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The 38th Red Banner Army was a field army of the Soviet Union that existed between 1941 and 1991. ==August 1941 to January 1942== The 38th Army was formed on 4 August 1941 after a large Soviet force had been surrounded by Axis forces in the area of Uman in the western Ukraine. Under the command of Lieutenant-General Dmitrii Riabyshev, 38th Army was based on the forces and headquarters of the 8th Mechanised Corps and incorporated other Soviet units then in the Cherkassy area. The army was subordinated to the Soviet Southwestern Front command, and Riabyshev's task was to defend the line of the Dnepr upriver from Kremenchuk, a task that became more urgent after the Soviet forces at Uman surrendered on 12 August and German forces began to close up to the Dnepr. On 30 August Riabyshev was assigned to command Soviet forces further south and Major-General Nikolai Feklenko was appointed to the command of 38th Army. By then 38th Army (based on seven rifle divisions, four cavalry divisions and two tank battalions) had been made responsible for an additional stretch of the Dnepr southeast of Kremenchuk to the river's confluence with the Vorskla. It was along this section of the Dnepr that the German Seventeenth Army forced a crossing on 31 August. German high command intended to develop this crossing into a bridgehead that would form the southern arm of an encirclement of much of Southwestern Front east of the Dnepr. (The northern arm of this encirclement had already crossed the river Desna 200 kilometres northeast of Kiev). Feklenko was ordered to eliminate Seventeenth Army's bridgehead as soon as possible, but he was unable to do so. German reinforcements were fed into the lodgement including panzer divisions from the German First Panzer Group, and the Germans were able to enlarge their bridgehead. On 12 September German armoured forces broke through 38th Army's lines and struck north, first to Lubny and then to Lokhavytsa where, on 16 September, they made contact with German armoured forces moving south from Romny. Most of Southwestern Front, including much of 38th Army, was caught in the trap, and few of the encircled Soviet forces escaped. Major-General Vladimir Tsiganov was appointed to replace Feklenko (Tsiganov's chief of staff was Major-General Aleksei Maslov), but there was little that Tsiganov could do, despite the Soviet reserves being rushed to the eastern Ukraine, to prevent the remnants of his army being pushed back towards Poltava. By the beginning of October 38 Army included six rifle divisions and tank division, but during October, under constant pressure from the German Sixth Army, it was forced to withdraw to the east on the Poltava - Kharkov axis towards the Donets. Since the German mechanised forces in the region had been directed towards Moscow and Rostov, 38th Army easily avoided encirclement by the slow-moving infantry divisions of Sixth Army. Tsiganov’s forces abandoned Kharkov on 24 October, and by early November the frontline had begun to stabilise east of the Donets in the Kupyansk area. In December, with Tsiganov's departure from 38th Army, Maslov was appointed to the Army's command and Lieutenant-Colonel Semyon Ivanov became the army's chief of staff. At the beginning of 1942 Maslov's forces, based on just five rifle divisions, were required to participate in a general offensive by Soviet forces in the Ukraine to retake Kursk, Kharkov and the Donbas region. On 5 January the right flank of 38th Army attacked the German Sixth Army's positions northeast of Kharkov in an attempt to advance on Belgorod, but Maslov had failed to disguise his intentions and the German defences were well prepared. By the second week of January Southwestern Front's offensives north of Kharkov, including that of 38th Army, had ground to a halt. However, a complementary offensive further south had been more effective and Soviet forces had made a deep penetration into the German lines south of Kharkov. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「38th Army (Soviet Union)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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