A World at Arms (118 page)

The Soviet leadership had decided after considerable internal debate that the Red Army would build up defenses on the north and south shoulders of the obviously vulnerable Kursk salient but await a German offensive. A major counter-offensive was, however, planned well ahead of time to strike from the northeast into the bulge around Orel from which the northern German pincer was expected; an offensive in the south would follow the hoped for defeat of Germany’s summer attack. As they awaited the expected blow, the Red Army Front commanders received very substantial reinforcements, built up several defensive positions in depth, and trained their units to meet the expected German armored thrusts. Rokossovski’s Central Front in the north and Vatutin’s Voronezh Front in the south had developed what they had good reason to believe would be strong barriers to any German assault. Both sides had reinforced their armored units to peak strength for what became the greatest tank battle in history.
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On July 4 a preliminary and on July 5 the main German offensive began. From the north, the German 9th Army began to blast its way into the Soviet Central Front, while in the south, armored formations cut deeply into the Voronezh Front’s defenses. Both sides moved in reinforcements, the Germans to nourish their attacking spearheads, the Russians to assist the defending forces as they were destroyed or obliged to withdraw. The next six days saw a slugging match of unprecedented scale as armor clashes and infantry and artillery fire caused colossal
casualties on both sides. The Germans were still advancing, somewhat more rapidly in the south than in the north, but they were entirely unable to accomplish a real breakthrough at either axis of attack in the face of determined and effective Soviet resistance.
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The delay of months in the offensive had, on balance, probably worked more in favor of the Red Army than the Germans, many of whose long-awaited new Tiger and Panther tanks turned out not to be fully ready for frontline deployment anyway.

By July 12, the northern thrust had been stalled to an extent that Model had been forced into a battle of attrition, a form of combat that obviously tied down whatever reserves German Army Group Center could muster. It was precisely this situation for which the Russians had been waiting. The Red Army’s Bryansk Front and West Front now initiated a massive offensive into the northern face of the Orel bulgein effect into the rear of Model’s attacking army–and quickly penetrated the thinly held lines of the 2nd Panzer Army. Not only were the Germans obliged to direct divisions intended for Model’s army to meet a threatened collapse of the whole Orel bulge, but to take forces away from the 9th Army itself. The northern pincer of the German offensive had been effectively halted in its tracks and soon faced great dangers of its own.

The southern pincer was still advancing against extremely fierce Soviet resistance and von Manstein wanted to keep going, but Hitler decided on July 13 to call off the “Citadel” offensive. The Orel bulge was in danger, Model’s army was in no shape to continue and was instead likely to have to withdraw to its earlier position. There was evidence of another Soviet offensive about to be launched in the Donets Basin. As for the assault forces of the southern pincer that von Manstein wanted to drive forward, Hitler was thinking of pulling some of them out to send to Italy. The landing of the Western Allies on Sicily on July 10 and the obvious collapse of most Italian resistance there meant that German divisions from the Eastern Front would have to be sent to help create an army in Italy and to replace Italian occupation forces in the Balkans. Germany was indeed fighting a multi-front, not a one–frontwar.
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Just as the heavy fighting on the Eastern Front prevented the Germans from devoting much of their resources to the struggle with Britain and the United States, so the need for Germany to leave large forces in the west and south, and to defend her home industries against Allied air attack, relieved the pressure the Third Reich could bring to bear on the Soviet Union.
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Similarly, as the industrial capacity and material and human resources devoted to the new German tanks designed primarily
with the Red Army in mind could not be made available for the construction of submarines to reinforce the Battle of the Atlantic, so the building of hundreds of submarines for the war at sea kept Germany from turning out additional thousands of tanks for the battles in the East.

