The Barvenkovo pocket

On 23 May 1942, south of Kharkiv, a ring closed around the Soviet troops who only a week earlier had been attacking the city from the Izium salient. From the south came the divisions of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s Army Group Kleist, from the north units of General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army. They met on the Donets, south of Balakliia. The pocket, which Soviet historiography came to call the “Barvenkovo trap”, held the 6th and 57th Armies, Major General Leonid Bobkin’s army group and part of the 9th Army – more than 200,000 soldiers in all. For the following week they tried to break out to the east. Only a small fraction of them succeeded.

A salient that became a trap

The salient on the western bank of the Donets, known after the small town of Barvenkovo (Ukrainian: Barvinkove) as the Barvenkovo salient or the Izium bridgehead, had been created in January 1942 by the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya offensive, one of the offensives with which Joseph Stalin hoped to end the war in 1942. The wedge, driven a hundred kilometres deep into the German front, had a narrow base between Balakliia and Sloviansk. For the Russians it was a springboard for an attack on Kharkiv; for the Germans it was an obvious target for a counter-stroke. Directive No. 41 of 5 April provided for its elimination as one of the preliminary operations before the great summer offensive.

On 12 May Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the South-Western Direction, opened the offensive with two groupings: from the bridgehead at Vovchansk, north of Kharkiv, and from the Barvenkovo salient in the south. The southern pincer was formed by Lieutenant General Avksentiy Gorodnyansky (PL)’s 6th Army and Bobkin’s group. Lieutenant General Kuzma Podlas’s 57th Army and Major General Fyodor Kharitonov’s 9th Army, both of the Southern Front, merely covered the southern face of the salient. After a few days of progress the offensive bogged down, and at dawn on 17 May Kleist’s counter-offensive opened from the south. Kleist’s tanks shattered the 9th Army and the next day reached the Donets at Izium; on 19 May Paulus struck from the north. Only on 19 May did Stalin agree to halt the offensive on Kharkiv. Timoshenko ordered the 6th Army to turn back eastwards and placed the troops in the salient under his deputy, Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko. It was by then too late for such a regrouping, carried out under incessant Luftwaffe air attack.

The pocket closes

From the south the furthest advance was made by General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps, led by the 14th and 16th Panzer Divisions. On 22 May the 14th Panzer Division took Husarivka (Russian: Gusarovka) and cut the last roads leading from the salient to the crossings over the Donets. From the north, from the German bridgehead at Andriivka, General Hermann Breith’s corps group, made up of parts of the 3rd and 23rd Panzer Divisions and the 44th Infantry Division, advanced to meet it. The spearheads of the two groupings met on 22 May south of Balakliia. The next day the Germans sealed the ring, and German reports, as well as some studies, take 23 May as the day the pocket closed. Soviet accounts state that by 23 May a large part of the assault forces had been encircled in the triangle of Merefa, Lozova and Balakliia.

It is often said that on this day the tanks of Kleist and Paulus met “at Balakliia” and encircled most of the 6th and 9th Armies. This needs two corrections. Balakliia itself had remained in German hands throughout the winter and spring, and the pincers met south of it, on the Donets. The forces encircled were above all the 6th and 57th Armies and Bobkin’s group. The main body of the 9th Army, shattered in the first days of the counter-offensive, had been thrown back across the Donets, and only some of its divisions ended up in the pocket. Nor did the northern arm of the German pincers consist of “Paulus’s tanks” in the strict sense: the 6th Army was an infantry army, and the attack from the north was led by Breith’s group, reinforced with parts of the panzer divisions that had been defending Kharkiv for a week.

Men in the pocket

Exactly how many troops were encircled is not known. Estimates speak of more than 200,000, and some of about 250,000 soldiers, with hundreds of tanks and thousands of lorries and horse-drawn wagons. All of them were caught in an area that shrank by the day. The encircled troops were running ever shorter of ammunition and fuel, had no anti-aircraft cover, and the Soviet air force was unable to support them. The aircraft of the German IV Air Corps, reinforced by units brought in from the Crimea, ruled the skies. Ju 87 dive-bombers and Ju 88 bombers had already destroyed or damaged most of the bridges over the Donets.

Kostenko was given the task of leading the troops out to the east. Attacks from outside, with which the weakened forces on the eastern bank of the Donets tried to reach the encircled troops, came to nothing. The outer front was too weak. Most of the reserves had been used up in the attack on Kharkiv and in the failed counter-attack of 18–19 May, and the Germans had already moved further divisions onto the outer face of the pocket.

Attempts to break out

On 25 May the encircled troops made their first great attempt to break out eastwards, towards the Donets. They advanced by night and by day, in masses, often without artillery support. General Hubert Lanz, commander of the German 1st Mountain Division, whose positions lay in the path of the attack, wrote in his report that for two nights tens of thousands of Russians, with tanks, guns and vehicles of every kind, stormed his lines in waves. German observers on the surrounding hills directed artillery fire onto the crowded roads and ravines, and by day aircraft attacked the columns with fragmentation bombs. The roads between Krutoyarka and Fedorovka, along which the remnants of the troops tried to get through, were choked with burnt-out vehicles and the bodies of the dead. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group South, watched the fighting from a hill near Lozovenka.

