Red Army and the Rzhev-Viazma strategic operation ( January 8–April 20, 1942) However, Stalin’s wider ambitions of destroying Army Group Center failed in front of Moscow and farther out, as premature wide flanking operations petered out at Orel-Bolkhov in February and at Liuban by the end of April The Red Army had just 3,000 tanks left in January 1942, from a prewar stock of 23,000 Some 3,000 tanks were added from new production, but the great tank factories in Leningrad, Kharkov, and other western cities were cut off, overrun, or had to be relocated Hence, only 1,400 of the new tanks were T-34s or KV-1s, or other medium or heavy models Most new production was still of light tanks, for want of any armor at all Tens of thousands of guns were likewise lost, along with thousands of trucks and hundreds of thousands of horses needed to tow them to battle Over strong objections by Zhukov, Stalin and the Stavka nevertheless insisted in January and again in March on general offensives all along the Eastern Front, from Leningrad to the Crimea That led to major battles along the Volkhov River, at Demiansk, Viazma, Rzhev, Briansk, Orel, Kharkov, and on the Kerch peninsula The Demiansk offensive operation witnessed desperate fighting and more massive loss of life, this time by Soviet airborne and ski troops The entire Crimean peninsula was lost by July 4, 1942, after nine months of positional fighting that began when General Erich von Manstein cut off the Crimea during the Donbass-Rostov defensive operation (1941) There followed equally disastrous and almost as costly cumulative losses of men and war matériel in the Kerch defensive operation (1941), the ill-fated and conceived Kerch-Feodoriia operations (1942), and a seven-month long siege of Sebastopol (1941–1942) Those disparate fights led to tremendous Red Army casualties while attriting German combat formations at a much slower rate: the loss ratio in the first half of 1942 was seven Red Army soldiers to each German New infantry armies were raised and new types of armored formations and doctrine were tried, but operations were still being conducted mostly by untrained recruits Fresh divisions were thrown into breaches in the frontline as soon as they detrained, or worse, were cast away in overly ambitious counteroffensives that came to operational grief In either case the new units were quickly chewed up Also contributing to massive Soviet losses was continuing command ineptitude at the top, most notably by Stalin and some of his old favorites still on the Stavka It was that combination that forced the Red Army to undertake major operations in the south in 1942, which led to disaster in the Crimea at a cost of 240,000 men, and to another grand offensive failure in the Battle of Kharkov (1942), which cost from 170,000 to 214,000 men In the first three months of 1942 official Soviet losses reached 620,000 on all fronts; another 780,000 were gone by the end of June It was a grossly imbalanced attritional exchange: the Germans lost 144,000 and 52,000 men in the corresponding quarters of 1942 The major turning point for the Red Army was the German Operation BLAU, which led to the split-off Operation EDELWEISS into the Caucasus and the follow-on Battle of Stalingrad around that city on the Volga After the Germans blew a massive hole in the southern sector of the front and raced through it to the Volga, the Red Army held at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus Then it launched 902