The Third Crushing Blow: Odesa and Crimea offensives

In 1944, the Red Army delivers its third crushing blow on the Axis forces in eastern Europe: two major offensives to recapture the rest of Ukraine, and the Crimean peninsula. 

Map 1: Northern Black Sea coast and southern Ukraine 

The range where the two mighty blows were delivered. Ploesti, Romania is to the far left of the map, just north of Bucharest.

 

Map 2: 

 

Map by Scott Bury

 

Map 3: The Red Army’s Crimean offensive, 1944

 

Image 1: Issa Pliyev, Commander, Cavalry-Mechanized Group

 

 

The Red Army, 4th Guards Cavalry Corps advancing across southern Ukraine, 1944

 

Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary, with Adolf Hitler in Budapest, 1938

 

 

The Red Army marches into “liberated” Odesa, 1944

 

Note the women soldiers in the ranks. 

Sources:

Prit Buttar, The Reckoning: The Defeat of Army Group South, 1944. Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2020.

Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK, The History Press, 2017. 

Wikipedia: The Crimean Offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_offensive

— The Odesa Offensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa_Offensive