Owing to the intervention of Eugène de Beauharnais and Józef Antoni Poniatowski, Davout managed to break through the Russian army's encirclement.
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American war correspondent Quentin Reynolds visited Vyazma shortly after the German retreat and gave an account of the destruction of the city in his book The Curtain Rises, in which he stated that its population was reduced from 60,000 to 716, with only three buildings remaining.
Vyazma |
Potential candidates are places of fierce battles: Oryol, Rzhev, Yelnya, Voronezh, Vyazma, and others.
The offensive was against the semi-circular Yelnya salient which the German 4th Army had extended 50 km south-east of Smolensk forming a staging area for a continued offensive towards Vyazma and eventually Moscow.