The end of the Smolensk pocket

On Tuesday 5 August 1941 the commander of the German Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, announced in an order of the day that the battle of encirclement at Smolensk was over. According to his tally, since 10 July the troops of the army group had taken some 309,000 Soviet soldiers prisoner and captured or destroyed 3,205 tanks and more than 3,000 guns. German propaganda rounded these figures up to “more than 300,000 prisoners” and proclaimed another great victory in the East, following the Białystok–Minsk pocket. West of the Dnieper, in the forests between Smolensk and Yartsevo, the last units of the Soviet 16th and 20th Armies that had failed to reach the eastern bank of the river laid down their arms or scattered into the woods. Those that had succeeded had been crossing the Dnieper for several days at Solovyovo and Ratchino, covered by the troops of Major General Konstantin Rokossovsky.

Popular war chronologies combine under 5 August the closing of the pocket and the capture of 300,000 prisoners with the statement that Oryol fell on that day, and under 6 August they record that the Germans took Smolensk. Both statements need correcting. The Germans took Oryol on the Oka, some 300 kilometres south-east of Smolensk, only on 3 October 1941, in the first days of Operation Typhoon, when the 4th Panzer Division of Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s group burst into the city. At the beginning of August Guderian’s important prize was Roslavl, taken on 3 August. Smolensk itself had been in German hands since mid-July: on 16 July the Germans took the larger, southern part of the city, and the last Soviet divisions left its northern part on 28 July. On 5 and 6 August, therefore, it was not the city that was being captured; the fighting in the pocket to its east and north was being brought to an end.

The last days of the pocket

The Smolensk pocket formed slowly and was never sealed. From the capture of Vitebsk on 9 July two German panzer groups – Guderian’s from the south and Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s from the north – were outflanking the Soviet armies concentrated around Smolensk, but for a long time their pincers could not close. Between the 7th Panzer Division at Yartsevo and Guderian’s divisions at Smolensk there remained a corridor with crossings over the Dnieper, through which the encircled troops received ammunition and fuel. Only on the night of 26–27 July did German units seize the crossing at Solovyovo and close the ring around the 16th Army of Lieutenant General Mikhail Lukin (PL) and the 20th Army of Lieutenant General Pavel Kurochkin, together with the remnants of Lieutenant General Ivan Konev’s 19th Army. Kurochkin took joint command of the encircled forces.

The ring did not hold for long. On 28 July Rokossovsky’s group, reinforced with fresh divisions, recaptured Yartsevo and struck the German XXXIX Motorised Corps from the east, while the encircled troops attacked towards it from the west. In the first days of August the Dnieper crossings were again in Soviet hands. Because the bridges had been destroyed, the soldiers crossed the river on footbridges, by fords and by swimming, under artillery fire and air attack, abandoning their heavy equipment, guns and most of their vehicles on the western bank. According to Russian studies the crossing went on until 4–5 August. Exactly how many were saved in this way is not known; some historians estimate that around 50,000 soldiers of the 16th and 20th Armies escaped the encirclement. Lukin and Kurochkin brought out the staffs of both armies, which soon received new divisions and fought on. For the Red Army it was a rare case that summer of encircled armies not being destroyed entirely.

The Germans, who had failed to close the pocket in time, used the last days of fighting to clear the western bank of the Dnieper of shattered units. Infantry, which had only arrived from Minsk at the end of July, replaced the panzer divisions in the ring, and these were withdrawn to the rear to refit, in accordance with Directive No. 34 of 30 July. When Bock announced the end of the battle of encirclement on 5 August, the front of Army Group Centre already ran far to the east of Smolensk, from Velikiye Luki through Yartsevo and Yelnya to Roslavl.

Roslavl and the Kachalov group

At the same time as the pocket was ending, Guderian eliminated the threat to his southern flank. At the end of July one of the operational groups of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko had been attacking towards Smolensk from the Roslavl area – three divisions under Lieutenant General Vladimir Kachalov, commander of the 28th Army. On 1 August Guderian’s panzer group, detached from the 4th Panzer Army and operating from then on as the independent Army Group Guderian, struck it from three sides. On 3 August the 4th Panzer Division and infantry of VII Army Corps took Roslavl, and Kachalov’s group was encircled. The Germans reported taking more than 38,000 prisoners there. Kachalov was killed on 4 August when his tank was hit during an attempt to break out of the pocket. In Moscow, however, he was declared missing and then a traitor: Order No. 270 of 16 August accused him of voluntarily going over to the Germans. He was rehabilitated only in 1953, when it was established that he had been killed in action.

At Roslavl Guderian opened the way east, towards Moscow via Spas-Demensk and Vyazma, and south, towards Bryansk. It was this very victory on the right wing of Army Group Centre that led the German command to begin thinking of turning his tanks towards Ukraine.

