The encirclement at Kiev

On 10 September 1941 the 3rd Panzer Division of Generalmajor Walter Model, the spearhead of Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group, reached Romny on the Sula, more than 200 kilometres east of Kiev. The day before, its corps had crossed the river Seym, and on the same day neighbouring divisions took the railway junction at Bakhmach. In the south, on the left bank of the Dnieper at Kremenchuk, a bridgehead stood ready from which Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group was to advance to meet Guderian. Less than 200 kilometres separated the two German pincers, and behind them lay almost the entire Soviet South-Western Front of Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos: five armies defending Kiev and the Dnieper line.

Some lists state under 10 September that the German armies had completely surrounded Kiev. That anticipates the facts by several days. On 10 September the ring did not yet exist: Kleist’s tanks set out from the bridgehead only on 11 and 12 September, and the two panzer groups met on the eastern bank of the Sula, near Lokhvytsia and Lubny, on 14–16 September. The first patrols made contact on the evening of 14 September, on 15 September the panzer divisions of Model and General Hans-Valentin Hube established a firm link, and on 16 September the ring was consolidated. Kiev itself was not surrounded at that point in the strict sense – the city lay in the western part of a huge pocket, some 200 kilometres from where the pincers closed. 10 September was, however, the day on which encirclement became practically unavoidable, while Stalin was still refusing to allow a retreat.

The Kiev salient

At the end of August the Soviet front in Ukraine formed a huge triangle with its apex at Kiev. In August Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South had reached the Dnieper along its entire length from Kiev to Kherson, having earlier destroyed the Soviet 6th and 12th Armies at Uman. Kiev itself it had not taken. The Kiev Fortified Region, a line of bunkers and anti-tank ditches on the approaches to the city, had been holding out since July, and in August Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau’s German 6th Army had been thrown back from it. North of Kiev, in the forests and marshes of Polesie, the Soviet 5th Army had for two months been tying down German divisions and threatening the junction between Army Groups South and Centre.

The South-Western Front, which at the beginning of September had six armies under its command (the 5th, 21st, 26th, 37th, 38th and 40th), numbered, according to Russian data, some 750,000–850,000 soldiers including rear services, but had only a little over a hundred tanks left. Its strongest forces stood in the west, in front of Kiev and on the Dnieper, while its long flanks, the northern one on the Desna and the southern one on the Dnieper below Kiev, were weak. The South-Western Direction, to which the front was subordinate, was commanded by Marshal Semyon Budyonny.

Who would close this pocket was settled by Hitler’s order of 21 August. Instead of advancing on Moscow, the 2nd Panzer Group and the 2nd Army from the southern wing of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre turned south, into the rear of the South-Western Front. Army Group Centre had only just ended the fighting in the Smolensk pocket, and Guderian’s divisions had two months of marching and fighting behind them; his leading corps, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg’s XXIV Motorised Corps, had fewer than a hundred serviceable tanks at the end of August. On 26 August the 3rd Panzer Division captured an intact bridge over the Desna at Novhorod-Siverskyi.

Guderian heads south

In Moscow it was long disbelieved that Guderian was heading for Ukraine. General of the Army Georgy Zhukov had warned of such a manoeuvre as early as the end of July. He had then proposed withdrawing the South-Western Front behind the Dnieper and giving up Kiev, for which he lost his post as Chief of the General Staff; he was replaced by Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov. In August, however, the Stavka took the turn of the German tanks to be a manoeuvre preceding a strike on Moscow from the south-west. Guderian was to be stopped by the Bryansk Front, created in mid-August under Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko, who promised Stalin he would smash “that scoundrel Guderian”. His counter-attacks at the turn of August and September, supported by several thousand sorties by the Soviet air force, inflicted losses on the Germans but did not stop them. Moreover, the Bryansk Front was fighting to the east of the German wedge, while Guderian was driving south, exposing his left flank but paying no attention to it.

At the beginning of September Guderian himself was in difficulties. His divisions were strung out over hundreds of kilometres, their eastern flank was under constant attack, and the 2nd Army, which was to cover the western one, was lagging behind. Bock, who viewed the whole operation with suspicion, agreed on 2 September to give Guderian one more motorised corps. Soon afterwards the resistance of the Soviet 21st and 40th Armies broke. On 7 September the German spearheads reached the vicinity of Konotop, and on 9 September they crossed the Seym. In the west the German 2nd Army took Chernihiv on 8–9 September and forced the Desna, driving a wedge between the Soviet 5th and 21st Armies. On 10 September, as Model’s tanks rolled into Romny, the Soviet front north of Kiev was falling apart.

The Kremenchuk bridgehead

The second arm of the pincers was growing in the south. At the end of August and the beginning of September the divisions of Army Group South seized bridgeheads on the left bank of the Dnieper: at Dnipropetrovsk, where the Russians counter-attacked incessantly, and at Kremenchuk, where on 31 August the 17th Army’s LII Army Corps crossed the river near the village of Deriivka. The Soviet 38th Army, cobbled together in August from what had survived Uman, was to defend nearly two hundred kilometres of the Dnieper and failed to push the Germans back into the river.

