The breakout from the Korsun pocket

At 11 p.m. on 16 February 1944 three columns of German infantry set off westwards from the area of the Ukrainian village of Shenderivka (PL). It was the last, desperate move of two corps of the German Eighth Army – about 45,000 men – who had been trapped in the Korsun pocket since 28 January. The relief force that was supposed to reach them had stuck fast a dozen or so kilometres away, at Lysianka. The encircled troops therefore had to fight their way through to it on their own, through Soviet positions, at night, in a snowstorm, abandoning their wounded, guns and vehicles.

On the morning of 17 February the night march turned into a massacre on open, snow-covered fields and in the icy water of a swollen river. Even so, most of the encircled men reached the German lines. War chronologies record under 16 February that the Germans, led by their tanks, failed to break out of the pocket. That needs correcting: on that day the order to break out was only issued, and the breakout itself, carried out on the night of 16/17 February, partly succeeded. Depending on the source, and on whether the wounded flown out earlier are counted, between about 30,000 and 40,000 men got out of the pocket – roughly two-thirds of those encircled. They were not led by tanks: the armoured relief force stood immobile at Lysianka, and the few armoured vehicles inside the pocket were abandoned or destroyed during the march. The survivors came out with almost no heavy weapons, and six shattered divisions had to be rebuilt from scratch.

The relief at Lysianka

The pocket was formed when, in the last days of January, Army General Nikolai Vatutin’s 1st Ukrainian Front and Army General Ivan Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front cut off the salient that the Germans had held on the Dnieper after losing the Battle of the Dnieper. Trapped inside were General Wilhelm Stemmermann’s XI Army Corps and General Theobald Lieb’s XLII Army Corps – according to German archives some 56,000–59,000 men, including the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking with the Walloon SS assault brigade Wallonien attached to it. The whole force was placed under Stemmermann as Group Stemmermann.

The commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, assembled two panzer corps for the relief. In the south, General Nikolaus von Vormann’s XLVII Panzer Corps had too few forces to break through far. The main burden fell on General Hermann Breith’s III Panzer Corps (PL), with the 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and Lieutenant Colonel Franz Bäke’s heavy panzer regiment. Hitler, however, demanded that the attacks of early February should not merely open a corridor but should themselves encircle the Soviet armies that had closed the pocket. That idea foundered on the weakness of the divisions, Soviet reserves and the weather. By 8 February it was clear that the “counter-encirclement” would fail, and Manstein sent Breith eastwards by the shortest route.

The regrouping cost three days. On 11 February the 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions attacked again, took Lysianka and seized a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the little Hnylyi Tikych river (Russian: Gniloy Tikich). That day Western reports said that the relief force was only about 10 miles (16 km) from the encircled troops – and indeed at that point a dozen or so kilometres separated them. But Breith’s tanks got no further. The thaw and the rasputitsa set in: roads turned into swamp, tanks used twice as much fuel as usual, and ammunition and petrol had to be dropped from aircraft or carried forward by hand. Between Lysianka and the pocket lay Hill 239 and the village of Zhurzhyntsi, which the Red Army had fortified and garrisoned with tanks.

The shrinking pocket

Inside the pocket the situation grew worse by the day. The Soviet command tried to split the encircled forces into pieces, striking with the 4th Guards Army and the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps at the junction of the two corps. Stemmermann patched each new breach with the only mobile unit he had – SS-Gruppenführer Herbert Otto Gille’s Wiking Division. Ju 52 transports landed on a field airstrip near Korsun, bringing in fuel and ammunition and flying out the wounded – more than 4,000 men – but around 12 February the airstrip had to be abandoned, and from then on supplies were dropped by parachute. On 14 February the Soviet 52nd Army took Korsun itself.

The encircled forces shifted the pocket south-westwards, towards the relief force, giving up ground in the north. Between 10 and 12 February they captured the villages of Nova Buda and Komarivka, and after heavy fighting against the 27th Army held Shenderivka, the last sizeable place before Breith’s lines. On 13 February the commander of the Wallonien brigade, SS-Sturmbannführer Lucien Lippert, was killed defending Nova Buda. Command was effectively taken over by Léon Degrelle, leader of the Walloon Rexists, who three years earlier had declared himself for Nazism and in 1941 had joined the Walloon volunteer legion as a private. The pocket shrank to a few kilometres across and lay under constant fire; the soldiers called Shenderivka “the gate of hell”.

