The Eastern Front in mid-December 1943

By mid-December 1943 the Eastern Front no longer resembled the line the Germans had meant to hold in the autumn. After the Battle of the Dnieper the Red Army stood on the right bank of the river at Kiev, Cherkasy and Dnipropetrovsk; the Crimea was cut off from the mainland; and in the north, between Nevel and Vitebsk, Soviet troops were driving into the junction of the German Army Groups North and Centre. Yet 16 December 1943 brought no decisive event. That day tanks of the 1st Baltic Front closed a ring around several German divisions north of Vitebsk, bitter defensive fighting against the counter-attacks of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein continued near Kiev, and in Kharkiv the first public trial of German war criminals before a Soviet court was under way.

Kalinin – December 1941, not 1943

Some war chronologies record under 16 December 1943 that Kalinin was recaptured in a great Red Army offensive. The date is two years out. Kalinin (today Tver) on the Volga, taken by the Germans in October 1941, was retaken on 16 December 1941 by the Kalinin Front under Colonel General Ivan Konev during the Moscow counter-offensive. It was then one of the first large cities the Red Army had won back from the Germans. By December 1943 Kalinin lay several hundred kilometres behind the front; the nearest fighting was in the Vitebsk region of Belarus and around Nevel.

The coincidence of dates is nonetheless telling. Two years earlier, on 16 December 1941, the Red Army was only just pushing the Wehrmacht back from the capital, and the war was being decided a few dozen kilometres from the Kremlin. In December 1943 the front ran through right-bank Ukraine and eastern Belarus, and the question was no longer whether the Germans could take Moscow but how quickly they would lose the rest of the Soviet territory they occupied.

After Tehran

At the Tehran Conference (28 November – 1 December 1943) Joseph Stalin obtained from the Western Allies a commitment to invade France in May 1944 and promised that the Red Army would launch an offensive at the same time, so that the Germans could not shift divisions from east to west. Meanwhile the Soviet command had no intention of waiting for the spring. The Stavka of the Supreme High Command was preparing a winter campaign along the entire length of the front, from Leningrad to the Crimea, to begin in Ukraine in December and at Leningrad in January.

On the German side Adolf Hitler forbade voluntary withdrawals. For economic and political reasons he demanded that the Nikopol bridgehead, the Dnieper bend and the Crimea be held, although the army group commanders – Manstein above all – were pressing for a shorter front and the creation of reserves. After the summer and autumn of 1943 the Wehrmacht in the east was markedly weaker: the losses at Kursk and on the Dnieper had not been made good, and Italy, the Balkans and preparations to defend the coasts of Western Europe were absorbing ever more forces.

The Gorodok salient

The most fluid fighting of mid-December took place on the northern sector of the front, in the Vitebsk region. In early October 1943 Soviet troops had taken Nevel, an important railway junction on the boundary between the German Army Groups North and Centre, driving a deep wedge between the two. On its southern edge, however, the Germans still held a salient around the small town of Gorodok, north of Vitebsk. Defended by the 3rd Panzer Army of Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt, part of Army Group Centre, commanded since the autumn by Field Marshal Ernst Busch, these positions threatened the flank and rear of the Soviet forces west and south-west of Nevel.

The 1st Baltic Front of General of the Army Ivan Bagramyan was ordered to eliminate the salient, encircle its defenders and then take Gorodok and Vitebsk. The main blow was delivered by the 11th Guards Army of General Kuzma Galitsky and the 4th Shock Army of General Vasily Shvetsov, supported by the 1st and 5th Tank Corps and the 3rd Guards Cavalry Corps; the 43rd and 39th Armies were to pin the Germans down with subsidiary attacks. According to Soviet figures the two shock armies had about 20 divisions, 275 tanks and self-propelled guns, and more than 2,100 guns and mortars.

The attack began on 13 December in bad weather that all but grounded the air forces. The 4th Shock Army broke through the main defensive belt, and the 11th Guards Army, having shifted the axis of its main effort, committed the 1st Tank Corps into the gap. On 16 December its tanks reached Bychikha station and linked up with the 5th Tank Corps of the 4th Shock Army. According to Soviet sources four German infantry divisions were caught in the pocket, two of which were destroyed while trying to break out; German accounts, however, say that some of the men managed to fight their way back to their own lines. Bagramyan’s troops then turned south towards Gorodok.

Vitebsk and Orsha

The Gorodok operation was part of a broader, dogged offensive into Belarus. From October 1943 the Western Front of General of the Army Vasily Sokolovsky attacked again and again along the Moscow–Minsk highway towards Orsha and Vitebsk. Mounted by exhausted divisions short of ammunition, in mud and against well-prepared German defences, these attacks gained a few kilometres at a time at very heavy cost. In the spring of 1944 a special commission of the State Defence Committee judged them harshly, and Sokolovsky lost command of the front. In mid-December 1943 Vitebsk, an important road and rail junction, remained in German hands, and so it would stay until the summer of 1944.

Further south the Belorussian Front (PL) of General of the Army Konstantin Rokossovsky, after the liberation of Gomel on 26 November, was consolidating on the Berezina and around Rechytsa in preparation for a thrust on Kalinkavichy and Mozyr. On the sector of Army Group North under Field Marshal Georg von Küchler the front had not moved between Leningrad and Nevel, but since November the Stavka had been shipping the 2nd Shock Army by sea to the Oranienbaum bridgehead. There a blow was being prepared that in January 1944 would finally end the siege of Leningrad.

The Kiev bridgehead

In Ukraine the fate of the winter campaign turned on the bridgehead that the 1st Ukrainian Front of General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin had won on the right bank of the Dnieper after the liberation of Kiev on 6 November. In mid-November the Soviet forces, which had pushed far to the west and south-west in pursuit, were struck on their overextended flank. Manstein, commander of Army Group South, concentrated in the 4th Panzer Army – whose commander, Hermann Hoth, Hitler blamed for the loss of Kiev and sent into the reserve – the XLVIII Panzer Corps of General Hermann Balck, with panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. On 19 November the Germans retook Zhytomyr, then occupied Brusyliv, and at the end of November Korosten.

In the first half of December Manstein tried to go further. Balck’s corps attacked north of Zhytomyr, around Radomyshl, Malyn and Meleni, aiming to encircle the Soviet grouping defending the north-western edge of the bridgehead and open the road to Kiev. The fighting in the forests and on roads that were first sodden and then frozen brought the Germans local successes and cost both sides dearly, but it did not destroy Vatutin’s forces, which received further armies from the Stavka reserve, among them the 1st Tank Army and the 18th Army. Around 22 December the front stabilised west of Kiev. The attempt to recapture the Ukrainian capital had failed, and the bridgehead – several hundred kilometres wide – became the springboard for the next offensive.

Cherkasy and the Dnieper bend

South of Kiev, in the great bend of the Dnieper, the 2nd Ukrainian Front of General of the Army Ivan Konev was widening the bridgeheads won in the autumn between Kremenchuk and Dnipropetrovsk. On 10 December Soviet troops took Znamianka, an important railway junction, and on 14 December, after a month of fighting that had begun with a landing across the river in mid-November, the 52nd Army captured Cherkasy. By the end of December Konev stood on the approaches to Kirovohrad and Kryvyi Rih. On the middle Dnieper the Germans still held the riverbank from Kaniv towards Cherkasy – a projecting salient that in January and February 1944 became a trap for two German corps.

Nikopol and the Crimea

Furthest south, Hitler ordered the defence of positions that were hard to hold from a military point of view. On the left bank of the Dnieper, opposite Nikopol, the German Sixth Army of Colonel General Karl-Adolf Hollidt defended an extensive bridgehead. At stake were the manganese ore deposits around Nikopol, essential to German steelmaking, and a starting point for a possible attack to restore the land link with the Crimea. The 4th Ukrainian Front of General of the Army Fyodor Tolbukhin attacked the bridgehead in November and December, but without result. To its north the 3rd Ukrainian Front of General of the Army Rodion Malinovsky was pushing from its bridgeheads near Dnipropetrovsk towards Kryvyi Rih.

