Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle For Smolensk 10 July - 10 September 1941 Volume 2 Av Colonel David M. Glantz

At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorised infantry of German Army Group Centre's Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500km into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers. In doing so, they satisfied the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safety behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now believed shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. This groundbreaking new study exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival