Stalingrad is considered one of the most important battles of the war. A great victory for the Soviets, a great defeat for the Germans and her allies, although of course it is a well known defeat, so hardly fits your criteria here. The victory at Stalingrad, in turn was significantly enabled by Operation Uranus, launched in late November of 1942, which was successful in bringing about a swift envelopment of the Axis forces, cutting them off and trapping them in the city for their eventual destruction. This too is well known as a critical Axis defeat. Operation Uranus, however, was paired with a second one, Operation Mars, launched further to the north in the region of Rzhev, which was something of the opposite, both as a Soviet loss, and as a forgotten one.
If you consult Soviet histories of the period, you would think this was a very minor operation. A small distraction, never launched with much hope of success, but simply intended to help tie up German forces elsewhere to ensure the success of Uranus. In Marshal Zhukov's memoirs, it merits barely a page of mention, and paints a fairly rosy picture of an operation which, while, "[failing] to cope with the task assigned by the Supreme Command — destroy the Rzhev salient — their vigorous actions prevented the German Command from rushing large reinforcements from this sector to Stalingrad." A moral victory in a minor defeat. It is also one which Zhukov took little responsibility for, portraying planning as last minute, with orders received from Stalin for the operation in only mid-November, allowing for only minimal preparation before operations were to launch, and of course further explaining the lack of success.
It is telling that even when Zhukov was being castigated by Stalin and pushed into exile, and later again pushed into premature retirement, while numerous of his alleged sins were dragged up, Operation Mars remained the above, a minor setback of no real consequence, and barely worth a mention within the Soviet sources, not used to blemish the name of the general who allegedly 'never lost a battle'.
More recent scholarship disagrees, however. While the utter dearth of Soviet analysis prevents a true, clear picture from forming, and perhaps always will, one thing is clear enough and agreed upon, namely that Mars was not planned with the intention of a minor sideshow where its own success was secondary to ensuring that or Uranus. At the very least, it is overwhelmingly agreed that planning for Mars had begun months earlier, at the very latest in the last week of September, and thus nearly concurrent with planning of Uranus. Some scholars, such as David M. Glantz, even go so far as to assert that Mars was intended to be the main offensive, and Uranus the secondary one. Writing in the mid-90s, Glantz makes a compelling argument for this view in Zhukov's Greatest Defeat but in the end suffers from the perils of being the first to write about a topic, and scholarship since then generally has reverted to seeing Mars as the complementary operation, but nevertheless not one launched with such lack of concern over its success by its planners.
While wrong in the full extent of the scope, Glantz's bombastic title is thus nevertheless reasonably correct. Along side his actions at Seelow Heights, Mars stands tall in exposing the worst of Zhukov's impulses as a commander, and while the Soviets did manage to cross the Oder there and claim victory even at great cost, Mars truly was a defeat of Zhukov's intentions. While secondary, and certainly intended to spread Axis forces thin, it was planned to be a full operation in its own right, and no one, least of all Zhukov, wanted anything less than victory. This is made clear enough in the parts of the story that he left out of his memoirs, not to mention the general Soviet histories of the war, where the initial lack of success resulted merely in sending good after bad. Met with heavier than expected resistance from the first days of the offensive, Glantz sums up where the repeated mantra of the operation:
Zhukov's decision, quickly assented to by Konev, was to renew the attack in all sectors with increased ferocity in the belief that, somewhere, German defenses would crack.
Given the topic of this thread, it isn't much of a surprise to say that that never happened. In Zhukov, the operation lays bare his greatest faults. Convinced of the quality of the planning, he was essentially unable to accept things could have gone so awry, and when met with such a wrench in the matter, more ended up being the answer, convinced that the breaking point was so close as to not require a different approach. Zhukov's numerous successes indicate that he quite readily possessed the flexibility necessary for such operational changes on the fly, but to do so required the wherewithal to see when they were needed, and his maniacal focus on breaking the Axis lines, as with Seelow Heights, simply did not allow it here.
There is, however, a deeper side to the story. Sadly for my namesake, it doesn't do all that much to salvage what his failure says about him as a commander - liable to become too focused on the objective - but it does provide some balm for the wounded pride, at least. As noted, Glantz goes a little too far in his estimation, but in large part due to a critical piece of information that only came to light too late for him. It was long known that the German intelligence apparatus had an agent, codenamed Max, feeding them information on Soviet planning, and as Glantz notes himself, a key factor in the overly strong resistance by the Axis forces, and Zhukov's frustration, was a report from Max with information pointing towards Soviet operations against Army Group Center in the region of Rzhev.
