The Road to Berlin (39 page)

The hills, ravines and forests—even the marshy reaches of the Olshanka river—furnished some natural defences for the Korsun ‘pocket’, but inside the ring food and ammunition were in short supply from the first day of the encirclement. As long as German troops held the airfields, transport planes flew supplies in and officers out; General Wohler left in this fashion, as did senior
SS
officers. General Stemmermann stayed to meet the final storm. To smash in the Korsun ring, Koniev employed thirteen rifle divisions and three cavalry divisions with 2,000 guns and 138 tanks from 27th, 52nd and 4th Guards Armies. The first attacks fell south of Korsun to clear German units from the Olshanka and to ‘thicken’ the belt between them and German tank divisions trying to crash through the external front at Zvenigorodka–Shpola; attacks in the north steadily converged on Korsun. On 8 February General Stemmermann was offered but refused surrender terms; hope, in the shape of a relief force of
Panzer
divisions, flickered on the horizon. From Rizino four German armoured divisions blasted a hole in the Soviet outer encirclement and aimed for Lysyanka. Vatutin rushed up 2nd Tank Army to seal off the breach. By 10 February Koniev’s assault divisions were closing in on Korsun, crushing the German ‘pocket’ to six miles by seven. When Korsun itself fell, the remnants of Stemmermann’s divisions clustered in Shanderovka and Steblev.

The crisis came in full force after 12 February. Four German
Panzer
divisions had chopped their way into 6th Tank positions; the trapped German divisions tried desperately to fight their way south-west from Steblev out to Lysyanka, there to link up with the relief force. Stalin was much displeased and demanded
a better performance from the ground troops and from the air force in blocking the German drive for Lysyanka, which in his view presented by far the greater danger. He recalled Khudyakov
(Stavka
‘representative’ for air force matters) to Moscow and sent Marshal Novikov, the Soviet Air Force commander, himself. A special
Stavka
signal to Front commanders severely criticized the mistakes that allowed the Germans to break out in the Shanderovka–Stablev area, a minute salient which must now be speedily liquidated. Koniev got control of 27th Army, while 5th Air Army was assigned to support Vatutin’s operations on the outer encirclement front and 2nd Air Army committed to preventing any German supply or support for the encircled divisions. Koniev determined at once to drive the Germans out of the shelter of Shanderovka into the open snow-swept fields, but the blizzards into which he intended to thrust the Germans also grounded his bombers. By dint of using volunteer crews and light aircraft from 392nd Aviation Regiment, Koniev finally got his air strike. The rain of incendiaries fell on Shanderovka, lighting up the target for the Russian guns, which rapidly ranged on the village from their positions not more than 5,000 yards away.

With their shelter burned about their ears, General Stemmermann and his remaining units determined on a final break-out, to march in two columns on Komarovka (only a few miles north-east of Lysyanka),
SS
units in the lead. At 0200 hours on 17 February, with a fierce snow-storm sweeping about them, Stemmermann’s German troops finished their last supplies and consumed what
schnapps
was left. General Stemmermann issued his last orders; his men set about destroying guns, lorries, even personal equipment. There was no place in the columns for the wounded; according to Soviet accounts, they were killed where they lay, shot in the head. One hour later the two columns moved off.

Across the path of the marching Germans lay two Soviet armies, 27th and 4th Guards, with lines of infantry, tanks and Cossack cavalrymen, the artillery massed in the woods. Only when the German columns emerged from the ravines into a stretch of open country, with the German troops whooping their delight at having escaped, did the waiting Russians attack. Under the yellow sky of early morning and over ground covered with wet snow Soviet tanks made straight for the thick of the column, ploughing up and down, killing and crushing with their tracks. Almost simultaneously massed Cossack cavalry wheeled away from the tanks to hunt down and massacre men fleeing for the refuge of the hills: hands held high in surrender the Cossacks sliced off with their sabres. The killing in this human hunt went on for several hours and a new round opened on the banks of the river Gniloy Tikich, where the survivors of the first collision of the German column with Soviet troops dragged and fought their way. Soviet artillery fire caught more German troops on the river bank as Soviet tanks charged from the flanks and rear, a flailing, maddened battle where men flung themselves headlong into the Tikich to break away at any cost to Lysyanka. Prisoners came low down on the list of Russian priorities. Koniev set out to kill, and he killed with a hardened single-mindedness. The battle with the column cost 20,000
German dead; 8,000 prisoners were herded together or dragged out of their hiding places. The final Russian tally for the Korsun encirclement—another flick of the Stalingrad whip—rested at 55,000 dead and wounded, plus 18,200 prisoners (contested by the Germans, who insisted that
30,000
men made their way out of the Russian trap). For the Soviet commanders came high reward: Rotmistrov earned his Marshal’s star, to make him the first ‘Marshal of Armoured Forces’ in Red Army history, and General Koniev also acquired his appointment to Marshal of the Soviet Union for his part in these Ukrainian battles. General Stemmermann lay dead from his wounds and was tidily coffined by his conquerors; for the rank and file there were only mass graves.

