The stated aim of this combined operation was to end the war in forty-eight hours. It was planned in conjunction with the French High Command, who were simultaneously embarking on a massive attack (the Nivelle Offensive) about eighty kilometres to the south. The Arras offensive was conceived as part of a plan to bring about this result. In essence, the Allied objective from early 1915 was to break through the German defences into the open ground beyond and engage the numerically inferior German army in a war of movement. For much of the war, the opposing armies on the Western Front were at a stalemate, with a continuous line of trenches stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. From 9 April to 16 May, 1917, British, Canadian, and Australian troops attacked German trenches near the French city of Arras on the Western Front.
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The Battle of Arras was a British offensive during World War I. In the course of the operation the Red Army also definitively drove back German forces from the Smolensk land bridge, historically the most important approach for a western attack on Moscow.
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It has been estimated that as many as fifty-five German divisions were committed to counter the Smolensk Operation - divisions which would have been critical to prevent Soviet troops from crossing the Dnieper in the south. Although playing a major military role in its own right, the Smolensk Operation was also important for its effect on the Battle of the Dnieper. However, the overall advance was quite modest and slow in the face of heavy German resistance, and the operation was therefore accomplished in three stages: August 7–20, August 21–September 6, and September 7–October 2. As a result of this operation the Red Army was able to start planning for the liberation of Belorussia. Despite an impressive German defense, the Red Army was able to stage several breakthroughs, liberating several major cities including Smolensk and Roslavl. Smolensk had been under German occupation since the first Battle of Smolensk in 1941. Its goal was to clear the Nazi Germany presence from the Smolensk and Bryansk regions. Staged almost simultaneously with the Battle of the Dnieper (13 August – 22 September), the offensive lasted two months and was led by Generals Andrei Yeremenko commanding the Kalinin Front and Vasily Sokolovsky commanding the Western Front. The second Battle of Smolensk (7 August 1943 – 2 October 1943) was a Soviet strategic offensive operation conducted by the Red Army as part of the Summer-Autumn Campaign of 1943 in the Western USSR. In Soviet military history the Battle of Moscow is considered the first successful Red Army strategic offensive that, despite heavy casualties, achieved a real and symbolic relief of the threat to the Soviet capital city.
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Subsequently, as the German offensives were halted, a Soviet strategic counter-offensive and smaller-scale offensive operations were executed to force German armies back to the positions around the cities of Orel, Vyazma and Vitebsk, and nearly surrounding three German armies in the process. Initially, the Soviet forces conducted a strategic defence of the Moscow Oblast by constructing three defensive belts, and deploying newly raised reserve armies as well as bringing troops from the Siberian and Far Eastern military districts.
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A separate operational German plan, codenamed Operation Wotan, was included in the final phase of the German offensive. The Nazi strategic offensive named Operation Typhoon was planned to conduct two pincer offensives, one to the north of Moscow against the Kalinin Front by the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups, simultaneously severing the Moscow - Leningrad railway, and another to the south of Moscow Oblast against the Western Front, south of Tula by the 2nd Panzer Army, while the 4th Army advanced directly towards Moscow from the west. It that took place between October 1941 and January 1942 to counter Hitler's strategy that considered Moscow, capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the largest Soviet city, to be the primary military and political objective for Axis forces in their invasion of the Soviet Union. The Battle of Moscow ( Russian: Битва под Москвой, Romanized: Bitva pod Moskvoy, German: Schlacht um Moskau) is the name given by the Soviet historians to the two periods of strategically significant fighting on a 600km sector of the Eastern Front during World War II. File:Soviet Offensive Moscow December 1941.jpg