Rokossovsky, Marshal Konstantin

Rokossovsky, Marshal Konstantin (1896–1968),Red Army officer whose earlier career progressed rapidly, but, promoted to corps commander in 1936, he was one still in June 1941. For an indeterminate period before his release in early 1940, he had been imprisoned as a suspect in Stalin's purge of the armed forces. In July 1941, after the first wave of defeats in the German–Soviet war, he received an army command under Zhukov, who had once been his subordinate but now outranked him by two grades. His chance came in September 1942 when Zhukov persuaded Stalin to entrust him with Don front (army group) in the crucial sector between the Volga and Don rivers north of Stalingrad.

In January 1943 he conducted the terminal operation against the Stalingrad pocket and received the German surrender. He then shifted his staff and one army by rail to the Kursk sector, where, reinforced and renamed Central front, they arrived at the end of winter and held the north face of the Kursk salient until after the battle in July. In August, Rokossovsky drove towards the River Dnieper, which he reached and crossed on a broad front in November, having in the meantime combined Central and Briansk fronts to form Belorussian front.

Since the main effort was in the Ukraine during the winter and spring of 1944, Rokossovsky's mission was to keep pace with the advance there by stretching his line westwards through the Pripet marshes. Consequently the Belorussian, later renamed First Belorussian front occupied the entire southern half of the bulge in which German Army Group Centre was destroyed in July and thereafter straddled the most direct route to Berlin. After Rokossovsky reached the River Vistula north and south of Warsaw in September, Stalin advanced him to Marshal of the Soviet Union; but (possibly because, among other reasons, he did not want a marshal with a slightly blemished past as the conqueror of Berlin) turned First Belorussian front over to Zhukov and shifted Rokossovsky to Second Belorussian front.

In January 1945, advancing across Poland on Zhukov's right, Rokossovsky reached the mouth of the Vistula. For the next two months, on Stalin's orders, he and Zhukov occupied themselves with desultory operations in West Prussia and Pomerania. He redeployed to the lower River Oder in April, helped Zhukov get around Berlin, and made contact with the Americans at Wismar, 200 km. (124 mi.) west of the Oder, on 2 May.

Earl Ziemke