But much to Glantz's misfortune, at the same time he was bringing his own book to print Pavel Sudoplatov published his own work which included a small bombshell, namely that Max was a double agent being run by the Soviets, something Glantz couldn't know!. Far from successfully transmitting a top secret find to German intelligence about Soviet intentions, Max had told the Germans exactly what Stalin wanted them to know. With this information, it is very plain to see how Mars must be viewed as the complementary operation to Uranus. The plan for Operation Mars was leaked on purpose by Stalin to absolutely ensure that Germans would concentrate their forces to the north of the operational zone for Uranus and be unable to quickly reinforce against the attempt to isolate the 6th Army in Stalingrad. As such, not only was the unexpectedly stiff resistance Zhukov faced due to German foreknowledge, but it was a foreknowledge that Stalin himself worked to ensure.
There is some humor to Glantz's omission too, that we have with hindsight. Unaware of the information Sudoplatov was about to reveal, Glantz is nevertheless close to hitting on it himself. Noting skepticism about Max, Glantz points out the fact that Max's information was predicated on a claimed meeting by Stalin and a dozen of his top generals in early November, but it is a meeting which we have no record for, and at least two of those allegedly in attendance, Zhukov and Vasilevsky, absolutely could not have been there. As such, Glantz offers skepticism about Max, noting it is possible he mixed up the dates and meant a meeting from late October which fit the bill, but also that Max might have been quite unreliable and my mere coincidence provided a report that was "strikingly compatible with the actual Soviet strategic plan". Whether Max was in fact a double agent, as turned out, was unfortunately not contemplated.
So why did Zhukov continue to shovel in more men afterwards, to the point of several hundred thousand casualties (Krivosheev calculated 215,600 casualties, with 70,000 killed; Glantz estimates casualties were closer to 335,000, with over 100,000 killed) for what was intended only as a distraction? Just like Glantz, Zhukov himself didn't know what Stalin had done either! Stalin in pursuit of victory, did everything to guarantee success, and that included not even allowing his Deputy, and the commander of the operation, know what had happened, ensuring absolute verisimilitude, with a commander not knowing that he was, essentially, being sent to certain failure. As such, while it does show Zhukov at his most stubborn, it is easy to sympathize with his frustrations and inability to believe that the Germans could be so well prepared as to not be close to the breaking point. Had Stalin not tipped his hand intentionally, it almost certainly would have been the case... but of course it as with any counterfactual scenario, it is hard to know how successful Uranus might have been in turn.
At this point in time, despite disagreements on the specifics, Operation Mars is decently well known, even if it lacks the stature of its compatriot Uranus, let alone other operations like Barbarossa or Bagration, but this is only the result of research and scholarship since the 1990s, when the disappearance of Soviet secrecy allowed better archival research to shed light on the extent of the Soviet defeat, which up to that point had been essentially unknown in western scholarship, at best the proverbial footnote to Operation Uranus, and even within Soviet histories of the war a defeat best forgotten.
THE BATTLE OF GANGWANA, 1741
Background
In the early 1700s two brothers of the Rathore Clan of Rajputs, Abhai Singh and Bakht Singh, dominated Marwar, a kingdom in Rajasthan, India. The two brothers emerged victorious from a civil war in 1726 following their murder of their father, during which conflict they had employed Maratha soldiers against their opponents. These actions estranged them from the Mughal government, which was at the time embroiled in a conflict with the Marathas. Bakht Singh, the lord of Nagor, decided in 1739 to force concessions from Bikaner, and called for his brother, then Raja of Marwar and Jodhpur, to assist him, who himself had become rather arrogant and impulsive, ever since he had enjoyed limited military success against the former viceroy of Gujurat Sarbuland Khan. The Raja of Bikaner appealed to Jai Singh for assistance after the Marwar army besieged his capital, while other accounts claim that it was Bakht Singh himslef who petitioned the Raja of Jaipur, Jai Singh to champion the cause of Bikaner, in an attempt to gain an upper hand on his brother Abhay. Jai Singh sent a letter to Abhai requesting leniency for Bikaner, a request Abhai sharply refuted stating that since Bikaner was ruled by a subordinate clan of Rathores, it was a matter between the Rathore branches of the same family, one in which Jai Singh, a Kachwaha Rajput should not interfere. Jai Singh then threatened to invade Marwar unless hostilities were ended and declared war. He also received news, that Bakht Singh, had changed his tune and had raided into Jaipur territory, looting Jaipur territories, realising, that sighting his brother was nor worth the honour of his clan. Jai Singh hurried back to his realm from Agra, with his newly formed army of 30,000 men, 15,000 foot armed with muskets and the same number of cavalry as well as many cannons with plenty of ammunitions for all. He also raised a levee en masse in his kingom calling to arms his vassals, his clansmen and any Rajputs or Brahmin with a horse and sword. In total, roughly 100,000 men, including the Hadas, the Sisodias of Shahpura, the Jats, the Kichi Chauhans, the Jadavs of Karauli and three Muslim generals sent by the Mughal Emperor from Agra were now under his command. He marched this army towards Marwar from Ajmer. He also sent terms for a peace treaty between Jaipur and Marwar to Abhay Singh whose terms were as follows :
The state of Marwar would pay 1,00,000 Rupees in gold, 25,000 in Jewels and give 3 Elephants as Nazarana (Submission) to the Mughal Emperor.
