 soldiers of the Italian 8th Army on the Don and advancing to Millerovo. (Manstein sent the 6th Panzer Division to the Italians' aid — of the 54,000 encircled troops, 4,000 survived to join the Panzers at Chertkovo on 17 January). To the south the advance of General Gerasimenko's 28th Army threatened to encircle the 1st Panzer Army and General Trufanov's 51st Army attacked the relief column directly. By 25 December tanks of the 2nd Guards Army had reached Tatskinskaya, the air base closest to Stalingrad from which the Luftwaffe had been supplying the besieged troops. The Soviet tanks drove through snowstorms onto the airfield and roamed about for hours, destroying the German transport planes at their leisure.

With the relief column under threat of encirclement, Manstein had no choice but to retreat back to Kotelnikovo on 29 December, leaving the encircled Germans at Stalingrad to their fate (of the 300,000 soldiers encicled 90,000 survived to be taken prisoner. Only 5,000 lived to return to Germany.) The limited scope of the Soviet offensive also allowed Hitler time to pull General Ewald von Kleist's Army Group A out of the Caucasus and back over the Don at Rostov.

Second stage: January 1943

The second stage of operations opened on 13 January 1943 with an attack by four armies of General Golikov's Voronezh Front that encircled and destroyed the Hungarian 2nd Army near Svoboda on the Don. An attack on the German 2nd Army further north threatened to bring about an encirclement; although the German 2nd Army managed to escape, it was forced to retreat and by 5 February troops of the Voronezh Front were approaching Kursk and Kharkov.

Third stage: February 1943

With German armies in disorganized retreat all across the southern Ukraine, the third stage was an ambitious operation for the Voronezh Front to advance to the Dniepr and encircle the German 2nd Army, and for the Southwest and South Fronts to capture Voroshilovgrad and drive south to the Sea of Azov to encircle Kleist's Army Group A and Manstein's Army Group Don.

These operations began well. Kursk was captured on 8 February 1943, Kharkov on 16 February, and Rostov was abandoned on 18 February. A gap had been driven between Army Group A — now squeezed into a small bridgehead opposite the Kerch peninsula — and Army Group Don, and Fyodor Isidorovich Kuznetsov's 1st Guards Army threatened to drive another gap between Army Group Don and Günther von Kluge's Army Group Centre by advancing through Dnepropetrovsk. Moreover the surrender of Stalingrad on 2 February 1943 had freed up Konstantin Rokossovsky's Don Front for new operations.

An ambitious plan was made to follow up the success at Kursk with an attack on the German Army Group Centre in the salient at Orel before breaking out towards Bryansk. This time, however, the Soviet general staff had asked more than their exhausted troops could perform. Logistical difficulties in redeploying the armies from Stalingrad 650 km (400 miles) to the west delayed the start of its offensive until 25 February. And tenacious German defence meant that only minor gains were made west of Kursk and none at all at Orel.

Meanwhile, in order to save the position in the south, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht took the decision to abandon the Rzhev salient near Moscow to free enough German troops to make a successful riposte in eastern Ukraine. Manstein's counteroffensive, stiffened by a specially trained SS Panzer Corps equipped with Tiger tanks, opened on 20 February 1943 and fought its way from Poltava back into Kharkov in the third week of March, upon which the spring thaw intervened. This left a bulge in the front centred on Kursk, and thus led to the Battle of Kursk in July.

References

• John Erickson, The Road to Berlin, Harper & Row, 1982.
• David M. Glantz, Prelude to Kursk: Soviet Strategic Operations February–March 1943
• Giusti, Maria Teresa. I prigionieri italiani in Russia, Il Mulino Bologna 2003 (Italian)