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World War 2:
German Withdrawals 1943 - 1944
Soviet Summer and Fall Offensives: August
- November 1943
Offensives on the Outer Flanks
Western Ukraine and the Crimea: March - May 1944
Soviet Summer and Fall Offensives: August - November
1943
As the Russian campaign entered its third year, the
world watched expectantly for the answers to two questions. Could the
Germans recover from the effects of the winter battles for a second
time and make another bid for victory? If not, could the Russians take
the initiative without their old ally, "General Winter"? Citadel
answered the first question, and the Soviet Army's subsequent performance
erased the last lingering doubts inherent in the second.
After two years of war the Soviet Army was about to
prove that it had completed its apprenticeship. It had developed tactics
suited to largescale offensive operations and had adapted them to its
own limitations, which consisted primarily of a lack of initiative in
the ranks and a frequent inability on the part of commanders and staffs
below army levels to execute tactical maneuvers requiring precision
or sensitivity to changing situations. The German blitzkrieg technique
had delivered the decisive stroke with precision, speed, and economy
of effort. The Russians, on the other hand, favored a broader lateral
scope and more conservative execution. They adopted the breakthrough
and penetration as basic tactical maneuvers, but they preferred to achieve
the decisive effect by a series of relatively shallow strokes along
the breadth of the front rather than by one or several deep thrusts.
Although the Russians claimed that Stalingrad had supplanted Cannae
as the classic encirclement battle, they did not employ the double envelopment
as frequently as the Germans had. More often they were content with
a single thrust or with parallel thrusts, the objective being to force
their opponent back on a broad front rather than to achieve a deep penetration
along a single line of advance.
On the morning of Aug. 3, 1943, in the sector from which
the Fourth Panzer Army had launched the southern arm of the attack toward
Kursk, the massed artillery of the Soviet Sixth Guards Army laid down
a barrage of several hours' duration on the German 167th Infantry Division.
When the artillery lifted its fire, 200 tanks roared into the German
line, followed by waves of close-packed infantry. Before nightfall the
German division was reduced to a few dazed survivors. Pouring through
the gap, the Russians reached and took Belgorod on August 5. In another
three days they had opened a 35-mile-wide gap on the right flank of
the Fourth Panzer Army, giving them a clear road to the Dnieper River
100 miles to the southwest. On the same day, Manstein, the commanding
general of Army Group South, informed Hitler that he lacked enough divisions
to close the northern flank or to hold the long line on the Donets below
Kharkov. He would either have to yield the Donets Basin or receive 20
divisions from somewhere else.
As he had on other occasions when confronted with unpleasant
choices, Hitler avoided the decision by moving in an altogether different
direction. He suddenly revived the idea of an East Wall, which he had
rejected earlier. On August 12, he ordered construction started on a
fortified line that was to begin in the south at Melitopol, run due
north to the Dnieper River near Zaporozhe, follow the Dnieper to Kiev
and the Desna to Chernigov, thence take a line almost due north to the
southern tip of Lake Pskov, and, running along the west shores of Lakes
Peipus and Pskov, anchor on the Gulf of Finland at Narva. While it appeared
that in ordering the East Wall Hitler had accepted a general retreat
on the eastern front as inevitable, subsequent decisions revealed that
he actually intended to establish a barrier behind which the armies
could not retreat and, since no work of any kind had as yet been done
on the so-called East Wall, give himself an excuse for holding out farther
east.
In the last two weeks of August, the Soviet High Command
expanded the offensive to the south and north. Kharkov fell on August
23. To the southeast the Russians broke through on the Donets south
of Izyum and on the Mius River line east of Snigirevka. In the last
week of the month they penetrated the Army Group Center front in three
places. On August 31, Hitler gave the Sixth Army permission to retire
from the Mius to the Kalmius River "if necessary." Three days
later, he took a second positive step, ordering Army Group A to begin
evacuating the useless beachhead which it still held on the Taman Peninsula.
The Sixth Army could not halt on the Kalmius. During
the morning of September 6, a motorized mechanized corps and 9 Soviet
rifle divisions broke through on the boundary between the Sixth and
First Panzer armies. The next day a tank corps slipped through the gap,
and, leaving the infantry behind, the two armored corps moved westward.
By September 8, they were approaching Pavlograd, 30 miles east of the
Dnieper and 100 miles behind the Sixth Army front. On that day, Hitler
allowed the Sixth and First Panzer armies to start withdrawing to the
line on which he had intended to build the East Wall, from Melitopol
to the Dnieper north of Zaporozhe.
