1943 The Battles of Rzhev (Russian: Ржевская битва, romanized: Rzhevskaya bitva) were a series of Red Army offensives against the Wehrmacht between 8 January 1942 and 31 March 1943, on the Eastern Front of World War II.

Due to the high losses suffered by the Red Army, the campaign became known by veterans and historians as the "Rzhev Meat Grinder" (Russian: Ржевская мясорубка, romanized: Rzhevskaya myasorubka).

It was strategically important for the German Army Group Centre due to the threat it posed to Moscow, and was therefore heavily fortified and strongly defended.

Initial Soviet forces committed by the Kalinin and Western Front included the 22nd, 29th, 30th, 31st, 39th of the former, and the 1st Shock, 5th, 10th, 16th, 20th, 33rd, 43rd, 49th, and 50th armies and three cavalry corps for the latter.

However, due to the nature of the terrain the supply route for the Soviet 22nd, 29th, and 39th Armies, which had attempted to enlarge the penetration, became difficult and they were encircled.

On 2 July 1942, the Ninth Army under General Walter Model launched Operation Seydlitz to clear the Soviet forces out.

The Germans first blocked the natural breakout route through the Obsha valley and then split the Soviet forces into two isolated pockets.

Its abandonment freed up 22 of those divisions and created a strategic reserve which allowed the Germans to stabilize the front and somewhat recover from massive losses at Stalingrad.

[8] The retreat of the Germans in Operation Büffel was tactically and militarily successful, but the abandonment of the "Rzhev–Vyazma pistol" was a strategic loss for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front.

[4] The Soviet losses during the beginning period of 1942 (including "Operation Jupiter") were 272,320 irrecoverable and 504,569 sanitary; with 25.7% of the total manpower that participated in these battles being killed on the battlefield.

[13] Russian historian Svetlana Gerasimova states that the official Soviet casualty count of 1,324,823 men for the four offensive operations against the Rzhev-Vyazma salient only accounts for approximately 8 out of the 15 months of fighting.

[18][19] However, according to Gerasimova, German casualties in the battle for Rzhev–Vyazma are uncertain, and the commonly cited 350,000–400,000 range lacks substantiation and references to documentary sources.

During this time, the USSR's Army commanders began to concentrate their main forces at the critical zones to strengthen their position in these areas, or to muster enough power for their assaults.

Of course, in this period, many Soviet units still had inadequate strength and equipment, but with the more plentiful reserve force, they managed to somewhat maintain stable fighting capability and prevent the severe fluctuation in manpower.

[27] As the second highest ranking member of the Stavka, Marshal Georgy Zhukov was one of the first Soviet military officers to admit and to make a strict self-criticism about the Red Army and also his own faults in this period: Today, after reflecting the events of 1942, I see that I had many shortcomings in evaluating the situation at Vyazma.

The "walnut" there was much stronger than what we predicted.The Soviet Army suffered terribly from severe deficits in weapons and equipment due to the tremendous losses during the German onslaught in 1941.

[28][failed verification] The serious lack of ammunition hampered Soviet efforts in neutralizing German strongpoints, leading to heavy casualties in the assaults.

All the above facts meant that the Red Army in the Rzhev area did not have adequate preparation in terms of equipment, weapons and logistics.

The worst mistakes of the Red Army in 1942 at the Rzhev salients lies in the coordination and cooperation between its Fronts and the control of Stavka towards them.

To make matters worse, on 19 January 1942 Stalin suddenly retook the 1st Shock Army from the Western Front with a "very nonsense" reason.

In every offensive, the aims and scale have to be correlative with the army's strength, but at the battles of Rzhev, the Soviet commanders demanded too much from their subordinates.

[32] The escape of 33rd and 41st Army was conducted on time, but they failed to keep it secret and chose the wrong direction to move, leading to considerable casualties.

Rather than stabilize the front and create defensive positions, the Germans pushed their forces forward and left them poorly prepared for the Soviet winter counteroffensive.

After the front stabilized, the German Army tied down enormous amounts of manpower in holding salients from which they did not intend to exploit.

In 2009, a television movie was aired in Russia entitled Rzhev: Marshal Zhukov's Unknown Battle, which made no attempt to cover up the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces.

The journalist Alina Makeyeva, in an article of Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper which was published on 19 February 2009, wrote: "The number presented by the historian is too low.

Journalist Elena Tokaryeva in her article which was published in the newspaper The Violin (Russia) on 26 February 2009 also claimed that more than 1,000,000 Soviet soldiers were killed at Rzhev.

Zhukov said he preferred an operation on the Western axis where the conditions were most favourable, and was supported by Voznesenskii who said that supplies for simultaneous offensives on all fronts would not be available.

After the meeting Zhukov was told by Shaposhnikov that directives had already gone out to front commanders some time ago, and that Stalin wanted to ginger up (podtolknut) the soldiers.

The statue was designed by sculptor Andrei Korobtsov and architect Konstantin Fomin and is 25 metres high on a 10-metre mount, surrounded by a war memorial.