The Year of Ruin
Part 1: The Great Offensive I, January 1 – January 11, 1945
Geography matters. This is a fundamental fact of strategy and warfare that is too often overlooked in the quest for decisive victory. If achieved, after all, a decisive battle tears away the trappings of geography to land a body-blow at the opponent’s polity, policy and politics. This quest for decisiveness was born out of the Napoleonic Wars and survived even the great changes in the battlefield wrought by the expanding size of armies and the pace of technological change. Humans can adapt to any situation in the pursuit of an ideal. By the First World War, ‘battlefield’ had become a misnomer as battle was no longer confined to one field, or two or even a dozen consecutive fields. Instead, battle became a theater-wide phenomenon, with armies grappling, as during the First World War, across the entire span of countries. With the expansion of the battlefield, geography came to matter even more than previously, when armies were but points on a plane. Now, armies
were the plane. The crushing weight of this truth bore in on Mussolini and his generals as they spent the last months of 1944 planning operations for the following year. They were going on the offensive.
They were going on the offensive, but the geography of the Soviet Union stifled their imagination. The geographer Halford Mackinder postulated that the Soviet Union, laying as it did across Eurasia, was the great pivot of geography and thus of history. The potency of this observation is never stronger than when honestly confronting the geography of the Soviet Union with an eye to invasion. Even with three million men the scale of the required effort boggled the mind and left it inadequate to deal with the challenge. The seven Italian armies available for invasion totaled half a million men. The challenge Mussolini faced was correspondingly greater. The Germans already in Ukraine and in the Caucasus provided yet another perhaps four hundred thousand men, but these were bound to be unreliable. Furthermore, Italy’s great strength lay in its sea power, an advantage of no use beyond the narrow littoral of the Black Sea. Italy’s options were legion, but all too similar for the variety to be meaningful. All dictated pushing into the infinite interior of the geographical pivot. The result was a campaign as tenuous as that of the previous year, if not more so, and infinitely more ambitious. Italy’s armed forces in the Balkans were split into to army groups: East and Anatolia. Army Group East comprised Bastico’s 1a Armata, Graziani’s 2a, Vercellino’s 5a, Pintor’s 7a and Guzzoni’s 8a, totaling some three hundred and sixty three thousand men. Army Group Anatolia comprised Amadeo Duca degli Abbruzi’s 9a Armata and Baistrocchi’s 11a Armata, totaling another one hundred fifty-five thousand men. Army Group East was sent in its entirety into the steppes of Ukraine. The order of the five armies in their final positions was to be, west to east, Guzzoni, Pintor, Graziani, Vercellino and finally Bastico.
Army Grop East redeploying for an offensive out of Ukraine.
The task for Army Group Anatolia was different. Amadeo Duca degli Abbruzi’s army was sent to the Caucasus. A small force of only two corps of three divisions each, the logistical system across Anatolia was sufficient to support them in active operations even with German formations already there. Baistrocchi’s army, three corps totaling ten divisions, had a different task, initially much more in like with Italian proclivities. The Soviet army had been hit hard the past two years, and its strength was about nine hundred brigades, compared to the combined Axis total of about thirteen hundred. Mussolini judged that it should be possible to overstretch the Soviets, so that they would be weak everywhere. Perhaps the Germans would even do something productive then. Baistrocchi’s mission was thus to, firstly, land in the Crimea.
Baistrocchi’s landing in Crimea.
With the fall of Sevastopol, thus guaranteeing a minor source of supply until overland routes were established, Baistrocchi’s army would dedicate minor assets to cleaning the peninsula and then moving east. They would cross the straits and move beyond Kazan. The oil refineries at Maikop would be threatened from the north, Rostov-na-Don from the south and Baistrocchi would kick up as big of a fuss as he possibly could. With ten divisions in a vast area entirely bereft of Soviet forces, Baistrocchi had the potential to cause a lot of trouble and be a significant distraction for the Soviets. If and once Soviet forces reached the area, Baistrocchi would fight. With an area the size of France to fight over, there would be more than enough opportunity for maneuver and, in the worst case, the route back to Sevastopol and evacuation would remain open. The first blood of the offensive was thus drawn in Crimea, as the one Soviet division on the peninsula was trapped and destroyed at the cost of five hundred Italian and German casualties.
By the 11th of January, Army Group East redeployments were nearly finished. The task of Guzzoni’s two corps in the far west was to pressure the incredible Soviet salient between Italian-German and German lines. A couple hundred kilometers to the east, Pintor’s army was located just south of the edge of the great German balcony, as it were, in northern Poland. Their job was to make Soviet redeployments out of southern Poland as difficult as possible. Pintor’s army was, in fact, in the best possible position not just to move on Kiev but to connect with the German eastern front and create a massive, undoubtedly porous, pocket of that entire area. Directly next to him, Graziani’s task was to provide flank protection to Pintor’s northern push, for his forces would be arrayed facing primarily north and west. Vercellino was placed next to Graziani and his mission was to support the great northward push. With the second-largest army in Army Group East, and with the only mobile corps, great achievements were anticipated of his force. Bastico, with the largest army, was deployed on and just west of the Dnepr. His three corps, twelve divisions, would be the main striking force. He was to push northward, toward Moscow.
The final deployments of the five armies in Ukraine.
Mussolini knew that his forces were but a small pittance against the exigencies of geography and the Soviet army, even in its weakened state. The entire Italian army comprised just over to hundred brigades, of which perhaps as many as fifty were in Spain and Africa. The available Italian forces were this probably only about a sixth as large as the entire Soviet army. The capacity for the Soviets to overwhelm the Italians while remaining committed to its main front with Germany, to the front in the Caucasus and in Finland was doubted, but Mussolini knew better than to underestimate his opponent. The Italian offensive was a gamble. Mussolini was going to defy armed forces six times greater than his own, and a vast geography beyond the understanding of those who had not yet waged war there.
