April 2020 Lecture: Pyrrhic Victory - Third Battle of Kharkov 1943

The Red Army’s stunning February 1943 destruction of the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army in the cauldron of Stalingrad ignited Soviet morale across the eastern front. Stalin was flushed with the news, insisting that commanders exploit this momentum to push the hated enemy beyond Russian territory. For German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, these conditions presented an unprecedented strategic and operational crisis.

In the winter of 1943 Manstein faced a complex military position, having been left with minimal forces to counter the moves of vastly superior numbers threatening to entrap all German armies in southern Russia. Worse, Manstein had to manage Hitler’s obstinate ‘don’t surrender ground’ battle directive, diametrically opposed to his own mobile defence-to-offence approach which he considered essential for the survival of his army.

The Third Battle of Kharkov has been studied in military academies ever since as a case study in how victory can be achieved by astute and calm generalship, use of combined arms, and the application of what Clausewitz identified as the massing of forces at the enemy’s ‘centre of gravity’. Ultimately, however, it failed to halt the Soviet sweep to Berlin.

Robert Muscat is President of the Military History Society of New South Wales and a former rifleman in the Australian Army Reserve. He holds two masters degrees in education and is currently a secondary school principal in NSW. His last lecture was about Normandy's Operation Cobra.

PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF LECTURE TIME AND ROOM:

Saturday, 4 April 2020, 10:00AM – 11:00AM, Level 3, City of Sydney RSL, 565 George Street, Sydney CBD. Admission is free of charge but a donation would be appreciated. For further information call 0419 698 783 or email: president@militaryhistorynsw.com.au

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