The shelling also struck the inhabitants of the villages, which changed hands again and again. Ukrainian peasants were trapped in the encirclement together with the troops, and the pocket also held thousands of Soviet citizens serving the Germans as auxiliaries. For them captivity meant at best the Gulag, so many of them later marched west with the columns.

On the other side of the ring tension was rising in the Soviet command. The progress of the relief force alarmed Stalin. On 12 February the Stavka entrusted the destruction of the encircled forces entirely to Konev, placing under him the 27th Army from Vatutin’s front, and left Vatutin and Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who was coordinating the two fronts, with the task of beating off the relief on the outer front. Zhukov later recalled that Stalin gave him a sharp dressing-down at the time; according to Konev the decision was taken on Stalin’s own initiative, according to Zhukov at Konev’s request.

The order “Freedom”

On the evening of 15 February the Eighth Army staff informed Stemmermann that III Panzer Corps could come no closer and that the encircled troops would have to break through under their own power to the line Zhurzhyntsi – Hill 239, where they were to link up with the relief force. The message did not say that both those positions were in Soviet hands. On 16 February Manstein, without waiting for Hitler’s consent, sent the order: “Password Freedom, objective Lysianka, 2300 hours.”

The plan was simple and cruel. The attack was directed by General Lieb. The men were to move in three columns: in the north a group formed around the 112th Infantry Division, in the centre the 72nd Infantry Division, in the south Wiking with the Walloons. The leading waves were to cross the Soviet lines with the bayonet, without firing a shot, in the dark. Stemmermann stayed behind with a rearguard made up of the remnants of the 57th and 88th Infantry Divisions, which was to cover the withdrawal and go last. The heavy artillery fired off its ammunition and was destroyed, and surplus vehicles were burned. Some 1,450 seriously wounded men who could not be taken along were left in Shenderivka in the care of doctors and medical orderlies – in the hope that the Soviet side would respect the Red Cross.

The night of 16/17 February

The weather, which had earlier stopped the relief force, favoured the encircled troops that night. Frost and a blizzard set in; in the darkness and the snow the first battalions passed through the Soviet lines without a shot and towards morning on 17 February reached the German positions in Lysianka and the village of Oktyabr. The centre and left columns, however, ran into Soviet tanks on Hill 239 and had to bypass them to the south, leaving the road along which the relief force’s engineers had prepared crossings.

At dawn the march descended into chaos. Guns, carts and nearly all the vehicles that could not climb the icy slopes were abandoned. Konev threw in tanks, artillery and the cavalry of the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps to smash the columns in the open. German accounts describe T-34s driving into crowds of soldiers, wounded men and baggage trains, and Cossacks cutting down fugitives with their sabres, including those trying to surrender. Soviet accounts present the same scenes as the destruction of an enemy who had rejected a call to capitulate. Both sides wrote about that day with a clear purpose – one to emphasise the ruthlessness of the enemy, the other to justify the death toll it later announced – so the details remain uncertain. What is certain is that thousands of men died that morning in the fields between Shenderivka and Lysianka.

The main mass of the fugitives reached the Hnylyi Tikych far from the prepared crossings. Swollen by the thaw, the stream was a dozen or more metres wide there and about two metres deep, and its high bank made it hard to climb out of the water. Men crossed by swimming, on fallen trees, on horseback and on abandoned vehicles. Hundreds drowned or died of exposure, and many reached Lysianka without weapons, boots or uniforms. The rearguard of the 57th and 88th Divisions later crossed by the engineers’ bridges, bringing several hundred wounded with it. The last groups of stragglers kept reaching the German lines for several more days, while Soviet units rounded up the rest in the surrounding villages and woods.

General Stemmermann did not get out of the pocket. He was killed on 17 or 18 February – accounts differ – when his car was hit by a shell from a Soviet anti-tank gun. Konev wrote in his memoirs that on his orders the general’s body was buried with military honours.