By September 14, the northern flank of Army Group South
was disintegrating. The Fourth Panzer Army was split into three parts,
and the Russians had a clear road open to Kiev. To the north, Army Group
Center fared no better. The Second Army's front on the Desna, which
was to have been part of the East Wall, was riddled with Soviet bridgeheads,
and on September 14 the Russians began an offensive directed at Smolensk.
The next day, Hitler gave the two army groups permission to retreat
to the line of the Dnieper, Sozh, and Pronya rivers. In most places
the retreat was already under way, and in the last week of the month
it developed into a race with the Russians for possession of the river
lines. At the end of the month, as the last German troops crossed the
rivers, the Russians had five bridgeheads on the Dnieper between the
confluence of the Pripyat River and Dnepropetrovsk.
In two and one-half months, Army Groups South and Center
had been forced back for an average of 150 miles on a front 650 miles
long. The Germans had lost the most valuable territory they had taken
in the Soviet Union. In an effort at least to deny the Russians the
fruits of those economically rich areas, Hitler had instituted a scorched-earth
policy, but in the end even that satisfaction was denied him. Nearly
all of the factories, power plants, mines, and railroads could be destroyed,
but the Germans lacked the personnel to transport or destroy more than
a fraction of the agricultural and economic goods.
The Dnieper affords the strongest natural defense line
in western European Russia, especially when the battle is moving from
east to west. Fortified and adequately manned, the Dnieper line could
have constituted an ideal defensive position, but Army Group South was
so badly battered that the river provided at most a degree of natural
protection and a tenuous handhold. Of the East Wall nothing was in existence;
much of the proposed line had not even been surveyed.
On reaching the Dnieper, the Soviet Army had attained
the original objectives of its summer offensive. Ordinarily the shortening
of the German front, the defensive advantages of the river, the lengthening
Russian lines of communications, and the attrition of the Russian forces
could have been expected to bring the two sides into temporary balance.
But Hitler had sacrificed too much of his strength east of the river.
In contrast, the Russians' numerical superiority had enabled them to
rest and refit their units in shifts, and they reached the Dnieper with
their offensive capability largely intact. Before the last German troops
crossed the river, the battle for the Dnieper line had begun.
In the first week of October, the whole eastern front
was quiet as the Russians regrouped and brought up new forces. To underscore
the victories achieved so far, they began renaming the front commands.
Opposite Army Group South and the Sixth Army, which had passed to Army
Group A, the Voronezh, Steppes, Southwest, and South fronts became the
First, Second, Third, and Fourth Ukrainian fronts.
On October 9, the Fourth Ukrainian Front launched 45
rifle divisions, five tank and motorized mechanized corps, and two cavalry
corps against the Sixth Army's 13 divisions in the line between Melitopol
and the Dnieper. Within three weeks it drove the Sixth Army back across
the flat, dusty Nogai Steppe to the lower Dnieper. Hitler refused last-minute
requests to evacuate the Seventeenth Army from the Crimea, claiming
that the Russians would thereby gain airfields from which to bomb the
Rumanian oilfields. When the Sixth Army retreated beyond Perekop Isthmus,
the Seventeenth Army was cut off, and in the first week of November
Soviet troops gained beachheads on the Sivash Sea near the base of the
isthmus and on the Kerch Peninsula.
While the Fourth Ukrainian Front was engaged below the
Dnieper bend, the Second and Third Ukrainian fronts operating against
the First Panzer and Eighth armies carved a bridgehead 200 miles wide
and 60 miles deep on the river between Cherkassy and Zaporozhe. On the
south the Third Ukrainian Front threatened important iron and manganese
mining areas near Krivoi Rog and Nikopol, which Hitler was determined
to hold at any cost. The Russians had taken a large bridgehead at the
confluence of the Pripyat and the Dnieper in September. South of it,
on November 3, the First Ukrainian Front broke out of two smaller bridgeheads,
and three days later it took Kiev. During the rest of the month it drove
the Fourth Panzer Army back west and south of the city, threatening
to demolish the entire left flank of Army Group South. To the north
the Belorussian Front forced the right half of Army Group Center back
from the Sozh River. Around Nevel, on the boundary between Army Groups
Center and North, the First and Second Baltic fronts made a deep salient
in the German front.
December brought some relief to the German armies, which
for a few weeks regained their balance and even managed to counterattack
west of Kiev. By this time the best solution for the German predicament
would have been to withdraw Army Group South and the Sixth Army to the
next major river, the Bug (Southern Bug), but Hitler would not consider
it. He talked vaguely of retaking Kiev and of reopening the Crimean
front. Actually, German prospects were worse than they had been in the
two preceding winters. Opposing 3,000,000 German troops the Soviet Army
had 5,700,000 men and an overwhelming superiority in tanks and artillery.