Marwar would pay 20,00,000 Rupees to Jai Singh as war reparations.
The payment would be done in 4 days. Five barons and Raghunath Bhandari were to remain hostages for it. Merta will be handed over to Bhakt Singh.
Marwar would not obstruct Jai Singh in his possessions of the Ajmer subah.
No prince or baron of Marwar would be allowed to seek private audience with the Mughal emperor without Jai Singh's permission.
Marwar cannot keep foreign relations with the Marathas without the mediation of the Jaipur Raja.
Abhai Singh's Councillors must be men selected by the Jaipur court.
The peace treaty angered many of the Rathors, with the Rathor nobility claiming, "Our noses have been cut off by the Katchhawas."
In 1741, Abhai Singh began to gather his forces at Jodhpur in preparation for a war of revenge against Jaipur since he had to life the Siege of Bikaner because of the gathering of the Jaipur army at his borders. As the Jaipur army advanced, Bakht Singh arrived at Merta, the forward camp for the Rathor and Marwar army. He entered the Raja's durbar, where he was chastised by his fellow Rathores and his brother for betraying them. Bhakt accepted his wrongdoing, and promised to lead his personal cavalry contingent of a 1000 men, against the oncoming Jaipur.
The Battle
The Battle of Gangwana was a military engagement fought between the armies of the Kingdom of Marwar under Bhakt Singh Rathore, and a combined army of the Jaipur Kingdom and the Mughal Empire in 1741 under the overall command of Jai Singh Kachhwaha along with 3 Mughal Generals.
Jai Singh arrived at Kunchgaon, 11 miles to the east of the Pushkar Lake. He arrayed his guns, artillery pieces, in a long line facing the supposed direction of the arriving Marwar army. His army numbered anywhere between 40,000 to 100,000. The huge discrepancy between quoted numbers of total men present in the Jaipur army was because of the large number of camp followers such as tent keepers, water holders etc. that accompanied Mughal Armies of the period.
Bhakt Singh, had a mere 1000 Rathore horsemen. These men were as desperate as Bakht himslef, the pride of their clan and dynasty was on the line and they had nowhere to go, but towards the enemy. As they had done time and time before, the Rathores were prepared for a suicidal frontal charge in defense of said pride. Bhakt Singh counted on this. Since, no reinforcements would arrive for him. With a force of mere 1000, he surprised the Mughal-Jaipur army, by charging straight towards their camp.
Bhakt Singh manged to punch through the artillery, hacking and slashing the gunners as he went, him and his horsemen reached the centre of the camp and threw the horde of enemies into absolute chaos, cutting their way through the Jaipur-Mughal forces.
The cavalry penetration was so deep that the Rathors burst through the rear of the Jaipur army and began to raid the baggage train. Tents and supplies were burned, and Bakht Singh seized Sitaramji, Jai Singh's personal family idol. The Rathors galloped from one end to the other causing havoc in the large masses of confused men and horses, the Jaipur army fled in panic, and within 4 hours the Rathors held the field. Sir Jadunath Sarkar quotes that - "the battle front was like tigers upon a flock of sheep".
By now, Bhakt Singh had only 70 Rathore men on horses. At this point, Mughal rocket contingents, began firing at the this small contingent of Rathore cavalry. Bhakt Singh could not see any enemies on the field and the direction of the artillery was covered by smoke and dust, he signalled a retreat, forcing the withdraw of the remaining Rathors.
Jai Singh's army lost several thousands of its soldiers in the battle. According to Chahar Gulzar-i-Shujai of Harcharan Das, who was an eye-witness to the battle, 12,000 of Jai Singh's men were killed in the conflict, and another 12,000 were wounded.
Though modern estimates place the losses at 12,000 total
AFTERMATH :
The Maharana of Udaipur mediated a peace between Marwar and Jaipur later that year. Gangwana was the last battle fought by Jai Singh, as he could never recover from the shock he received from the outcome of the war and died two years later. The Rajput states had once again cemented their rivalry against one another, meaning in the coming years, no Rajput coalition would rise to defend Rajasthan against the Marathas. Jaipur's new model army was broken and Sawai Jai Singh II, one of the foremost princes of his age, could never recover mentally or materially from this defeat. The fate of Rajasthan, Jaipur and the Mughal Emperor, was worsened by this event.
Sources :
Secondary:
"A History of Jaipur: c. 1503-1938" and "Fall of the Mughal Empire Vol I" by Jadunath SarkarIn
Primary :
"Chahar Gulzar-i-Shujai" by Harcharan Das