The Road to Berlin (13 page)

The German tank columns were certainly moving, but not to cover any withdrawal. Plans for a German counter-stroke had been finalized on 19 February and the
Panzer
divisions were deploying for attack, timed for the following day. The crisis was clearly of the first magnitude as Soviet formations appeared to be hacking the German southern wing to pieces; but now Manstein’s counter-stroke proposed to chop off the Soviet advance to the Dnieper crossings, to restore the situation between the Dnieper and the Donets, and then—depending on circumstances—to deal with the situation at Kharkov. Manstein had already moved
HQ
Fourth
Panzer
Army on to Dnepropetrovsk, thereby ‘centring’ the gap between
Armee-Abteilung Kempf
(formerly under Lanz) and First
Panzer
; Fourth
Panzer
was split into two assault groups, one near Krasnograd formed out of the
SS Panzer
Corps, the other from two divisions of XLVIII
Panzer
Corps west of Krasnoarmeisk, with First
Panzer
concentrating 40th Corps to the south. Meanwhile the Mius river line, which had already been pierced in three places, had to be held as tenaciously as possible.

On the morning of 20 February, Manstein’s armoured shears went into action. From Krasnograd,
SS Panzer
troops struck at the right flank of Kharitonov’s 6th Army, while XL
Panzer
Corps attacked northwards to hit Popov’s ‘mobile group’. This ‘mobile group’, which Vatutin had ordered to be attached to Kharitonov’s 6th Army, was still concentrating when it was hit by German bombers in the Pavlograd area. Popov found himself in dire straits when the
Panzer
corps jumped him; the three tank corps of the ‘Front mobile group’ could muster only twenty-five tanks between them. During the night of 21 February Popov urgently requested permission from Vatutin to pull back to the north of Krasnoarmeisk, to a line some twenty miles away—a decision Vatutin refused to countenance as being ‘counter to the assignments given to the [mobile] group and to the situation as it stands, when the enemy is doing everything he can to speed the withdrawal of his forces from the Donbas to the Dnieper’. Vatutin categorically forbade withdrawal and insisted upon the fulfilment of the ‘offensive assignment’ to cut enemy escape routes to the west. Kharitonov, with
SS
divisions biting into his right flank, was scarcely better off, but his orders were to force the river Dnieper some fifteen miles north-west of Dneprodzerzhinsk during the night of 21–22 February, to take both this town and Dnepropetrovsk and to hold a bridgehead; at the same time, mobile formations were to go for Zaporozhe and to prepare to strike down to Melitopol. During the night of 21 February these orders were again confirmed in an exchange between Kharitonov and Vatutin. Kharitonov duly attempted to carry out his orders but his lead divisions only plunged on to their doom. A division of 25th Tank Corps pushed on to Zaporozhe,
only to lie stranded for lack of fuel within ten miles of the town, while the main force of 25th Corps was itself stranded fifty miles from the body of 6th Army and running desperately short on fuel and ammunition, even as XLVIII
Panzer
Corps, moving on Pavlograd from the east, was slicing through its slender line of communication.

The implications of the situation failed to impress themselves on the higher Soviet command. Vatutin literally hurled his troops forward in one final offensive thrust, though they were fast running out of power and were speeding into acute danger. On 21 February Bogolyubov at the General Staff ordered Malinovskii on the Southern Front to get a move on—‘Vatutin’s troops are speeding on at extraordinary pace: his right flank is beyond Pavlograd and the hold-up on his left is due to the absence of active operations on the part of your Front’—though 3rd Guards Mechanized Corps had broken over the Mius only to find itself in a grievous position at Matveyev Kurgan, and were finally encircled. When 48th
Panzer
Corps joined battle on 22 February, attacking from the region some twenty-five miles west of Krasnoarmeisk in the direction of Pavlograd, the crisis on Vatutin’s right wing had become dangerous. Some of Kharitonov’s units, like 106th Rifle Brigade and 267th Rifle Division, were already fighting in encirclement. Four of Kharitonov’s corps were enmeshed in this trap; 1st Guards Tank and 4th Guards Rifle Corps were pulling back eastwards, and 25th Tank Corps was splayed out along the road to Zaporozhe. Popov with his mobile group was fighting to hold off XL
Panzer
Corps and was falling back northwestwards, the remnants of the ‘Front mobile group’ struggling now to bar the way to Barvenkovo.

