Original subtitles

October 1941. The Germans reach Rzhev, 130 miles from Moscow.

The battles fought here are some of the bloodiest of the war.

They come to be known as "The Rzhev Meat-Grinder".

Originally produced for Russian television in 2011,

this is the story of Russia s Great Patriotic War

and the Red Army s long road from defeat to victory.

The Red Army was pulling back across the Volga.

Suddenly, enormous explosions ripped through the city behind them.

The ammunition and fuel dumps in Rzhev were being blown up

to prevent them falling into the enemy s hands.

Everywhere there was confusion.

The roads were crowded with retreating soldiers.

No one knew where it would end.

It seemed the whole front was collapsing.

It was October 1941. The Germans had launched Operation Typhoon

the Battle for Moscow.

The German army was in Rzhev just hours behind the Soviets.

An investigation into the conduct of Soviet commanders at Rzhev

cleared them of wrongdoing.

There had been no way to get the ammunition out.

The Luftwaffe had already destroyed all transport connections to the city.

The Red Army ammunition dumps were at Rzhev

because the city lay at the heart of the rail network.

Both sides depended on ammunition, food and fuel by the trainload.

It made Rzhev a valuable prize.

Red Army units retreating from Rzhev were reorganised into the Kalinin Front.

Their new commander was Colonel General Ivan Stepanovich Konev.

Konev was the son of Russian peasants,

and became a conscript of the Tsarist army in 1916.

By 1941, he d risen to senior command and been put in charge of a Front

the Soviet equivalent of an army group.

However his forces became encircled in the opening phase of Operation Typhoon.

Konev s conduct was investigated by the State Defense Committee,

led by Molotov and Voroshilov.

Konev s predecessor, General Pavlov,

had been shot following a similar investigation.

But Konev was saved by Zhukov s intervention.

Zhukov knew any general could have a bad day. And shooting competent officers,

with the enemy at the gates of the capital, was counter-productive.

That winter, outside Moscow, the Red Army launched a massive counterattack.

The German 9th Army was forced to retreat from Kalinin back to Rzhev.

Hitler s response was to sack Army Group Centre s commander, Fedor Von Bock.

He was given just a few hours to brief his successor, Field Marshal von Kluge.

Von Bock painted a bleak picture.

He warned von Kluge that he believed the enemy was preparing a powerful strike

against both flanks of Army Group Centre.

Gunther Von Kluge had been promoted Field Marshal the previous year,

following his success in the Battle of France.

He came from a Prussian family with a long tradition of military service.

In 1944 he would take his own life following the failure of the army plot

to assassinate Hitler.

Von Bock s warning proved accurate.

As Zhukov attacked from the east, Konev s 39th Army

broke through the German lines west of Rzhev,

threatening Army Group Centre s supply lines.

The Soviet 29th Army followed through the breach, threatening Rzhev itself.

The Germans clung on desperately. Heinrich Haape,

a medic in the German 6th Infantry Division, described the chaos:

We got reinforcements from construction companies and rear area units.

Many didn t know anything about handling weapons.

They were cannon fodder thrown into the battle.

While we changed positions after firing,

the newcomers always shot from the same spot.

One burst from a Russian machine gun was all it took.

In 12 hours, from 130 new men, just 26 were left.

Konev s counterattack encircled the German 23rd Corps near Olenino.

But Zhukov s advance became bogged down in fighting around Yukhnov.

Only Belov s Cavalry Corps broke through to Vyazma.

Because of the almost total destruction of Red Army tank units

in the first weeks of the war, by late 1941,

the Soviets were forced to look elsewhere for fast-moving offensive units.

They turned to their cavalry. The cavalry was used to exploit breakthroughs

and attack enemy lines of communication.

Each cavalry corps included one tank brigade, anti-tank guns, and mortars.

The cavalry were in effect mobile infantry. Horses got them there,

but then the men dismounted to fight, and the horses were led to the rear.

Mounted cavalry charges were for the newsreels.

Later in the war, the Red Army created Cavalry-Mechanised groups,

containing cavalry, tanks, self-propelled guns and rocket artillery.

These formations were powerful and highly mobile.

On 16th January, General Strauss asked to be relieved

as commander of the German 9th Army. His replacement was Walter Model.

Model now turned the tables on the Soviets.

First he broke through to the isolated 23rd Corps.

Then he cut-off the Soviet 29th Army.

Konev launched ferocious counterattacks in a bid to rescue his trapped units.

But Model successfully parried one blow after another.

The Soviets failed to break through.

Konev ordered the encircled men to save themselves. On 17th February,

a small airborne force was parachuted in to guide the troops back through the lines.

