Battle of Rostov (1941)
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| Eastern Front |
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| Barbarossa – Finland – Leningrad and Baltics – Crimea and Caucasus – Moscow – 1st Rzhev-Vyazma – 2nd Kharkov – Stalingrad – Velikiye Luki – 2nd Rzhev-Sychevka – Kursk – 2nd Smolensk – Dnieper – 2nd Kiev – Korsun – Hube's Pocket – Belorussia – Lvov-Sandomierz – Balkans – Hungary – Vistula-Oder – Königsberg – Berlin – Prague |
| Operation Barbarossa |
|---|
| Bialystok-Minsk – Smolensk – Uman – 1st Kiev – Yelnya – Odessa – Leningrad – 1st Crimea – 1st Rostov |
The Battle of Rostov (1941) was a battle of the Eastern Front of World War II, fought around Rostov-on-Don between the German Army Group South, commanded by General Gerd von Rundstedt and the Soviet South Front commanded by General Yakov Timofeyevich Cherevichenko.
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[edit] Prelude
After winning the Battle of Kiev in September 1941, the German Army Group South pushed down from the Dniepr to the Sea of Azov coast. Walther von Reichenau's 6th Army captured Kharkov. Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel's 17th Army marched through Poltava towards Voroshilovgrad. Erich von Manstein's 11th Army moved into the Crimea and had taken control of all of the peninsula by autumn (except Sevastopol, which held out until 3 July 1942).
Ewald von Kleist's 1st Panzer Army drove down from Kiev and encircled Soviet troops at Melitopol in October, then drove east along the shore of the Sea of Azov toward Rostov at the mouth of the Don river, the gateway to the Caucasus.
[edit] The battle
On 21 November the Germans took Rostov. However, the German lines were over-extended, and Kleist's warnings that his left flank was vulnerable and that his tanks were ineffective in the freezing weather were ignored. On 27 November the Soviet 37th Army, commanded by Lieutenant-General Anton Ivanovich Lopatin, counterattacked the 1st Panzer Army's spearhead from the north, forcing them to pull out of the city. Adolf Hitler countermanded the retreat. When von Rundstedt refused to obey, Hitler sacked him. However, retreat was unavoidable, and the 1st Panzer Army was forced back to the Mius River at Taganrog. It was the first significant German withdrawal of the war.
[edit] The Battle of Rostov in fiction
Stuart M. Kaminsky's character Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov fought in the Battle of Rostov as a young man. He took out a German tank with a grenade and a lucky burst of gunfire from a looted German machine pistol, but was badly wounded. A doctor saved his leg, but the leg was badly injured enough to give Rostnikov his trademark limp.
[edit] See also
- In the Battle of Rostov (1942), the German 17th Army captured the city.
- In the Battle of Rostov (1943), the Soviet Union recaptured the city.