In the summer and fall offensives the Russians had repeatedly laid down
artillery barrages heavier than any since the great battles of World
War I. Moreover, the German Army faced two new dangers: its manpower
reserves were rapidly being exhausted, and an Anglo-American invasion
in the west within the next half year was nearly certain. In November,
Hitler notified the eastern front that it would have to manage on its
own resources until the invasion had been defeated. The danger in the
west, he said, was greater than that in Russia, and he could no longer
take the responsibility for allowing the western front to be weakened
for the benefit of other theaters of war. He suggested that possibly
the eastern front might trade space for time, but events soon were to
prove that he was constitutionally incapable of adopting this course.
Offensives on the Outer Flanks
In the winter of 1943-1944 the weather, as always in
Russia, became the third force in the fighting, but with a difference.
The hard freeze which usually set in by mid-December and lasted into
March did not arrive at all that winter in the south, and in the north
it was frequently broken by thaws. Rain, sleet, slush, and mud tested
the endurance of men and machines. Again the Russians had the advantage.
They had sufficient reserves to give their troops occasional periods
to rest and dry out. Their tanks, having wider tracks, performed better
in mud than did the German armor. Their American-built lend-lease trucks
ran through mud that hopelessly mired the two-wheel-drive German trucks.
Both sides relied heavily on the light, high-riding one-horse panje
wagon, the Russian peasant's answer to mud.
On Christmas Eve, the First Ukrainian Front drove two
armies into the southern rim of the Fourth Panzer Army's front around
Kiev, and the next day it developed a strong secondary thrust to the
west. Either of these thrusts could ultimately smash the entire southern
flank of the eastern front. The thrust moving southward, if it reached
the Black Sea coast, would envelop Army Groups South and A between the
Dnieper and Dniester rivers. The thrust moving to the west, on reaching
the Carpathian Mountains, could be employed to drive the two army groups
back against the Black Sea and into the Balkans. Considering the first
thrust the greater danger, Manstein ordered the Fourth Panzer Army to
concentrate on stopping the Soviet armies going south, but even that
task was temporarily beyond the army's strength. By mid-January, the
First Tank Army, spearheading the First Ukrainian Front's southern thrust,
had gained 65 miles and was approaching Uman.
On Jan. 10, 1944, the Third and Fourth Ukrainian fronts
opened a two-pronged offensive against the Sixth Army. By the end of
the month, mainly because Hitler rigidly insisted on holding the mines
near Nikopol and Krivoi Rog, the Russians had nearly encircled the army's
main force in the angle of the front east of Krivoi Rog. Not until February
19, after the army had lost nearly all of its vehicles and artillery,
did Hitler give it permission to retreat to a line on the Ingulets and
lower Dnieper rivers.
In the two years that had elapsed since the first Soviet
winter offensive, Army Group North had by comparison with the rest of
the eastern front been almost stationary. It had yielded some ground
on the right, but it had kept its line firmly anchored on Lake Ilmen.
Below the lake the old Russian towns of Staraya Russa and Kholm had
lain directly on the front since the summer of 1941. Even the breakthrough
at Nevel in October 1943 was more significant as a portent of a possible
Soviet drive to outflank the army group in the south than for the immediate
loss of ground it entailed. South of Lake Ladoga the army group had
fought three battles to keep Leningrad under siege and had held the
Russians to a token gain of a few miles along the lake shore. From the
Volkhov River to the Gulf of Finland the front resembled a World War
I battlefield. It was a complicated lacework of trenches and shell holes,
the result of two and one-half years' fighting in which gains and losses
on both sides could be measured in yards. By January 1944, however,
the stable front no longer reflected the actual condition of the army
group, which had lost its best divisions through transfers.
On January 15, the Leningrad Front launched two strong
attacks, one south of the city and the other from the pocket around
Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov) to the east. On the same day, the Volkhov
Front struck at Novgorod north of Lake Ilmen. By the end of the fifth
day of the battle, the German front was disintegrating in all three
places, and on January 19 the Soviet troops completed the liberation
of Leningrad. Thereafter the entire left flank of Army Group North cracked.
Hitler, concerned about the effect that a more extensive retreat would
have on Finland, which was already negotiating tentatively with the
Soviet Union, at first ordered the army group to build a new front line
on the Luga River. This attempt had no chance of success, and on February
13 he was forced to order the army group back into the Panther Line,
the Narva River-Lake Peipus-Lake Pskov section of the ill-fated East
Wall. The Panther Line was the only major part of the wall on which
substantial work had been done, and when the army group reached it on
March 1, it held.
