The Battle for the Caucasus, 1942–1943

By Anthony Tucker-Jones

In late 1942 Hitler's forces advanced far into the Caucasus in the southern Soviet Union in one of the most ambitious offensives of the Second World War, but this extraordinary episode is often forgotten-it is overshadowed by the disastrous German attack on Stalingrad which took place at the same time. Using over 150 wartime photographs Anthony Tucker-Jones gives the reader a graphic, concise introduction to this remarkable but neglected campaign on the Eastern Front.Operation Edelweiss was designed to seize the oil fields of Maikop, Baku and Grozny. Seen by some as a wholly unnecessary diversion of resources from the critical confrontation at Stalingrad, the assault on the Caucasus aimed to secure oil supplies for the Germans and deny them to the Soviets.As this memorable selection of photographs shows, the Werhmacht came close to success. Their forces advanced almost as far as Grozny, famously raising the Nazi flag over Mount Elbrus, the highest peak in the region, before they were compelled into a hurried withdrawal by the rapid deterioration of the German position elsewhere on the Eastern Front.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781473894945

Anthony Tucker-Jones

Anthony Tucker-Jones, a former intelligence officer, is a highly prolific writer and military historian with well over 50 books to his name. His work has also been published in an array of magazines and online. He regularly appears on television and radio commenting on current and historical military matters.

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Chapter One

Stalin’s Lifeblood

At the time of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, the sleepy oil-rich Caucasus region was producing 80 per cent of Stalin’s oil supplies. Not only was the area a rich source of oil but also manganese, coal and peat. The western Kuban area was very fertile, producing abundant harvests of crops such as corn and wheat. South of the Caucasus mountains, the Transcaucasus incorporated the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Stalin was a native Georgian so had a close personal interest in the fate of both the Caucasus and Transcaucasus.

When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union the Caucasus had little love for Soviet rule. The North Caucasus, along with the lower and middle Volga, was one of the most important food producing regions in the country. Together they were designated as the main grain growing area. The administrative capital was Rostov-on-Don. The Krasnodar area with a number of other areas that later became autonomous republics (North Ossetia, Chechen-Ingush Republic and the Kabardin-Balkar Republic) also formed part of the larger administrative territory run by the North Caucasian Communist Party committee in Rostov.

The North Caucasus suffered like many regions as a result of Stalin’s forced collectivization of peasants’ land to form large state-owned farms known as kolkhozy. The state took almost everything, leaving the peasants to starve. Procurement quotas were enforced. Inevitably this resulted in widespread famine in the region and the neighbouring Ukraine.

In the early 1930s the situation was so bad that Stalin sent a special commission to the North Caucasus and a state of emergency was declared. Those who opposed collectivization were deemed to be counter revolutionaries and dealt as such. The Soviet writer A.B. Kosterin visited the area in the mid-1930s and was dismayed by what he found:

I had occasion to go through dozens of villages in Stavropol, on the Don, Kuban and Terek, and in Saratov, Orenburg, and Kalinin oblasti … Houses with boarded-up windows, empty barnyards, abandoned equipment in fields. And terrifying mortality, especially among children