In the northern segment of the Kursk battle front, Model, with Hitler’s agreement, now conducted an elastic defense of the Orel bulge, developing a shortened line behind it, called the “Hagen” position, to which the Red Army had chased him by mid-August. In those four weeks, Orel was liberated and the battered 2nd Panzer and 9th Army pushed back. Their new line was indeed shorter, but the Germans had lost heavily in the initial offensive phase and then in the defense against Rokossovski’s attack. The insistence of Hitler that Army Group Center transfer divisions directly to Italy and to Army Group South, to replace divisions sent from the latter to Italy, had made it impossible even to try to hold the Orel bulge. Contrary to post-war apologias by German military memoir writers, Hitler was quite capable of sanctioning retreat when urged by generals he trusted and such action was required by strategic priorities.
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By the time this Soviet advance and German retreat were well under way, the Soviet offensive into the Donets basin, planned before “Citadel” and anticipated by Hitler when he called off the offensive on July 13, had begun. On July 17, Southwest and South Fronts attacked the German 1st Panzer Army and the new 6th Army in the Donets area. Although this operation in the remaining two weeks of July did not drive the Germans out of the Donets basin as the Stavka had hoped, it made any renewed German attacks in the south impossible, inflicted heavy casualties, and showed that the initiative had definitively passed to the Red Army in the summer as well as in the winter.

More offensives would be launched by the Soviet Union in August even as the Red Army was liberating Orel, but it is critical to note first that in July 1943 the German army had suffered a shattering defeat. It had thrown its best units and most modern weapons against an exposed Soviet salient and had been beaten back with heavy losses. Certainly Soviet losses were also huge, and the battlefield would be littered for years with burned out German and Soviet tanks, but the signal to the world which Hitler had expected from a victory at Kursk had indeed been given–it was a signal of the triumph of the Red Army over the Wehrmacht in a slugging match of enormous size and ferocity.

During August and September, even as the Germans were obliged by the Allied victory over Italy to withdraw units from the Eastern Front to replace Italian ones in that country and in the Balkans, the Red Army pushed forward in new offensive operations, now conducted in the summer and thus altering the pattern which many observers had expected. In August, even as the Red Army cleared the Orel bulge, a massive offensive was launched by the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts against von Manstein’s troops still holding parts of the line reached in their July attacks. With the help of very heavy artillery concentrations, the Soviets broke into the German lines, liberated Belgorod and continued to strike both westwards and to the south. By the end of the month, the Germans had been driven out of Kharkov, a victory which redeemed the defeat suffered there by the Red Army in March. This was, however, by no means the end of the Soviet summer offensive; in a way it was only the beginning.

A series of Red Army offensives in the second half of August and during September on practically the whole southern portion of the front drove the Germans out of the Donets basin during September, cleared much of the left bank of the Dnepr, forced the Germans to abandon their old defensive position on the Mius river and obliged Hitler to order the evacuation of the Kuban bridgehead on September 3. By the beginning of October, the Germans had been pushed back on average 150 miles on the whole 650 miles of the southern front, with the Soviet Union thereby reclaiming very important industrial and agricultural areas, the most valuable portion of the country which the Germans had seized. Furthermore, although the retreating Germans were able to escape being encircled, they suffered very heavy casualties and materiel losses, so that when they reached the Dnepr line, even the reinforcements provided by the evacuation of the Kuban could not make up for the weakening caused by the defeats of summer and fall.
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The Germans held on to a few bridgeheads east of the Dnepr, one near Zaporozhe which was intended to help protect the manganese mines of Nikopol that she desperately needed for her steel industry, and one on the southernmost portion of the line which covered the land approach to the Crimea. The other side of this equation was, however, far more advantageous for the Red Army and dangerous for the Germans. Not only were the German forces on the new line weakened and exhausted, the Dnepr line itself had in effect been broken even before they could develop and hold it. Facing the possibility of a defense along the Dnepr long before the Germans themselves had decided to retire to it, the Soviet high command had ordered all its units to make every effort to seize crossings on the
run, to bounce the river and gain footholds on the other side. In a procedure that was the exact opposite of the one Montgomery would use on the Rhine in 1945, the Red Army set the pattern which the Americans followed, namely to push across a wide river quickly wherever opportunity offered and bravery was sufficient. The gambit worked, and by the time the Battle of the Dnepr River Line began in the first days of October, the Red Army was already across the river at several points, and able to exploit bridgeheads seized the previous month when the Germans were being driven back to the river.

