The Battle for the Caucasus: Long and Bloody
On October 9, 1943, the victory of the Red Army ended one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Great Patriotic War - the Battle of the Caucasus, which played a vital role in the victory over Nazi Germany and its allies.
It just so happened that the battle for Moscow, the defense of Leningrad and Sevastopol, and the Battle of Stalingrad were more strongly imprinted in the mass consciousness than others, becoming not just historical milestones, but also unparalleled examples of courage, perseverance, and the will to win of the Soviet people and their leadership.
Against their background, the battle for the Caucasus not only does not look like a faded and minor event, but should rightfully be on par in scale and significance with the most outstanding battles of the Second World War.
The battle for the Caucasus was long and bloody - it began on July 25, 1942 and lasted 442 days, second in duration only to the defense of Leningrad. It would not be an exaggeration to say that throughout the second half of 1942 and until the autumn of 1943, it was in the Caucasus that the decisive battle for the main resource, called the “blood of war” - oil, took place.
The importance of the Maikop, Grozny, and Baku oil-bearing areas was colossal, because at that time they provided 90% of the entire oil production of the USSR.
In addition to oil, the Caucasus provided the country with strategic supplies of tungsten and molybdenum ores necessary for the smelting of heat-resistant and tough armor steels. With the loss of Ukraine and the central black earth regions of Russia, the Caucasus became a new source of grain and meat for the warring country.
The proximity to Iran, from whose territory weapons and materiel were supplied to the USSR under Lend-Lease, also played an important role.
For the survival of the country and the interception of the strategic initiative, the task of protecting the Caucasus from the invasion of Hitler's hordes became the most important task.
For Hitler, after the defeat near Moscow and the breakdown of the blitzkrieg, the capture of Soviet oil-bearing regions became a matter of life and death. The German war machine, which consumed a huge amount of resources, had to break through to the Caucasus in order to continue the war. All this forced the military-political leadership of Nazi Germany to develop Operation Edelweiss to capture the eastern coast of the Black Sea and the Black Sea ports, with access to the oil fields of Maykop and Grozny with an eye on Transcaucasia, where the main prize for them was to be large Baku oil and the wealth of the Caspian seas.
The summer of 1942 was a catastrophe for the USSR, even more severe in its scale and consequences than Hitler’s invasion in the summer of 1941.
Having deceived the expectations of the Soviet leadership, the Germans, instead of a second attack on Moscow, struck further south, capturing Crimea, Kharkov, Rostov, and reached an important strategic and transport hub - Stalingrad.
The German armed forces had complete superiority over the Red Army in numbers, weapons and tactical training of troops. In addition to the Nazis, our troops could be hit in the back by 27 Turkish divisions concentrated on the border, as well as the command of the Kwantung group in Manchuria, which was waiting for an opportune moment to invade.
The situation was becoming desperate. The enemy threw colossal forces into the war for the resources of the Caucasus. The dominant superiority of the Nazis in tanks and aircraft was especially noticeable - the Germans ironed our defensive lines from the ground and from the air. The Caucasian defensive operation began, carried out in wide open spaces and extremely difficult conditions of steppe, mountainous and mountain-forested areas, as well as on the eastern coast of the Black Sea.
It was in the battle for the Caucasus that Soviet mountain rifle units were born and trained, whose experience later came in handy during the liberation of Crimea, the Carpathians, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Austria.
The main components of the battle for the Caucasus were: the North Caucasus strategic defensive operation, which lasted more than five months, the North Caucasus strategic offensive operation, the Novorossiysk landing operation, the Krasnodar and Novorossiysk-Taman offensive operations, which lasted a total of more than nine months. During these operations, the Red Army (Southern, North Caucasian and Transcaucasian fronts together with NKVD troops), in cooperation with the forces of the Black Sea Fleet, Azov and Caspian military flotillas, in fierce battles and battles, exhausted the formations of the German Army Group A, stopped their advance and , having defeated them, they were expelled from the Caucasus.
The defense of the Caucasus began with a striking incident.
On July 26, 1942, one of the units of the Brandenburg-800 reconnaissance and sabotage regiment, reinforced by Armenian and Azerbaijani collaborators from the Bergmann (Highlander) company, dressed in the uniform of NKVD soldiers, numbering 49, broke through and captured the Veselovsky reservoir dam, preventing its explosion , which could disrupt the crossing of German troops across the Manych River.