5,200 men of the 29th Army made it back... 14,000 did not.

The Soviet plan to cut the Smolensk-Vyazma highway,

thereby cutting off German Army Group Centre, had ended in a bloody failure.

The losses were extraordinary, but casualty claims remain controversial.

The Soviets admitted to a staggering 341,000 casualties on the Kalinin Front.

The Western Front suffered an additional 105,000 casualties,

while German Army Group Centre sustained an estimated 150,000 casualties.

Summer, 1942. The drone of a light aircraft could be heard over the forest,

and the occasional crack of a rifle. Field Marshal Von Kluge

was indulging in his new hobby fox hunting from the air.

It was a dangerous sport.

Partisans and stranded Red Army soldiers hid in the forest.

Model had recently been wounded by a lucky shot.

After the winter fighting, many Soviet units were cut off behind the German front line.

The front here had become a confusing patchwork of pockets and salients.

The largest salient projected into the forests around the town of Zhirkovsky.

It contained parts of the Soviet 39th Army and 11th Cavalry Corps.

They were supplied along a narrow corridor through enemy lines.

Artillery officer Mikhail Lukinov described conditions:

We were few and no one was in good shape. All the horses had died.

The sick and wounded were evacuated on foot. And we envied them .

The Stavka was not willing to give up any of its hard-won ground,

no matter how exposed it left the troops. And now disaster loomed.

On 2nd July, the Germans launched Operation Seydlitz.

Within three days, they had closed the corridor at the village of Pushkari.

It meant the encirclement of the 39th Army, 11th Cavalry Corps,

and also parts of the 41st and 22nd Armies.

Attempts to break out lasted for several days.

Poliakov, a signals officer from a Guards Rifle Division described the atmosphere:

At Headquarters there was a sense of calm foreboding.

You could sense people thinking we ve done all we can.

Now duty demands we go to the very end.

But while his troops fought bravely on,

39th Army Commander General Maslennikov was evacuated by air.

His injured deputy, General Ivan Bogdanov, was also flown out, but died of his wounds.

In all 18,000 soldiers escaped the trap. More than 60,000 did not.

Operation Seydlitz gave the Rzhev bulge its definitive shape.

At its tip the city of Rzhev, and the junction of two rail arteries:

one running east-west from Moscow to Velikiye Luki;

the other running north-south from Torzhok to Vyzama.

German control of Rzhev prevented the Soviets moving men and supplies

between the two flanks. But if Rzhev fell,

the Red Army would be able to launch powerful offensives on both flanks.

They would trap and destroy German forces in the salient.

What s more, the German lines here were only 150 kilometers from the Soviet capital.

It was imperative that Soviet forces drive the enemy as far from Moscow as possible.

In July 1942, the Wehrmacht launched a new offensive in southern Russia

to capture the Caucasus oil fields.

The Red Army retreated towards Rostov and Stalingrad.

Stalin issued his famous Order Number 227 Not a step back!

At the Rzhev salient, the fighting had settled into a routine of bombardments

and small-scale raids.

For the Eastern Front, this was what passed for a quiet patch.

But it was the calm before the storm. The Soviets were preparing something big.

B-4 guns, dubbed Stalin s Sledgehammers , had arrived at the front.

The B-4 was a Soviet 203 millimetre heavy howitzer.

It was a fearsome weapon, used for smashing enemy fortifications and strongpoints.

B-4 batteries were under the direct command of the Stavka strategic reserve.

This meant that wherever they showed up, something big was being planned.

The explosion of a 100-kilogram B-4 shell would instantly catch the Germans attention.

So to keep the presence of the heavy guns secret,

gunners carried out their ranging fire with light howitzers.

The results were then recalculated for the B-4s.

But that wasn t all the Soviets were hiding.

The new M-30 rocket launcher was about to make its operational debut.

M-30s were similar to the famous Katyusha truck-mounted rocket launchers.

But this version carried a heavier 300 millimetre rocket with a bulbous warhead,

which meant the launcher had to be installed directly into the ground.

Each M-30 could be loaded with four, or later eight rockets.

It was a crude but devastating weapon, nicknamed "Pounding Ivan" by the troops.

Each rocket had a range of 2.8 kilometres. Later in the war,

an M-31 rocket was developed with a range of more than 4 kilometres.

It was fired from a car-mounted launcher known as Andryusha .

The frontline was quiet when Leonid Sandalov,

Chief of Staff of the 20th Army, went to visit:

On a clear day, you could see German guards changing shifts,

smoke drifting from their dug-outs,

and soldiers bailing out flooded trenches with buckets.