On his own initiative Golikov during the night of 21 February ordered Kazakov’s 69th and Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army, presently engaged on their own westerly drive to the Dnieper, to prepare a turn to the south to bring them into the flank of the German
Panzer
formations operating against Kharitonov south of Kharkov; Kazakov’s 69th Army would attack from south of Bogodukhova towards Krasnograd, which Rybalko would also aim for by attacking through the area west of Merefa. The divisions of both Soviet armies duly turned south, moving on parallel tracks but only very slowly, the infantry without any armoured support, short of ammunition and stiffened, not with trained soldiers, but with local conscripts—raw recruits still in their peasant gear. Within forty-eight hours, as Kazakov and Rylbalko rolled into the regiments of
SS Gross Deutschland
, the Soviet counter-thrust came to a halt, and Golikov issued orders for a renewal of the westerly thrust, which now caused Manstein little concern since he had already stopped the most dangerous Soviet drive. During the night of 23–24 February, Vatutin’s report to the
Stavka
admitted that a serious situation had developed on his right flank—three German division with 400 tanks were loose in attacks on Pavlograd and from the Krasnograd area, where the German objective seemed to be Lozovaya. Nevertheless, Vatutin still mentioned ‘the withdrawal in columns of the Donbas group of enemy forces’ on the central sector of the front. The
front had already been committed in building up assault formations for the final phase of the offensive, but now, entirely lacking general reserves of anti-tank forces, Vatutin was obliged to order Kuznetsov of 1st Guards to move 6th Guards Rifle Corps from Slavyansk to the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya sector in order to bar the German advance.

With each successive day the outlook worsened. On 24 February several units of Kharitonov’s 6th Army were fighting in encirclement but only 25th Tank Corps—largely immobilized for lack of fuel—received orders to pull back northwards. Popov’s Front group was falling back on Barvenkovo, joining two divisions of 6th Guards Rifle Corps (1st Guards Army) holding the Lozovaya–Slavyansk line; Popov’s ‘mobile group’, even with its recent reinforcement, was a shadow of its former self—a mere 35 T-34s and 15 T-70 light tanks. All hope for the offensive had long gone, but only on 25 February did Vatutin order his right flank over to the defensive and submit a report to the
Stavka
that revealed the true state of affairs. The need for reinforcement consequent upon heavy losses made confession to the
Stavka
imperative and unavoidable. In particular, the tank forces urgently needed increased repair facilities; all Front repair units were up with the tank corps, so that the armour in the rear went completely untended, partly because the two mobile tank repair workshops promised to the Front had not arrived.

At Barvenkovo, a motley assortment of Soviet units, the wreckage of the right flank, tried to halt XL
Panzer
Corps striking north-westwards to the northern Donets; the remnants of Popov’s group and a severely weakened 1st Guards Army—13th Guards Tank Brigade and 4th Guards Tank Corps (with fifty tanks between them, most stuck fast for lack of fuel), the remnants of 10th and 18th Tank Corps, two brigades of 3rd Tank Corps, units of three rifle divisions and a couple of ski battalions—held on until the afternoon of 28 February, when German tanks broke through to the Donets. That same evening the
Stavka
detached Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army from Golikov’s left wing and subordinated it to Vatutin for a counter-attack aimed at the German armour ripping into 6th Army. It was a plan that miscarried and misfired almost from the start. German bombers and tanks caught Rybalko as he tried to form up for the attack, inflicting heavy damage on the already weakened 3rd Tank. By the evening of 2 March the attack formations were themselves encircled, only 6th Guards Cavalry Corps managing to break out, though at the cost of heavy losses. With only about fifty tanks left, Rybalko’s tank army was itself almost wholly encircled by 4 March. They tried desperately to break out towards the south-west of Kharkov, but in falling back 3rd Tank was uncovering the flank of 69th Army. All this time 6th Army and 1st Guards Army, continually battered by German attacks, fell back on the Donets between Andreyevka (north-west of Izyum) and Krasnyi Liman (to the south-east), the frozen river allowing Soviet units to slip back into comparative safety even if the tally of losses was high—6th Army severely mauled, 1st Guards seriously weakened, four tank corps practically obliterated (25th, 3rd,
10th and 4th Guards) and several armoured brigades and rifle formations badly damaged in manpower and equipment.