The Crimea had been cut off from the mainland since early November. Tolbukhin’s troops had reached the Perekop Isthmus and seized a bridgehead across the Sivash, and from the night of 31 October – 1 November landings across the Kerch Strait put Soviet troops ashore at Eltigen and north of Kerch. The German Seventeenth Army of General Erwin Jaenecke, made up of German and Romanian divisions, defended the peninsula and was supplied by sea and air. In early December German and Romanian troops eliminated the encircled Eltigen bridgehead; some of its defenders broke out northwards to Kerch and Mount Mithridates, from where, around 10–11 December, ships of the Azov Flotilla under Rear Admiral Sergei Gorshkov managed to evacuate some of the men. The Separate Coastal Army of General of the Army Ivan Petrov held on to the bridgehead north-east of Kerch. Hitler rejected proposals to evacuate the peninsula, fearing the effect of such a decision on Romania and Turkey, as well as Soviet air attacks on the Romanian oilfields.

The Kharkiv trial

The middle of December 1943 on the Eastern Front was also marked by an event away from the battlefield. On 15 December in Kharkiv, liberated in August after almost two years of occupation, a Soviet military tribunal opened the public trial of three Germans – Captain Wilhelm Langheld of military counter-intelligence, SS-Untersturmführer Hans Ritz and Reinhard Retzlaff, an NCO of the Secret Field Police (Geheime Feldpolizei) – and of a Soviet collaborator, the driver Mikhail Bulanov. They were charged with taking part in mass crimes against the inhabitants of the city and region and against prisoners of war: shootings, the torture of prisoners and the killing of people in lorries converted into mobile gas chambers, known in the USSR as dushegubki (“soul-killers”).

It was the first public trial of German war criminals before a Soviet court; collaborators had been tried at Krasnodar in the summer of 1943. The proceedings were covered by Soviet, British, American and French correspondents, the writers Aleksey Tolstoy, Konstantin Simonov and Ilya Ehrenburg were among those in the courtroom, and the trial was recorded in a documentary film. On 18 December all four defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out the next day in Kharkiv’s market square; according to Soviet sources more than 40,000 people watched the execution. The trial was both an instrument of propaganda and a foretaste of the reckoning to come: the defendants pleaded superior orders, and the court held that an order did not absolve them of responsibility – a principle later reaffirmed at the Nuremberg trials. The trial drew on the declaration on German responsibility for atrocities adopted by the three great powers at the Moscow Conference in October 1943, under which the perpetrators were to be tried in the countries where they had committed their crimes.

Place in the war

Mid-December 1943 on the Eastern Front was a moment before the next blow rather than a lull in the fighting. On 24 December the 11th Guards Army took Gorodok, but by the end of the month Bagramyan’s troops had failed to break through the defences in front of Vitebsk, and the Gorodok operation ended on 31 December. The Soviet side announced the destruction of several German divisions but did not reach its main objective, Vitebsk; the city fell only in June 1944, in the first days of Operation Bagration, which shattered Army Group Centre.

On the same day, 24 December, the 1st Ukrainian Front launched the Zhytomyr–Berdychiv offensive from the Kiev bridgehead. The attack, delivered in thick fog, took the 4th Panzer Army by surprise; on 29 December the Red Army took Korosten, on 31 December Zhytomyr for the second time, and on 5 January 1944 Berdychiv. Manstein had to bring up divisions of the 1st Panzer Army from the south, and the gains of his November and December counter-attacks were lost within a few days. The offensive opened a campaign in right-bank Ukraine that lasted until the spring: in January Konev took Kirovohrad; in January and February the two Ukrainian fronts encircled German corps in the Kaniv–Korsun salient; in February Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih fell; and in April and May 1944 the Crimean offensive ended with the destruction of the Seventeenth Army at Sevastopol. In the north the Leningrad–Novgorod offensive began on 14 January 1944 and in the second half of January brought the siege of Leningrad to an end.

December 1943 also showed how unequal the two sides had become. The Red Army could conduct several operations at once on sectors hundreds of kilometres apart, while suffering very heavy losses in the process – as the bloody and fruitless attacks at Orsha showed. The Wehrmacht, bound by the ban on retreat and increasingly stretched between the east, Italy and Western Europe, could do no more than put out one fire after another. Two years after the Red Army had retaken Kalinin near Moscow, the war was approaching the pre-war borders of Poland and Romania: in the first days of January 1944 Soviet troops crossed the former Polish–Soviet border in Volhynia.