In the evenings you could hear them playing their harmonicas .

These routines were carefully observed by Red Army staff officers,

disguised as common soldiers.

This sector, near the Derzha River,

had been chosen by the Stavka High Command for an ambitious operation.

The orders from the Stavka were to seize control of the cities of Rzhev and Zubtsov,

and then advance to fortify the lines of the Volga and Vazuza rivers.

The attack was to be made by two armies of the Kalinin Front,

and two armies of the Western Front. It would commence on the 28th July 1942.

But the Germans were preparing their own offensive.

The Germans planned to attack at Sukhinichski,

where there was a bulge in the front.

Operation Whirlwind would be the classic German pincer move:

two blows from north and south to encircle Soviet troops in the bulge.

Summer rainstorms turned roads into swamps.

The Western Front s attack had to be delayed.

But Konev s Kalinin Front went ahead without them on 30th July.

Its troops had been given two days to capture Rzhev.

General Khlebnikov, the Kalinin Front s artillery commander,

reported the effect of his guns:

Two of the forward positions of the enemy s main defensive line were destroyed.

The forces occupying them were almost completely wiped out.

But Model used the German 6th Infantry Division

to plug any gaps that appeared in the line.

Battles raged for days over villages and landmarks.

To the north of Rzhev, Polunino village and Hill 200 were the focus of bitter fighting.

A battalion commander from the 6th Infantry Division tried to describe the experience:

Our trenches are under constant fire from guns, rockets and mortars.

It s hard to imagine the sheer number of guns.

The indescribable sound of the rockets.

The wounded drag themselves to the rear. They say it s all bad in the front line.

The Russians destroy our guns and level our positions .

But still the Soviet infantry failed to break through.

Soviet infantry tactics weren t helping. In 1942,

Red Army doctrine stated that infantry should be drawn up in two echelons.

For a division, this meant two regiments in the first echelon, and one behind.

Their battalions and companies were arranged in the same way.

It allowed a division to move quickly to exploit a successful attack.

It also meant that in a rifle division,

only 8 out of 27 companies were in the front line.

Attacks were weakened, and units in the rear

were exposed to shells and bombs long before they even engaged the enemy.

In the bloody fighting around Rzhev, the Red Army would learn many painful lessons.

4th August 1942.

The dawn silence was about to be broken by a deafening cannonade.

Stalin s Sledgehammers had joined the battle.

Then the Katyushas joined in.

Five days late, Zhukov s Western Front had joined the battle.

As Zhukov s troops advanced, they liberated their first Russian village.

At Pogoreloye Gorodishe,

they learned first-hand about the brutality of Nazi occupation.

Jews had been murdered, Russians starved

or transported to the Reich as slave labour.

From a population of 3,076, only 905 remained.

In two days of slow and costly advances,

the 20th Army reached the Vazuza and Gzhat rivers.

Now it had to storm across them, take Sitchevka,

and so cut the vital Vyzama-Rzhev rail-line.

Model hurriedly redeployed the five divisions, three of them armoured,

that had been earmarked for Operation Whirlwind.

The attacking Red Army units were decimated.

Zhukov was forced onto the defensive.

He turned his attention to the village of Karmanovo on his left flank.

It was a virtual fortress, protected by the Yauza river in front,

and impenetrable swamps on both flanks.

For the Soviet infantry, it meant more costly, frontal assaults.

On 21st August, the Kalinin Front finally took Polunino

and advanced to the outskirts of Rzhev.

The Western Front managed to outflank Karmanovo,

and finally took the on the 23rd August.

Model demanded that von Kluge release three more divisons

to help shore up Ninth Army s position. He got them.

With these reinforcements, and his skilful handling of the tactical situation,

Model was able to fight the Soviet offensive to a standstill.

Red Army gains had fallen far short of expectations.

Stalin now telephoned Zhukov at Western Front Headquarters. He told him:

You must report to the Stavka as soon as possible.

Think carefully about who will take over from you there .

Stalin was sending Zhukov south,

to oversee a new crisis unfolding near the city of Stalingrad.

Zhukov named Ivan Konev as his successor at Western Front Headquarters.

Konev immediately ordered a new strategy.

There would be no more attempts to cut the railway at Sitchevka.

Instead Konev would concentrate all his resources

on driving the Germans out of Rzhev.

New attacks were launched in late August.

Konev seemed on the brink of victory.

But once more Model received reinforcements in the nick of time.

They included the elite Grossdeutschland motorised infantry division.

This unit exemplified the superior equipment,

tactics and training still possessed by the German army.

In October, the Soviets were forced to abandon their offensive.