The second phase of the German counter-stroke, the northerly drive into Golikov’s left flank and on to Kharkov, was now proceeding at full speed, racing the Russians and the thaw. On 7 March Fourth
Panzer
attacked northwards from the Krasnograd area and by 8–9 March it had driven a twenty-mile gap between 69th and 3rd Tank Army, whose rifle divisions fought fiercely to hold off the German advance. Attached to Rybalko’s army was the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Battalion, 979 men strong, raised in February 1942 at Buzuluk in Orenburg
oblast
and under the command of Ludvik Svoboda. Svoboda’s men slid into position south-west of Kharkov between the Soviet 62nd and 25th Guards Rifle Divisions.
SS Totenkopf
and
Adolf Hitler
, out to avenge their earlier defeat at Kharkov, aimed to batter their way into the city from the south, the direct route. West of Kharkov, however, on to Akhtyrka and Poltava—the road to Kiev—lay Soviet divisions over-extended in their offensive, divisions Manstein hoped to trap, though on 2 March Golikov had already reined them in to draw them back eastwards. By 10 March German units were in the northern suburbs of Kharkov, the
SS Panzer
Corps had been swung to the east of the city, straddling the escape route to the Donets. The capture of Rogan on 12 March effectively cut off 3rd Tank, while
Gross Deutschland
units, moving through the thirty-mile breach between 69th and 3rd Tank Armies, raced north-eastwards for Belgorod, thereby putting Kursk at risk and creating the danger of a German breakthrough into the rear of the Central Front, or the encirclement of Soviet troops west of Kursk in the event of German forces in the Orel area also striking out.

The German drive on Belgorod made the reinforcement of the Voronezh Front a very urgent matter. Rokossovskii on the Central Front was ordered ‘not later than March 13th’ to move 21st Army south of Kursk; 64th Army was ordered to move from the Stalingrad area and Katukov’s 1st Tank Army received orders to block the German thrust. For the moment, Kazakov’s 69th had to hold off the
SS
troops who threatened to split 69th Army from Moskalenko’s 40th. Not that Kazakov could do much with divisions ground down to less than 1,000 men each and one (340th Rifle) with only 275 men left; 69th had no tanks and less than 100 guns. To hold the junction between 69th and 40th, Golikov brought up two tank corps, 3rd and 2nd Guards, the latter with more than 170 tanks moving into 69th’s areas. Under cover of darkness, Kazakov’s men quit Belgorod on 18 March, but to Kazakov’s disgust the command of 2nd Guards did not seize their chance to attack the
SS
tank units in the flank;
HQ
2nd Guards remained on the eastern bank of the Donets directing their brigades by radio but failing to follow up their chance. With 69th back over the Donets, 21st Army moved to the north of Belgorod, 1st Tank concentrated at Oboyan, and 64th Army moved on to the line of the Donets; thus Kursk was secured from the south (to form the southern face of the ‘Kursk salient’). Within a week,
the line stabilized on the Donets from Belgorod to Chuguev, and on the South-Western Front further down the Donets to the Mius.

The race for the survival or the destruction of the entire southern group of German armies had been run terribly close. From Manstein’s point of view, the Soviet thrusts to the Dnieper crossings were chopped off in the nick of time, for with these crossings in Soviet hands his whole army group would have died swiftly enough from fuel starvation. From the Soviet side, to attempt to clear the Donbas and to force the Dnieper with formations already worn with heavy fighting was a high risk turned into a brush with calamity when reconnaissance reports were so persistently misinterpreted after mid-February; Golikov and Vatutin pounded west and south-west without pause. Late in February, even with the German attacks on Kharitonov and Popov, Golikov signalled to Kazakov of the 69th: ‘There are 200–230 miles to the Dnieper, and to the spring
rasputitsa
[mud] there are 30–35 days. Draw your own conclusions and make your own reckoning from this.’ Kazakov drew the same conclusion as ever, that there should have been a pause in operations after the capture of Kharkov. Even more fundamental was the redeployment of the Soviet troops liberated for fresh action once the German forces in Stalingrad had been eliminated; Rokossovskii’s Don Front forces were to be transported north-west of Voronezh to form the basis of the Central Front (interposed between the Voronezh and Bryansk Fronts), while the insertion of this strength between Golikov’s and Vatutin’s fronts would have poured enormous power into the Soviet drive for the Dnieper, an operation borne largely by Vatutin’s right-flank strength.