"Throughout the summer of 1944, the men of General der Artillerie Maximilian Fretter-Pico's German Sixth Army were literally fighting for their very existence. The Red Army, pushing ever westward, was nearing the zenith of its strength. Although German soldiers were killing Russian soldiers at a rate of 4.5 to 1, conscripts from newly liberated Soviet territory made good the losses.
Tough, confident generals had long since replaced the inefficient Red Army commanders responsible for the disasters of 1941 and 1942. The commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Marshal Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, was one such general. Born near Odessa in 1898, he joined the Czarist army at age 15 and was wounded in World War I. In 1919, he became a machine-gun instructor in the Red Army.
Malinovsky made his way through the ranks, and by 1942 he was commander of the 66th Army at Stalingrad. In early 1943, he commanded the South Front, followed by command of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, with which he liberated the western Ukraine. By mid-September 1944, Malinovsky found himself in command of the powerful 2nd Ukrainian Front, consisting of four infantry armies (27th, 53rd, 40th and 7th Guards), the First and Fourth Romanian armies, the 6th Guards Tank Army and two combined mechanized cavalry groups commanded by Generals S.I. Gorshkov and I.A. Pliyev. The front also included the independent XVIII Tank Corps. In all, Malinovsky had 42 Soviet rifle divisions, 22 Romanian divisions, 750 tanks and assault guns, and 1,100 aircraft at his disposal…"
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