The Rzhev sector began to quieten down.

That summer, Model s Ninth Army had lost 60,000 men.

Soviet casualties were 314,000 men more than five times as many.

Red Army soldiers called it "the Rzhev meat-grinder".

Alexander Bodnar was in the middle of it:

We d never attacked in the summer before that.

And we didn t know how to attack the Summer German.

I was a kilometer behind the front,

and suddenly I saw a field covered with our dead.

Young boys with guard badges, wearing brand new uniforms

The German machine gunner was just mowing them down.

We were still learning how to fight from the Germans, right up until Stalingrad.

But after Stalingrad, we had nothing to learn. We knew everything .

The Russian poet, Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovski, gave a voice to the dead.

I was killed near Rzhev. In a nameless bog,

In fifth company, On the Left flank,

In a cruel air raid.

I did not hear the explosions And did not see the flash.

Down to an abyss from a cliff No start, no end.

And in this whole world Til the end of its days,

Neither patches nor badges From my tunic you ll find .

November 1942. At a Red Army Air Force base near Moscow,

aircrew rushed to inspect a brand new arrival.

This sleek new twin-engined bomber was the Tupolev TU-2.

The TU-2 was a high-speed bomber with a crew of four.

It was armed with two 20 millimetre cannon, three defensive machineguns,

and could carry more than 3 tons of bombs.

The designer Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev

worked for the Aviation Design Bureau known as OKB-29.

They were based at 24 Radio Street, Moscow,

where they were closely supervised by the NKVD secret police.

Most Soviet wartime designers and engineers worked under similar supervision

by the authorities some whilst under actual arrest.

The Germans still held Rzhev and the crucial rail hub.

It made it difficult to resupply the Kalinin Front for a fresh assault.

So the Stavka allocated it more transport aircraft, to get supplies in by air.

It was all part of the build up to a new offensive, codenamed Operation Mars.

In November 1942, the Red Army planned

to encircle German forces at Stalingrad in Operation Uranus.

Mars would be a simultaneous hammer blow at Rzhev,

that would prevent the Wehrmacht sending reinforcements south.

Zhukov, who had been in the south acting as the Stavka s representative

on the Stalingrad Front, would return north to command Operation Mars personally.

The offensive would be carried out by Konev s Western Front,

and the Kalinin Front, now commanded by General Maksim Purkayev.

Zhukov would oversee them both.

The Red Army would attack with 660,000 men and 2,000 tanks.

It was clear that Zhukov hoped for a significant breakthrough.

On the first day of the Operation, a harsh wind blew from the Southwest,

bringing heavy grey clouds. Wet snow fell from the sky.

Visibility was down to twenty yards.

Zhukov and Konev had placed great emphasis on close air support.

But nothing could fly in this weather.

There was no question of postponing the attack.

On the west side of the Rzhev salient,

one Soviet mechanised corps broke through the positions of a Luftwaffe Field Division,

while Katukov s 3rd Mechanised Corps advanced along the Luchesy Valley.

Model and von Kluge committed all their forces to the battle.

Supreme High Command reserves were now on route to Army Group Centre from Smolensk.

From the east of the salient,

Soviet tanks and cavalry briefly cut the railway line to Rzhev.

But with the help of an armoured train, the Germans threw them back.

The Red Army sent wave after wave into the attack.

But the German defences were well-organised

and held by well-armed, experienced troops. Soviet losses were enormous.

But the German High Command foresaw disaster.

If defences around Beliy crumbled, the whole salient could be cut off and destroyed.

The fighting in the Luchesy Valley would prove critical.

Here the Germans finally managed to contain the Soviet advance.

Far to the South, Field Marshal von Manstein

was preparing an offensive to rescue German forces trapped at Stalingrad.

It was codenamed Operation Winter Storm. But there were serious concerns

that it lacked the strength to break through to Stalingrad.

When von Manstein asked for more divisions,

he was told no the strategic reserve had already been committed at Rzhev.

As Operation Mars continued,

German infantry fought a bloody struggle in freezing conditions,

for a handful of vital highways and railway lines.

Elite German units who fought here would remember these months

as the worst of the entire war.

Katukov s 3rd mechanised corps was just 2 kilometres short

of cutting the highway to Rzhev. He was down from 270 tanks to just 70.

But Operation Mars could go no further.

By 20th December, the offensive had ground to a halt.

The Red Army was still outmatched by the Wehrmacht.

Although in some arenas, such as sniping, the Soviets were highly proficient,

they still lacked crucial capabilities.

Many lives were still being wasted in repeated,

frontal attacks on German strongpoints.

Their tanks and infantry still hadn t learnt to work together effectively.

The Red Army often lacked good intelligence on enemy forces.

One captured Soviet officer told the Germans

he had been shocked when their reserves arrived.

A German intelligence report picked up this point:

The enemy wasn t counting on these troops appearing.

No German reserve forces are marked on any of the Soviet maps we ve recovered .

Soviet statistics put casualties for Operation Mars at 216,000.

They may have been much higher. German 9th Army casualties were 53,000.

Von Kluge, Commander of Army Group Centre,

was awarded the Oak Leaf Cluster to his Knight s Cross.

But in secret, the Field Marshal was already plotting against Hitler.

In July 1944, von Kluge was in France commanding the Western Front

when von Stauffenberg tried to blow up the Fuehrer

at his headquarters in East Prussia.

When it became clear the plot had failed, von Kluge took a cyanide pill.

He was succeeded by his former subordinate, Walter Model

who would also later commit suicide to avoid Soviet war crimes charges.

There were no medals for the Red Army commanders.

Konev was relieved of command. But he was soon back in favour.

He later led the 1st Ukrainian Front into Germany and Berlin.

The Commander of the Kalinin Front, Maksim Purkayev,

was reassigned to the Far East, where he remained for the rest of the war.

Operation Mars was a bloody defeat for the Red Army,

and it was a personal failure for Marshal Zhukov. For these reasons,

the events were largely ignored by Soviet historians,

and are hardly known in the west.

But despite the enormous casualties, the offensive did achieve something.

Army Group Center s reserves had been pinned down at Rzhev.

It meant they had not been available to assist von Manstein s

rescue operation at Stalingrad.

General Model s 9th Army had suffered heavy casualties too.

These were experienced officers and men that Germany would struggle to replace.

In January 1943, Velikiye Luki was liberated,

a town 250 kilometres west of Rzhev.

The loss of this important transport hub hampered German supply,

and put the Rzhev salient in an even more precarious situation.

On 26th January 1943,

von Kluge requested permission to withdraw from the Rzhev salient.

Five days later Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad.

Hitler, suddenly anxious to avoid another encirclement,

Hitler gave von Kluge permission to retreat.

Ninth Army would be vulnerable as it withdrew from the salient.

So its staff had begun planning the retreat

even before Hitler s authorisation came through.

The result was codenamed Buffalo,

a massive operation to move 365,000 men

to new prepared positions 100 kilometres to the rear.

As the Germans prepared to withdraw,

they launched a large-scale anti-partisan operation.

They rounded-up Red Army stragglers, and many innocent civilians too.

All faced swift and summary punishment.

A corporal from the 4th Panzer Division described

how such operations were conducted:

Our patrol arrested an old man and a 6-year-old boy carrying potatoes and salt.

They claimed they were going fishing,

but they were obviously delivering food to the partisans.

We didn t detain them for too long. We sent them on their way to Paradise .

In the East, such crimes had become commonplace.

Now as the Germans retreated,

Model gave orders to deport all males of working age,

confiscate all food supplies, poison wells, and burn villages.

For these actions he would be declared a war criminal by the USSR.

The German retreat began on 1st March 1943.

Engineers waited to blow the Volga bridge after the last unit had crossed.

Hitler had demanded to hear the explosion for himself.

It was carried by telephone line back to Fuehrer Headquarters.

Across No Man s Land, a Russian medic noticed something was up:

A strange silence filled the air.

Not a sound, neither from the German side, nor ours.

Slowly, our men left their trenches

more and more of those daredevils with every minute.

Then I heard a cry: "Fritz has run away!

The German withdrawal was conducted in stages.

In their wake they left land-mines and booby-traps.

Model s "scorched earth" policy spared nothing.

When the Red Army liberated Vyazma, they found total devastation.

Every building had been demolished or gutted,

every telegraph pole had been cut down, every railway point smashed.

Even oil drums had been riddled with bullets.

German soldiers spoke of having left Rzhev undefeated.

But the reality was that they were retreating to avoid a second Stalingrad.

The Battles of Rzhev saw some of the most ferocious,

futile blood-letting of the entire war.

Red Army casualties were estimated at 1.2 million.

The only recompense was that the Germans too had suffered appallingly.

On 3rd April 1943, Model was awarded the Swords to his Knight s Cross.

He was also told to prepare his Ninth Army for a new offensive: Operation Citadel.

The General had no illusions about the prospects for this new offensive.

His forces, although nominally large,

contained many units worn-down and exhausted by the long winter fighting.

Now they were to be thrown into the white heat of the Battle of Kursk