Battle of Smolensk (1941)

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First Battle of Smolensk

Part of The Eastern Front of World War II

The eastern front at the time of the Battle of Smolensk.

Date	10 July 1941 – 10 September 1943
Location	Smolensk region, USSR
Result	Soviet retreat

Combatants

Axis

Soviet Union

Commanders

Strength

Casualties

~250,000^{[citation needed]}

Eastern Front
Barbarossa – Baltic Sea – 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 – Brody – Smolensk – Uman – 1st Kiev – Yelnya – Odessa – Leningrad – 1st Kharkov – 1st Crimea – 1st Rostov

The Battle of Smolensk (July 10-September 10, 1941) refers to the fierce engagement of the German Army Group Centre with the Soviet Army at Smolensk on the Eastern Front of World War II. The Soviets referred to this conflict as the Great Patriotic War.

German armoured divisions of Army Group Centre began an offensive on July 10 to encircle Soviet forces in the Smolensk area. The offensive was met by the forces of the Western Front (Timoshenko), Reserve Front (Zhukov), Central Front (Kuznetsov), and Bryansk Front (Yeremenko). Ultimately the 16th Soviet Army and the 20th Soviet Army were encircled just to the south of Smolensk.

Smolensk fell on July 16, but Soviet resistance was strong, and several counter-attacks were conducted, the most noteworthy of these was the Yelnya Offensive, which was the most substantial reverse that the Wehrmacht had suffered up to that date and the first successful planned Soviet offensive operation in the Soviet-German war.

The Soviets even managed to temporarily break the German encirclement and to evacuate troops out of the Smolensk pocket. The bitter fighting had considerably delayed the overall German advance toward Moscow, so that defence lines further East could be strengthened, and thus effectively disrupted the German offensive.

According to German military, the Soviet losses during the Battle of Smolensk were about 250,000 personnel. Nearly all of the city of Smolensk was destroyed during the battle. In 1985 it was awarded the title Hero City.