In theory the wide Dnepr river, with a western bank higher for most of its course than a flat eastern bank, would have made an ideal defensive line for the Germans, but there were two great disadvantages. In the first place, the course of the river heading southeast from Kiev and then after a great bend going southwestward to the Black Sea meant that either they would be in an enormous bulge open to the sort of encirclement that had brought on the Stalingrad disaster, or they would have to hold an essentially unprotected ground line south from the bend to the Sea of Azov, thereby shielding the northern approach to the Crimea. In the second place, not only had the Red Army secured several bridgeheads across the river in the September offensive, but the hundreds of miles of the Dnepr line which the Germans did hold had not been prepared for defense in the two years that the Germans had occupied the area. The assumption had always been that Germany would seize and hold vast stretches of territory east of the Dnepr, and by the time the river line became significant as a possible barrier for the Germans to utilize, there was no interval left to establish the needed positions. And the Red Army was determined not to let the Germans have that time. Not only had several of the Fronts pushed bridgeheads across the stream, but the Stavka was building up the armies in several sectors where assaults were to be mounted at a rate which made it possible to attack still in the fall.

The Russians did not repeat the error which the Germans had made in the spring of 1943, when repeated postponements of the summer offensive had afforded the Red Army time to recover from its spring set-back and to construct effective defensive lines. The two Army Groups, South under von Manstein and Army Group A under von Kleist, were not allowed the time either to recuperate or to dig in before the Red Army Fronts, now triumphantly renamed First, Second, Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts, attacked.

In the first days of October, Third Ukrainian Front (formerly the
Southwest Front) drove in the Zaporozhe bridgehead in fighting that was very costly for both sides. Soon after, Fourth Ukrainian Front (formerly South Front) attacked the German line running south from Zaporozhe to the Sea of Azov, freed Melitopol, the southern anchor of the German position, and then drove west. By the beginning of November, this thrust had chased the new 6th Army back to the Dnepr and cut off the German and Romanian forces in the Crimea which, in spite of pleas from the 17th Army commander there and from Marshal Antonescu, Hitler would not allow to be evacuated. He feared repercussions on Turkey, as well as air attacks from there on the Romanian oil fields, and hoped that a thrust of German armored forces south from the central Ukraine could reestablish land contact with 17th Army.

These hopes were to prove vain. Even as the Crimea was being cut off, 2nd Ukrainian Front (formerly Steppe Front) launched a smashing attack across the Dnepr between Kremenchug and Dnepropetrovsk, ripping open the front of 1st Panzer Army and threatening the rear of 6th Army. The Germans were able to drive back the most threatening Soviet spearhead, which reached the railway, mining and supply center of Krivoi Rog; but by the end of October the Red Army was deeply into the Dnepr bend area and had removed any possibility of the Germans holding the river line.

Further north, the First Ukrainian Front (formerly Voronezh Front) attacked in the last two weeks of October and the first days of November. After initially holding, the Germans were soon forced back. On November 5–6 the Red Army freed Kiev, the largest Soviet city held by the Germans, and pushed well beyond it. In the subsequent weeks, substantial German armored reinforcements, some of them divisions brought in from the West, cut off Soviet spearheads at Zhitomir; but here too the Dnepr line was gone beyond recall and important territory returned–with much of its population and resources–to Soviet control. By the end of 1943, a very large part of the Ukraine and the whole Northern Caucasus had been cleared of German troops and a substantial combined German-Romanian garrison effectively cut off in the Crimea. And as both sides knew from prior experience, it was the Red Army which launched offensives in the winter. The Soviet winter offensives in the Ukraine and in the north are really a portion of the preparation for the following year’s operations and hence discussed in the next chapter; but it is necessary to note that on the central portion of the front, the Soviet victory at Orel by no means ended either the heavy fighting or the summer successes of the Red Army.