Battle
Neither side was aware that the other was building up forces and planning to launch an offensive in the region. The Germans only realized that the Soviet action was a major offensive in the following days after the start of the attack by the 8th Army on August 27. This resulted in the 11th Army and the 8th Air Corps being reassigned to deal with a major Soviet offensive and abandon preparations for the offensive on Leningrad. Likewise the Soviet forces were unaware of the redeployment of the 11th Army to Leningrad and only expected to face ten divisions of the 18th Army. The redeployment of forces from the Crimea was not detected. This meant that the Soviet forces were launching an offensive when at a numerical disadvantage even before the battle started.
Read more about this topic: Sinyavino Offensive (1942)
Famous quotes containing the word battle:
“There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“No battle is worth fighting except the last one.”
—J. Enoch Powell (b. 1912)
“The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, change which suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)