Rundstedt had originally wanted the infantry of the 17th Army to go north to meet Guderian, and Kleist’s tanks to go east, towards Poltava and Kharkiv. On 8 September, at a conference at his headquarters attended by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and the Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, these roles were swapped so that the encirclement could be closed as quickly as possible. The 1st Panzer Group, swiftly moved from Dnipropetrovsk, was to pass through the Kremenchuk bridgehead and strike straight north, towards Lubny and Romny. The attack was set for 11 September. On 10 September Kleist was completing his concentration, and the infantry corps of the 17th Army were crossing the Dnieper. On 11 September General Hube’s 16th Panzer Division crossed the river, and on 12 September, after rains that had washed out the roads, it set off northwards.

Stalin says “no”

All the Soviet commanders in Ukraine could see the danger. On 7 September Kirponos asked for permission to withdraw the 5th Army behind the Desna, and received it only on 9 September, when Chernihiv had already fallen. On 11 September Budyonny sent a telegram to the Stavka: the South-Western Front lacked the strength to prevent encirclement, and if the Supreme Command did not give it reserves, the troops would have to be withdrawn from Kiev eastwards, behind the river Psel, because any delay would end in the loss of the troops and of an enormous amount of equipment.

That same night Joseph Stalin spoke by teleprinter with the command of the South-Western Front – with Kirponos, the member of the front’s military council Mikhail Burmistenko, and the chief of staff, Major General Vasily Tupikov. He judged the proposal to retreat dangerous: the Germans, he wrote, would get on the backs of the retreating troops and do to them what they had done at Uman. He ordered them to stop looking for lines to retreat to and to look instead for ways of putting up resistance, not to give up Kiev and not to blow up the bridges without the Stavka’s consent. Kirponos assured him that the front had not even thought of retreating, and asked only for reserves. Stalin was counting on the Bryansk Front striking Guderian in the flank and on the South-Western Front holding the Dnieper line. He also remembered Uman, where a retreat in open country had ended in encirclement, and feared that an army on the march to the Psel would be destroyed by tanks more quickly than in its fortifications.

On 12 September Stalin removed Budyonny, who was regarded in Moscow as a panic-monger. On 13 September Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, until then commander of the Western Direction, took over command of the South-Western Direction at Poltava. The change changed nothing: Timoshenko too at first assured Moscow that the front would hold, and the reinforcements promised to him – one rifle division and two tank brigades – were a drop in the ocean.

The pincers close

On the evening of 12 September Hube’s 16th Panzer Division, having set out from Kremenchuk, reached Khorol, overrunning the headquarters of the Soviet 38th Army on the way; its commander managed to escape. On 13 and 14 September the Germans fought for Lubny, defended among others by NKVD units. In the north a small battle group of the 3rd Panzer Division – according to German reports a few tanks, a few armoured cars and some artillery – took Lokhvytsia and its bridge over the Sula. On the Soviet side, on the morning of 14 September, General Tupikov sent Shaposhnikov a telegram saying that a catastrophe was beginning which “in a couple of days” would be obvious to everyone. Shaposhnikov replied that this was panic and reminded him of Stalin’s order of 11 September. At around 6 p.m. on 14 September the first patrols of the two panzer groups made contact between Lokhvytsia and Lubny. The next day, 15 September, the divisions of Model and Hube joined up for good, and on 16 September, when the 9th Panzer Division of Kleist’s group arrived, the ring was consolidated.

The pocket, covering some 20,000 square kilometres between the Dnieper, the Desna and the Sula, held the 5th, 21st, 26th and 37th Armies, part of the 38th Army and the front headquarters. According to Russian calculations, some 450,000 soldiers were trapped in it. For the time being the eastern wall of the ring consisted of thin lines of tanks and motorised infantry, the western one of the infantry divisions of the German 2nd and 6th Armies, closing in from the north and west. On 15 September Timoshenko changed his mind and asked Moscow for immediate permission to retreat. On 16 September he sent the head of his operations department, Major General Ivan Bagramyan, from Poltava to the front headquarters at Pyriatyn with a verbal order: abandon Kiev and break out eastwards to the Psel. Kirponos, who remembered his conversation with Stalin, would not carry out such an order without written confirmation from the Stavka. By then it was too late to break out of the encirclement.

Place in the war

10 September was one of those days on which the fate of a great battle is decided, although in itself it brought only a tank advance of a few dozen kilometres and one captured road junction. On that day the Germans already had the bridgehead from which Kleist set out, and Guderian stood where the link-up was only a few days’ march away. The Soviet command could still have issued an order to retreat that would have saved at least part of the armies, but Stalin, convinced that Kiev could be held like Leningrad, which had just been cut off from the rest of the country, decided otherwise. A week later it was too late for rescue.

The encirclement at Kiev became the largest pocket of the war and one of the greatest defeats of the Red Army. On 19 September the Germans entered Kiev, on 20 September Kirponos was killed trying to break out of the encirclement, and on 26 September the fighting in the pocket ended. The Germans announced the capture of 665,000 prisoners. Russian calculations by the team of General Grigory Krivosheev state that in the whole Kiev defensive operation, from 7 July to 26 September, the South-Western Front lost more than 700,000 soldiers, more than 616,000 of them killed, missing or taken prisoner. The defeat opened the way for the Germans to Kharkiv, the Donets Basin and Crimea. At the same time it held up Army Group Centre for more than a month: the offensive against Moscow, Operation Typhoon, began only on 30 September and 2 October, and after the great pockets at Vyazma and Bryansk it bogged down in the autumn mud and the winter frost. Historians still argue over whether the victory at Kiev cost Hitler Moscow. What is certain is that after Kiev the Wehrmacht never again trapped so many enemy soldiers in a single pocket.