The well-known poem by Alexander Tvardovsky "I was killed near Rzhev" was written in memory of the Battle of Rzhev, one of the bloodiest episodes of the Great Patriotic War. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in 1942-1943 were left to lie in the "nameless swamps" of the Tver and Smolensk regions. The battle near Rzhev was called a "meat grinder" for a reason. According to modern estimates, the number of killed Red Army soldiers ranged from 600 thousand to 1 million people. Since the Soviet command had nothing to brag about, this battle was not mentioned in history books for many years. What facts later allowed the writer Viktor Astafyev to assert that in those battles the Russians “overwhelmed the enemy with corpses”?
Ate carrion
Stalin assigned the Red Army the task of dislodging the troops of the German Army Group Center from a well-equipped bridgehead in the immediate vicinity of the capital of the USSR. However, the operations were poorly planned. In addition to solving combat missions, Russian soldiers had to fight hunger and cold.
For example, during the Rzhev-Vyazemsk offensive operation in February 1942, to the west of Rzhev, General Shvetsov's grouping fell into the German encirclement. It was possible to break through to our own people with great difficulties. The nurse of the 449th medical-sanitary battalion Zakharova, who received those who had come out of the encirclement, recalled that almost all of them came with wounds and frostbite.
It was especially hard for the groups hiding in the forest. According to the political officer of one of the companies of the 1211th rifle regiment, Shiryaev, in order not to reveal their whereabouts, the fighters did not light the fire. The Red Army men had to gnaw the frozen meat of dead horses, seizing it with tree bark.
In March, the units of the 33rd Army, which still could not escape from the "cauldron", began to starve to death.
- The food consists of a small amount of boiled rye and horse meat. There is absolutely no salt, fat and sugar. On the night of March 15, two soldiers died of exhaustion, - the head of the special department of the NKVD of the Western Front reported to the center.
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As a result, the remnants of the encircled troops were destroyed by the enemy.
Death valleys
The fighting was so intense that often no one buried the dead soldiers. The so-called "valleys of death" in the vicinity of Rzhev, which became especially numerous during the Rzhev-Sychevsky offensive in the summer of 1942, were fields strewn with rotting bodies. Sometimes the soldiers had to literally crawl over the swollen corpses of their colleagues, teeming with worms.
"The explosion of the shell drives you under the corpses, the soil shudders, the corpses fall on you, showering with worms, a fountain of a pernicious stench hits your face," Pyotr Mikhnin, a participant in the battles, described in his memoirs the horror of what was happening.
Orders to advance were sounded even when the Red Army did not have enough ammunition and aircraft. Front-line writer Vyacheslav Kondratyev recalled that the infantrymen had to go forward without artillery support. Machine-gun bursts of the Germans mowed down entire companies of the Red Army. In addition, the defenders fired at the attackers with mortars and bombed them from aircraft. The links of the German bombers did not meet the resistance of the fighters.
It also happened that the Soviet artillery worked in vain, having incorrectly calculated the location of the enemy's firing points.
“There are three hundred meters left to the height, we have already covered more than half of the way!.. And then the German trenches give a voice. The destructive fire that is increasing with every minute deafens all attackers with a machine-gun flurry, "the offensive participant Boris Gorbachevsky told about his first battle on August 24 in the book" Rzhevskaya Meat Grinder ".
According to him, Russian soldiers helplessly shouted curses at their own command: “What have you done to us ?! Drive machine guns like cattle!"
Meanwhile, the commander Georgy Zhukov explained the failure of offensive operations near Rzhev solely by the fact that the Soviet command underestimated the complex relief of the territory. According to him, the Nazis took cover behind the reverse slopes of heights and in ravines, and it was difficult to attack them.
Destruction of Rzhev and death of the population
At the beginning of 1943, the Rzhev-Vyazemsky ledge was eliminated, but not during the battle. The Wehrmacht soldiers deliberately retreated to prepared positions, thus "cutting off" the front sector. It is known that Adolf Hitler personally listened on the phone to the sounds of the explosion of the bridge over the Volga in Rzhev. Contrary to the laments of the Goebbels department, the loss of the city did not become for the Germans "the loss of half of Berlin."
The Soviet troops who liberated Rzhev on March 3 after a 17-month occupation saw a "crater landscape" (an expression of the German general Horst Grossmann). The amount of damage caused to the city, the state commission subsequently estimated at 1.5 billion rubles. Almost all of the 20 thousand residents who did not manage to evacuate from Rzhev perished. Only 150 people survived.
Timur Sagdiev