Battle of Voronezh (1942)

The Battle of Voronezh was a battle of the Eastern Front of World War II, fought in and around the city of Voronezh on the Don in June and July 1942. The Axis forces were the German 4th Panzer Army commanded by General Hermann Hoth and the Hungarian 2nd Army commanded by Colonel-General Gusztav Jany . The Soviet forces were the Voronezh Front commanded by Lieutenant General Yevgeny Golikov .

After German victory in the Second Battle of Kharkov in May 1942 the plan for the summer campaign was to execute Operation Blue, a drive southeast from the Don to the Volga and into the Caucasus. Threatening the flanks of this drive was the concentration of Soviet troops at Voronezh. The German operation, codenamed Operation Fridericus II (after King Frederick II of Prussia), began on June 22 1942 — the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. The 4th Panzer Army drove east from Belogorod and Kursk, achieving an encirclement on July 2, but the number of prisoners was disappointing when compared to the battles of 1941 — the Red Army had learned not to reinforce failure.

Hoth, under strict instructions not to get bogged down in street-to-street fighting, captured Voronezh easily on 6 July, only to be subjected to a Soviet counter-attack. It took two days for infantry divisions to reach Voronezh to hold the line and free 4th Panzer to be sent to the Caucasus. Adolf Hitler later came to believe that these two days, when combined with other avoidable delays on the drive south, allowed Marshal Semyon Timoshenko to get defenders to Stalingrad before the 4th Panzer Army.