During January and February, Army Group South fought
in knee-deep mud, sleet storms, and blizzards to keep its front together.
The First and Fourth Panzer armies managed to halt the Soviet southward
thrust northeast of Uman, but by that time the First and Second Ukrainian
fronts, with Zhukov commanding as at Stalingrad, had encircled two German
corps northwest of Cherkassy. Army Group South concentrated almost its
entire tank strength to rescue the corps, and on the night of February
17 approximately 30,000 men, about half the number originally in the
pocket, broke out. In the meantime, the left flank of Army Group South
had been driven behind the 1939 Polish border nearly to Kowel (now Kovel),
Luck (now Lutsk), and Dubno. At the end of February, Army Groups South
and A held a weak but (for the first time since Christmas) almost continuous
line about halfway between the Dnieper and the Bug.
Western Ukraine and the Crimea: March - May 1944
After mid-February, it appeared to the German High Command
that the army groups on the eastern front had seen another winter through.
Army Group North was retiring to a fortified line. Army Groups South
and A were less well provided for, but after the breakout from the pocket
near Cherkassy the Russians were not on the march anywhere, and anyone
who wanted to overlook the fact that the Soviet armies had continued
to move through an abnormally warm, wet winter could assume that in
a matter of days-in a few weeks at most, when spring set in-the front
would sink into the mud for a month or so.
Field Marshal von Manstein was not so hopeful. He believed
that the Russians would attempt at least to advance another 35 miles
and cut the Lwow (now Lvov ) -Odessa railroad behind Army Group South's
left flank. The signs were plentiful that they could resume the offensive
if they wished. During the fighting in January and February, the four
Ukrainian fronts had at no time brought all of their strength to bear,
and their reserves, instead of declining, had grown enormously. By mid-February,
the Soviet High Command had shifted five of its six tank armies to the
area opposite Army Group South. Three of them remained in reserve. At
the end of the month the sixth tank army also appeared. The Americanbuilt
trucks, the wide-tracked Soviet tanks, and the panje wagons had proved
their ability to keep an offensive rolling through mud.
On March 4, the First, Second, and Third Ukrainian fronts
attacked. The First Ukrainian Front, the strongest of the three, struck
due south from the vicinity of Shepetovka into a gap between the First
and Fourth Panzer armies' flanks. The Second Ukrainian Front hit the
Eighth Army's center east of Uman, and the Third Ukrainian Front drove
through the center of the Sixth Army below Krivoi Rog. The Soviet offensive
advanced rapidly through the mud. Except on the left against the First
Ukrainian Front, the Germans usually lacked sufficient troops even to
place temporary roadblocks in the Russians' way. In quick succession
the Soviet spearheads crossed three potential German defense lines,
the Bug, Dniester, and Prut rivers. In the last week of March, the whole
First Panzer Army was encircled at Kamenets-Podolski and had to break
out to the west. After gaining 165 miles on the three main thrust lines,
the Soviet offensive halted in midApril, leaving the Germans with a
front which at its center was backed up against the Carpathians, and
which they managed to hold only by utilizing, for the first time since
Stalingrad, one Hungarian and two Rumanian armies.
At the height of the offensive, on March 30, Hitler
had called the commanding generals of Army Groups South and A, Manstein
and Kleist, to his headquarters and had dismissed them. On the eastern
front, he had explained, the day of the master tacticians was past.
What he needed were ruthless generals who would drive their troops to
the utmost and extract the last ounce of capability for resistance.
The two new-style generals whom he appointed were Field Marshal Walter
Model to command Army Group South and Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal)
Ferdinand Schorner to command Army Group A. A few days later, in a typical
empty gesture, he redesignated Army Groups South and A as Army Groups
North Ukraine and South Ukraine.
On April 8, almost as an afterthought, the Fourth Ukrainian
Front launched an attack on the Crimea. The Seventeenth Army's front
on Perekop Isthmus disintegrated in two days, and by April 16 the army
was forced back to a small beachhead around Sevastopol. Until early
May, Hitler had insisted on holding Sevastopol-to keep Turkey neutral,
he said. By then the Russians had a clear field of observation across
the whole beachhead to the tip of Cape Khersonesski. During four nights,
German ships from Constanta, Rumania, attempted to evacuate the army,
but only about half of the 65,000 men on the peninsula escaped. Meanwhile,
on May 9, Sevastopol was reoccupied by the Russians.
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