Further south, Malinovskii and Tolbukhin finally stove in the elaborate German defence system covering Nikopol and Krivoi Rog. On 5 February two Soviet divisions from 46th Army stormed Apostolovo junction, a thirty-mile advance which well-nigh outflanked both Nikopol and Krivoi Rog, and delivered the contents of a German supply base—Sixth Army’s base—to the Red Army, effectively cutting Sixth Army in two. From Apostolovo 46th Army and 8th Guards turned west towards the river Ingulets. Tolbukhin meanwhile launched his front once more against Nikopol, first driving German troops out of their bridgehead on the Dnieper opposite the town. Soviet bombers and ground-attack planes bombed the German pontoon bridges south of Nikopol and the wooden bridge at Ushkalka; the bridge was blown, but a squad of assault engineers had to deal with the pontoons. On the morning of 8 February the bridgehead was cleared and that night the Soviet 6th Army (4th Ukrainian Front) broke into Nikopol from the north. After a night of heavy street fighting, Nikopol was also cleared. Malinovskii’s attack from the north had reached Novo Vorontsovka, shutting off the German escape to the west. The attack on the pontoon bridges blocked the escape route for men in the eastern bridgehead; the units in Nikopol could only pull back along a narrow corridor to the west through swampland lying between the Dnieper and Novo Vorontsovka, but this meant bursting through 8th Guards Army. In this hazardous operation Sixth Army succeeded in holding the swamp and the sole road to safety—that leading down the Dnieper from Nikopol to Dudchino—until 5th Shock Army finally severed it late in February.

Malinovskii now turned his attention to Krivoi Rog, a tough nut protected by its outer layer of fortifications almost twenty miles across and by three rivers, the Ingulets, the Visun and the Ingul. Krivoi Rog also attracted Stalin’s attention, who required of Malinovskii in a special signal sent on 22 February that the town must be in Soviet hands that same day. If only to prevent German demolition of the major electric power stations, speed was an urgent consideration. Already 37th Army command had formed a special squad under Colonel Shurupov to get behind the German lines and frustrate the blowing up of the Krivoi Rog power stations as well as the installations on the river Saksagan. Shurupov’s men did succeed in saving the Saksagan installations, fighting in the German rear,
while Sharokhin’s 37th Army, repulsed like 6th and 46th Armies in a frontal attack, also crossed the Saksagan and broke into Krivoi Rog from the north-west. At 1600 hours on the day nominated by Stalin, Krivoi Rog was cleared. Now the barrier of the Ingulets was broken; 37th Army had a bridgehead on the western bank west of Krivoi Rog, 8th Guards on 6 February had broken through to the Ingulets at Shirokoe, and to the north 46th Army was over. By the end of February the bend in the lower Dnieper had been swept clean of German troops, the tangle of fortifications flattened, the precious iron-ore region back in Soviet hands and the German Sixth Army the poorer by 40,000 men. Without the Nikopol bridgehead to menace its rear, 4th Ukrainian Front could launch a full-scale attack on the Crimea, while Malinovskii’s 3rd Ukrainian Front stood poised to strike at Nikolaevsk–Odessa.

Late in February most Soviet armies for all practical purposes had drawn to a halt. In the ‘northern theatre’, Govorov drew up to the Pskov–Ostrov defence line and was held there. In the centre, the ‘western theatre’, Rokossovskii, under-gunned and under-manned as his front was, could claw no further through the slime and the German defences. In the south, battered though Army Groups South and A were, they held a line bereft of the bulges and indentations that had engulfed so many divisions and which ran slanting from north to south more or less midway between the Dnieper and the Bug. But appearances were deceptive (and scarcely failed to deceive the German command). The bloody sacrifice at Korsun had delayed but not frustrated a massive Soviet general offensive in the south, designed to roll across vast areas of mud and to crash more major river barriers. Behind their present lines Soviet fronts and armies regrouped feverishly, taking in
Stavka
reserves, moving up reinforcements, stocking ammunition, fuel and food. The day after the Korsun battle brought catastrophe to the German columns, on 18 February, Stalin signed the formal
Stavka
directive for the new offensive timed for early March; simultaneously a new front, the 2nd Belorussian under the command of Col.-Gen. Kurochkin, was established at the junction of 1st Ukrainian and the Belorussian Fronts (redesignated 1st Belorussian).

