The bodies of Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus' troops were still being buried under the watchful eyes of the Red Army when Adolf Hitler ordered a new Sixth Army to be constituted in March 1943. Since its reconstitution after the Stalingrad debacle, the Sixth Army had fought a campaign in southern Russia that had seen the Wehrmacht pushed out of the Ukraine and into Romania.
In the area of General Johannes Friessner's Army Group South Ukraine (the Sixth and Eighth German and Third and Fourth Romanian armies), the front remained relatively stable after April 1944. Although Soviet Marshal Rodion Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Front had entered Romania and taken a small portion of Moldavia in the northwest area of the country, supply demands for the northern operations had forced him to temporarily suspend his attack. However, now that the offensives against the other army groups had run their course, Josef Stalin and the Soviet high command (Stavka) again turned their attention to southeastern Europe.
Stavka devised a plan that had three main objectives. The first and most important was the destruction of German forces in Romania. Politically, the new offensive was designed to knock Romania out of the war, then Soviet troops would advance into Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, outflanking the Germans and, hopefully, forcing Hungary to sue for peace. Finally, there was the economic objective. The Ploesti oil fields had to be seized.
To accomplish these objectives the Soviets planned to use Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Front and Marshal Fyodor I. Tolbukhin's Third Ukrainian Front to strike in a pincer movement designed to isolate and destroy Army Group South Ukraine. Malinovsky's command consisted of seven armies and a mechanized cavalry group under General S.I. Gorshkov with a total of 537,856 men and 1,283 tanks and self-propelled (SP) guns. The Third Ukrainian Front had four armies and a mechanized cavalry group, commanded by General P. S. Pliev, totaling 348,633 men and 591 tanks and SP guns.
Germany's Army Group South Ukraine occupied a defensive line that bulged eastward, with its right flank (the Third Romanian Army) anchored on the Dniestr River and its left flank (the Eighth Army) nestled in good positions against the Carpathian Mountains. Friessner's two German and two Romanian armies had a total of 430,000 men, of which 220,000 were German. However, the army group was deficient in armor, having only 170 tanks and SP guns, of which about half were assigned to the 1st Romanian Tank Division.
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