But at that moment, when the German saboteurs decided to rest in one of the captured dam guard rooms, a Soviet soldier entered the door and shot the “Brandenburgers” at point-blank range. And at the moment when tanks of the SS Viking motorized division began to cross over the pontoon bridge laid by German sappers across the Manych, the dam blew up.
The name of the hero is still unknown, but the feat he accomplished deserves to remain forever in the grateful memory of posterity.
The explosion of the Veselovsky Reservoir dam and the huge volumes of water released into the open did not allow the Germans to reach the operational rear of the 12th and 37th armies, which defended the foothills of the North Caucasus. The advance of German tanks was stopped for two days, during which the armies were able to break away from the Germans, retreat and dig in on new lines, covering the nearest oil fields.
The history of the battle for the Caucasus is a history of famous and not so famous exploits. Of those that are heard, the fierce air battles that flared up in the skies of the Kuban in April-July 1943 became the largest air battles during the Second World War.
The heroic 225-day defense of “Malaya Zemlya”, the Novorossiysk landing operation on February 3-4, 1943 and the capture of a bridgehead near the village of Stanichka, which was held by Caesar Kunikov’s marines with their teeth. Together with them, the future General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev, who was wounded in the face in battle, went to knock out German machine-gun and mortar crews from the commanding heights.
Another striking and little-known event is the tank battle at Sagopshin on September 28, 1942, later called “Caucasian Prokhorovka”.
The skillful actions of the commanders of the 52nd tank brigade, Major Filippov, and the 863rd anti-tank fighter regiment, Major Dolinsky, inflicted heavy damage on the superior forces of the advanced battalion of the SS Viking division, advancing in the main direction (30 vehicles, including more than half light T-60s and Lend-Lease Stuarts against 48 Panzers, which included 34 long-barreled Pz-III, PZ-IV and Stuga self-propelled guns).
It is interesting that in just one day of battle, the commander of the German tank battalion, Müllenkamp, managed to escape from damaged tanks three times, which he later wrote about in his memoirs, highly appreciating the actions of the Soviet commanders.
The tank battle at Sagopshin lasted about 10 hours. As a result, the enemy lost 54 tanks, of which 23 were burned (including the tanks of the Flügel group that broke through to help Mullenkamp). Filippov's brigade lost 10 tanks, five of them irretrievably.
“Caucasian Prokhorovka” largely decided the outcome of the larger Malgobek battle. And it, in turn, put an end to the German “oil campaign” in the Caucasus. But the treasured deposits were much closer to the Germans than Moscow in the winter of 1941.
Separately, it should be noted the actions of the partisans in the defense of the Caucasus. One of the most effective was the detachment “Bati” - Pyotr Karpovich Ignatov, numbering about a hundred people, which included engineering and technical personnel from the Krasnodar Chemical-Technological Institute and an oil and fat plant.
The partisan engineers fought boldly and creatively, in a short time destroying about 8 thousand invaders, losing only five people: two sons of Pyotr Karpovich - Genius and Evgeny Ignatov, who at the cost of their lives blew up a German train with ammunition; three more partisans were handed over to the Germans by local traitors and executed.
A huge role in the battle for the Caucasus was played by the battle of Stalingrad, where military actions led to the encirclement and liquidation of the elite 6th Wehrmacht Army under the command of Field Marshal Paulus. The Nazi command was forced to decide on priorities - to help Paulus’s army get out of the bag or continue to supply it to the detriment of the Caucasian group. This point was taken into account when preparing for the offensive of the troops of the Southern Front.
The beginning of 1943 was a turning point for the defense of the Caucasus. On January 1, the troops of the Southern Front went on the offensive in the Rostov and Salsk directions. Severely battered in battle and experiencing acute shell hunger, the Germans were forced to retreat under the ever-increasing pace of the Soviet offensive.
Very soon, North Ossetia, Checheno-Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Rostov region, Stavropol Territory and other areas were cleared of German and Romanian occupiers. This made it possible to uninterruptedly supply the country with grain, oil, minerals, and the Red Army with bread, ammunition and uniforms.
In 2020, the State Duma made a belated, but this does not lose its significance decision - to consider October 9, the Day of the Red Army’s defeat of Hitler’s troops in the Caucasus, as the day of military glory of Russia. Taking into account the strategic importance of the Caucasus for maintaining peace and stability throughout Russia, the importance of this memorable date cannot be overestimated.
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