Red God of War: The Soviet Operation Mars, 1942

By the winter of 1942, the Red Army of Workers and Peasants had contained the German attacks of the previous summer and fall. Now came the time for a whole series of counter-offensive of its own, designed to cut off and destroy the weakened Nazi armies. The northernmost of these would be Operation "Mars", aimed at the German Ninth Army around the city of Rzhev, west of Moscow in the winter of 1942. The Soviet plan, the work of the brilliant Marshal Georgi Zhukov, called for smashing the already