Wiking and the Walloons

In the final phase of the fighting in the pocket the Wiking Division and the Wallonien brigade served in the rearguard and on the most threatened sectors: they covered Nova Buda and Komarivka and, on the night of the breakout, the southern flank. Both suffered heavy losses. Of the roughly two thousand Walloons who had entered the pocket, according to the brigade’s own figures a few hundred came out; the Wiking Division lost all its equipment and a large part of its strength. Gille and Degrelle crossed the river together with their men.

The propaganda of the Third Reich immediately turned both commanders into heroes. On 20 February, at his headquarters, Hitler personally awarded Gille the Swords to the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, and Degrelle the Knight’s Cross. Degrelle later claimed that at a further decoration ceremony in August 1944 Hitler told him that if he had a son, he would want him to be like Degrelle; historians doubt the truth of this account. The scene, described in the German press and in newsreels, obscured the real balance sheet: a collaborationist brigade of volunteers from occupied Belgium had been practically destroyed in defence of a cause that was already lost.

Two balance sheets

The figures that the two sides announced after the battle cannot be reconciled. On 18 February Moscow celebrated the victory with an artillery salute fired solely in honour of the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, and the Soviet communiqué stated that the encircled grouping had been destroyed: 55,000 dead Germans had been counted on the battlefield and 18,200 men taken prisoner. According to this version almost no one had escaped from the pocket. Konev later spoke of as many as 130,000 killed and wounded.

The Eighth Army’s returns tell a different story. About 45,000 men set out on the breakout, and according to these figures some 27,700 soldiers and more than a thousand Russian volunteers reached the lines of III Panzer Corps, together with about 7,500 wounded; adding the more than 4,000 wounded flown out earlier, the German documents show about 40,400 survivors. On this basis Karl-Heinz Frieser in the German official history Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Douglas Nash, and Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson conclude that some 35,000–40,000 men escaped from the encirclement and that the irrecoverable losses of the encircled force – killed, missing and captured – amounted to roughly 19,000–20,000. David Glantz considers the German figures for survivors to be inflated. Whichever reckoning is accepted, the pocket cost the Germans practically all the artillery, tanks and transport of six divisions, which had to be withdrawn to be rebuilt. The relief divisions also suffered heavy losses, abandoning many immobilised tanks in the mud around Lysianka.

Russian statistical compilations put Soviet losses in the operation as a whole, from 24 January to 17 February, at more than 80,000 men, including about 24,300 killed and missing. No one has accurately counted the victims among the Ukrainian civilian population.

The victors were rewarded quickly. On 20 February Konev was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, and on 21 February the commander of the 5th Guards Tank Army, Pavel Rotmistrov, to Marshal of Armoured Troops. Zhukov and Vatutin, who had also fought at Korsun, were passed over in the victory ceremonies; Zhukov later called this an “unforgivable mistake” by Stalin.

Place in the war

Korsun was not the “second Stalingrad” proclaimed in Moscow – too many of the encircled troops escaped, and the German Eighth Army did not lose its command, its staffs or its cadres. It was nonetheless a defeat for the Wehrmacht. Two corps were out of action for several months, the relief effort exhausted Army Group South’s best panzer divisions, and the front on the Dnieper ceased to exist. The battle showed once again how dearly Hitler’s ban on giving up ground cost: the Korsun salient, which Manstein regarded as pointless to hold, was held until its defence turned into a fight for the lives of two corps.

It soon became clear that this was only the beginning. At the start of March the two Ukrainian fronts, now at full strength, struck again: the thaw and the mud did not stop the Soviet tanks, which crossed the Southern Bug, the Dniester and the Prut and in April reached the borders of Romania and Czechoslovakia. At Kamianets-Podilskyi the entire First Panzer Army was encircled; it too broke out, but only after abandoning its equipment. At the end of March Hitler dismissed Manstein, with whom he had argued for months over every decision to retreat, and never gave him a command again.

The surviving divisions were rebuilt: Wiking fought in the summer at Kovel and on the Vistula near Warsaw, and the Walloons were expanded into an SS division. In April Degrelle was given a parade in occupied Brussels. Korsun became a legend for the propaganda of both sides – for the Soviets a model of encirclement and annihilation, for the Germans an example of endurance – and for decades after the war historians argued about how many men had really got out of the pocket.