Second Battle of Kharkov

Second Battle of Kharkov
Part of the Eastern Front of World War II
Operations in eastern Ukraine from 12 May to 15 June 1942
Date 12–28 May 1942 (2 weeks and 2 days) Location Izium/ Barvenkovo area, Kharkov Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union Result Axis victory
Belligerents
Germany  Romania  Hungary  Italy  Slovakia  Croatia	Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Fedor von Bock Ewald von Kleist	Semyon Timoshenko Ivan Bagramyan
Strength
350,000 men 447 tanks[1] 40 assault guns[2] 27 tank destroyers[1] 591 aircraft[3]	12 May: 765,300 men[4] 1,176 tanks 300 self-propelled guns[5] 1,154 guns and howitzers[6] 1,700 mortars[6] 926 aircraft[7]
Casualties and losses
~20,000–30,000 men[8][9][10][3] 108 tanks destroyed[3] 49 aircraft destroyed[11] 12 airmen killed[11] 98 airmen missing[11]	277,190 men 170,958 killed, missing or captured 106,232 wounded[4][9] 1,250 tanks destroyed[9] 1,648–2,086 guns and howitzers lost[3] 3,278 mortars lost[3] 542 aircraft destroyed[12] 57,000 horses[3]

The Second Battle of Kharkov or Operation Fredericus was an Axis counter-offensive in the region around Kharkov against the Red Army Izium bridgehead offensive conducted 12–28 May 1942, on the Eastern Front during World War II. Its objective was to eliminate the Izium bridgehead over Seversky Donets or the "Barvenkovo bulge" (Russian: Барвенковский выступ, romanized: Barvenkovsky vystup) which was one of the Soviet offensive's staging areas. After a winter counter-offensive that drove German troops away from Moscow but depleted the Red Army's reserves, the Kharkov offensive was a new Soviet attempt to expand upon their strategic initiative, although it failed to secure a significant element of surprise.

On 12 May 1942, Soviet forces under the command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko launched an offensive against the German 6th Army from a salient established during the winter counter-offensive. After a promising start, the offensive was stopped on 15 May by massive airstrikes. Critical Soviet errors by several staff officers and by Joseph Stalin, who failed to accurately estimate the 6th Army's potential and overestimated their own newly raised forces, facilitated a German pincer attack on 17 May which cut off three Soviet field armies from the rest of the front by 22 May. Hemmed into a narrow area, the 250,000-strong Soviet force inside the pocket was exterminated from all sides by German armored, artillery and machine gun firepower as well as 7,700 tonnes of air-dropped bombs. After six days of encirclement, Soviet resistance ended, with the remaining troops being killed or surrendering.

The battle was an overwhelming German victory, with 280,000 Soviet casualties compared to just 20,000 for the Germans and their allies. The German Army Group South pressed its advantage, encircling the Soviet 28th Army on 13 June in Operation Wilhelm and pushing back the 38th and 9th Armies on 22 June in Operation Fridericus II as preliminary operations to Case Blue, which was launched on 28 June as the main German offensive on the Eastern Front in 1942.