In these days almost the entire command of the encircled forces was killed. Podlas fell near Lozovenka on 25 May, Kostenko and Bobkin on 26 May, and Gorodnyansky on 27 May. According to some accounts some of them took their own lives to avoid capture, but the circumstances of their deaths have never been fully explained. Among those taken prisoner was the commander of the 6th Cavalry Corps, Major General Aleksandr Noskov. A small part of the troops, including an armoured group made up of the remnants of several tank brigades and corps, managed to break through near the village of Chepel and cross to the eastern bank of the Donets. According to Russian studies, at most one in ten of the encircled men escaped from the “Barvenkovo trap”. The American historian David Glantz puts their number at about 22,000.

On 28 May Timoshenko formally ended the operation. Isolated groups went on trying to break out until 29–31 May, but the battle had already been decided.

The balance

Under 31 May some war chronologies record “enormous German successes” at Kharkiv and the encirclement of several Soviet armies. In fact the fighting in the pocket was ending by then, and the encirclement, closed on 22–23 May, had become no more than a clearing of the battlefield. German communiqués at the end of May announced the capture of about 239,000 prisoners and the destruction or capture of about 1,250 tanks and more than 2,000 guns. Soviet figures published years later by a team under General Grigori Krivosheev give losses for the whole Kharkov operation (12–29 May) of 277,190 men, of whom 170,958 were killed, died, missing or taken prisoner. An earlier Soviet tally spoke of about 267,000 losses, including more than 207,000 captured and missing. The differences arise from different scopes and methods of counting, and Soviet statistics of “irrecoverable losses” include both the dead and prisoners. German losses in the whole battle are estimated at about 20,000 killed, wounded and missing.

On the south-western axis the Red Army lost three armies, several tank and cavalry corps and hundreds of tanks that were to have served as a reserve for the summer. Together with the defeat in the Crimea, where between 8 and 20 May Operation Trappenjagd destroyed the Crimean Front, it was the heaviest blow the Red Army had suffered since the autumn of 1941.

Whose fault

After the war responsibility for the disaster became the subject of a dispute in which each of the participants defended himself. Stalin had approved the offensive against the advice of the General Staff, which recommended a temporary strategic defence. Timoshenko, his chief of staff General Ivan Bagramyan and the member of the Direction’s military council Nikita Khrushchev had persuaded him that the attack would succeed, and had underestimated Kleist’s grouping on the southern face of the salient. General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, acting Chief of the General Staff, recalled that on 17 and 18 May he proposed to Stalin that the offensive be halted and the 6th Army turned against Kleist, but Stalin refused, citing reassuring reports from the Direction’s command. Khrushchev, who according to Vasilevsky telephoned Stalin through Georgy Malenkov, received the same refusal.

Stalin did not punish Timoshenko and Khrushchev in the way he had punished commanders in 1941. The only one to lose his post was Bagramyan, moved from the command of the Direction and the front to become chief of staff of the 28th Army. In a letter to the military council of the South-Western Front of 26 June 1942, however, Stalin compared the defeat to the catastrophe of Rennenkampf’s and Samsonov’s armies in East Prussia in 1914, and added that if the country learned the full extent of it, “with the loss of 18–20 divisions”, its commanders “would be dealt with very severely”. In 1956, in his speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, Khrushchev presented Kharkov as an example of Stalin’s military incompetence, claiming that Stalin had rejected the request to break off the operation. Marshal Georgy Zhukov in his memoirs laid the blame on both Stalin and the Direction’s command. Today historians generally agree that both sides failed: the Stavka, which approved an offensive from a narrow salient without protecting its flanks, and Timoshenko’s command, which for too long refused to recognise the danger.

Place in the war

The Barvenkovo pocket is sometimes called the last great victorious encirclement battle of the war for the Wehrmacht. The Germans achieved what Directive No. 41 had set as the aim of the preliminary operations: the Izium salient was gone, and the South-Western and Southern Fronts had lost most of their reserves before the summer offensive. The defeat coincided with Vyacheslav Molotov’s talks in London. On 24 May Stalin accepted a treaty with Britain without territorial provisions. Historians attribute that decision primarily to American opposition, but the news from the Crimea and Kharkiv did nothing to strengthen Moscow’s hand.

In June Army Group South carried out two further, smaller operations, Wilhelm near Vovchansk and Fridericus II near Kupiansk, which straightened the front along the Donets and the Oskol. On 28 June Case Blue began. The weakened Soviet forces were unable to halt it either on the Donets or on the Don, and in July the Germans took Voronezh and Rostov. On 28 July Stalin issued Order No. 227, known as “Not one step back!”, which introduced blocking detachments and penal companies. On 23 July Stalin removed Timoshenko from command of the Stalingrad Front, and Paulus’s 6th Army, which in May had closed the Barvenkovo pocket, marched on Stalingrad. In the autumn it was itself encircled, and in February 1943 it capitulated. The defeat at Kharkov did, however, teach the Soviet command caution. In the summer of 1942 the Red Army more often retreated than let itself be encircled, and the great pockets envisaged in Directive No. 41 never closed.