The German high command was almost persuaded that the Russian
Ansturm
, the great onrush of early February threatening the northern and southern flanks, must now sink inexorably into the great morass of mud, to be renewed only when the ground became drier. Field-Marshal Manstein entertained fewer illusions: the greatest likelihood was that the Red Army would attack once more, this time in great strength, to sever the Lvov–Odessa railway running behind his northern flank. But what Stalin proposed for the March operations in southern Russia went far beyond German imagining, for he was intent on the complete destruction of the German armies in southern Russia, to be accomplished across a gigantic front running from the Pripet to the Black Sea and involving four fronts, 2nd Belorussian and 1st, 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian; Tolbukhin’s 4th Ukrainian Front was presently handing over most of its armies to Malinovskii before being detached for its attack on the Crimea.

Vatutin’s right wing was transformed into 2nd Belorussian Front, which became operational on 24 February, taking over 61st Army from Rokossovskii, a right-flank corps of 13th Army (77th Corps) and two armies from
Stavka
reserve, 47th and 70th, with 6th Air Army in support. Kurochkin received orders to attack Kovel and to aim at Brest (thus bringing him into the rear of Army Group Centre), an exploitation of the earlier Soviet success at Kovno and Lutsk. Vatutin’s orders for 1st Ukrainian Front stipulated an attack from the Dubno–Shepetovka–Lyubar front towards Chortkov and Chernovitsy, a southerly sweep to cut off Army Group South’s line of retreat north of the Dniester: Marshal Koniev’s 2nd Ukrainian would drive from its present positions (the flattened Korsun salient, Zvenigorodka) through Uman on to Jassy: Malinovskii’s 3rd Ukrainian was to strike from its bridgeheads over the Ingulets towards Nikolaev and Odessa. Stalin confirmed the operational orders on 18 February for 1st and 2nd Ukrainian, ten days later for 3rd Ukrainian Front. The three Ukrainian fronts would attack with a piston-like momentum, 1st Ukrainian opening on 4 March, 2nd Ukrainian on 5 March and 3rd Ukrainian on 6 March, a violent but co-ordinated motion.

The
Stavka
proposed to commit all six Soviet tank armies in the Ukraine. Badanov’s 4th Tank Army moved out of
Stavka
reserve to Vatutin’s front, which handed over 40th Army and 2nd and 6th Tank Army to Marshal Koniev, who in turn handed over 57th Army to Malinovskii at 3rd Ukrainian, already the recipient of 5th Shock Army and 28th Army from Tolbukhin. Vatutin and Koniev disposed of equal infantry strength, 56 rifle divisions, both deployed three tank armies (1st, 3rd Guards and 4th Tank on 1st Ukrainian, 2nd, 6th and 5th Guards on 2nd Ukrainian), Vatutin had five ‘all-arms’ armies (1st Guards, 13th, 18th, 38th and 60th), Koniev seven (4th, 5th and 7th Guards, 27th, 40th, 52nd and 53rd). Vatutin faced 26 divisions (none of them
Panzer
or motorized divisions) of Fourth and First
Panzer
, Koniev 21 divisions (erroneously estimated at 28 by Front intelligence) including four
Panzer
divisions of Eighth Army and elements of Sixth Army. Malinovskii enjoyed substantial reinforcement, bringing his strength to seven ‘all-arms’ armies (8th Guards, 5th Shock, 6th, 28th, 37th, 46th and 57th Army) and 57 rifle divisions with one tank and two mechanized corps in support, out of which Malinovskii formed a ‘cavalry-mechanized group’ (4th Guards Cavalry and 4th Mechanized Corps) under Lt.-Gen. Pliev, a raiding force to operate in the German rear. This final reinforcement and regrouping invested the Red Army with a general superiority of two to one in infantry and rather more than two to one in armour.

Moving into the Kovel–Lutsk area on the Volhynia proper, the Red Army also drove into the midst of another battlefield where German troops, Soviet partisans and Ukrainian nationalist guerrilla armies fought their appallingly brutal, multi-sided war. Soviet partisan brigades drifting south had turned the north-western Ukraine into a sizeable base, but in Polesia and northern Volhynia the Ukrainian nationalists, men of the
UPA
, the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’
(Ukrainska
povstanska armiia)
, had their guerrilla strongholds. The
UPA
at first helped to clear out communist partisans, but on being denied a separate ‘state’ by the Germans turned to fighting them also. In the struggle between the nationalist factions (the
OUN-B
and the
OUN-M
, representing the Bandera and Melnyk groups), a fresh force, the ‘Ukrainian National-Revolutionary Army’,
UNRA (Ukrainska Narodna-Revoliutsiina Armiia)
, was organized to distinguish it from the
UPA
, which the Bandera group was bent on controlling. But by late 1943
OUN-B
came out on top in this dog-fight and the
UPA
gathered fresh strength in Volhynia. East of Rovno the guerrillas were strong enough to set up their own administration, keeping the Germans confined to the towns.