Bock’s tally and its reliability

The figures from Bock’s order found their way into German communiqués and became one of the pillars of the propaganda picture of the summer of 1941. Later, once the fighting at Mogilev and Rogachev was included, the number of prisoners taken at Smolensk was raised to about 350,000. Historians treat these figures with caution. The prisoners often included men of military age detained behind the front, wounded men collected from the battlefields and soldiers of rear-area formations, while the number of tanks “captured or destroyed” covered vehicles knocked out since 10 July across the army group’s entire sector, including those abandoned by their crews for lack of fuel and spare parts. The Russian compilation of losses edited by Grigori Krivosheev, which treats the battle of Smolensk broadly, from 10 July to 10 September, gives for the Soviet forces more than 486,000 killed, missing and captured and almost 274,000 wounded and sick, without separating the dead from the prisoners.

On the German side the mood was far from triumphant. Bock himself noted that the Russians were attacking every day on several sectors and would not let him withdraw divisions into reserve. According to German figures, Army Group Centre had lost almost 75,000 killed, wounded and missing from the start of the campaign to the beginning of August, and the panzer divisions often had fewer than half their tanks in the line. On 4 August Adolf Hitler flew to Bock’s headquarters at Novy Borisov to discuss further operations with the commanders of the army group and the panzer groups. According to Guderian’s memoirs, Hitler told him then that had he known that the figures for Soviet tank strength given before the war in Guderian’s book were true, he would probably not have started this war. Hitler named Leningrad as the first objective and, after it, Ukraine with its grain and industry; he spoke of Moscow reluctantly. The dispute over the direction of the further advance, which was to be decided in the second half of August, was already in full swing.

Uman: the second pocket of August

In the same days a similar battle was ending in Ukraine. From mid-July Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group and the German 17th Army of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South had been outflanking two Soviet armies – the 6th under Lieutenant General Ivan Muzychenko (PL) and the 12th under Major General Pavel Ponedelin – which were falling back from western Ukraine towards Uman. The command of the Southern Front, to which they had been subordinated, and the Stavka long refused to let them withdraw to the south-east, believing that the Germans were heading above all for the Dnieper. On 2 August the German 1st Mountain Division of the 17th Army met Kleist’s 9th Panzer Division on the Synyukha, and on 3 August the 16th Panzer Division and the Hungarian Mobile Corps linked up near Pervomaisk. The ring was closed.

Some 20 divisions were trapped in the pocket, which on 5 August, according to Russian studies, measured only about 10 by 10 kilometres and lay entirely under fire. Attempts to break out on the nights of 5–6 and 6–7 August ended in disaster. The wounded Muzychenko was captured during the night breakout of 6–7 August, Ponedelin in a further attempt, when his tank was hit. On 7 August the last units in the forests near Podvysokoye began to surrender, and by 8 August the fighting had ceased. The Germans reported taking 103,000 prisoners, among them the commanders of both armies, four corps and eleven divisions. At Uman they set up an open-air prisoner-of-war camp in a former brickworks, which the prisoners called the “Uman pit”, where thousands died of hunger, thirst and disease. Order No. 270 declared Ponedelin and Nikolai Kirillov, commander of the 13th Rifle Corps, traitors; on their return from captivity both were arrested and in 1950 shot. Muzychenko survived captivity and after the war, having been vetted by the security organs, returned to the army.

The defeat at Uman opened the Germans’ way to the great bend of the Dnieper and to the Black Sea. In the second half of August Kleist’s troops reached Kremenchuk and Dnipropetrovsk, and Soviet Odessa was cut off by land.

Place in the war

The first week of August 1941 was a string of successes for the Wehrmacht: the pockets at Smolensk, Roslavl and Uman gave German communiqués a combined total of almost half a million prisoners. At the same time it closed the first phase of the war in the East. In six weeks the Red Army had lost most of the forces with which it had begun the war, but the Barbarossa plan had assumed that the war would be decided in precisely these battles west of the Dvina and the Dnieper – and that had not happened. The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted on 11 August that before the war about 200 Soviet divisions had been reckoned with, and that 360 had already been counted. At Smolensk, for the first time, German panzer groups had been forced on to the defensive for several weeks.

The fate of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers captured at Smolensk and Uman was tragic. They were driven on foot to makeshift camps lacking food, water and shelter. Political commissars and Jews were shot. Most of the Soviet prisoners of war taken in 1941 had died by the spring of 1942. On the Soviet side the response to the defeats was Order No. 270, which branded those who surrendered as traitors and threatened their families with reprisals.

A few days after the end of the fighting in the Smolensk pocket, the Red Army went over to further attacks on this sector: at Dukhovshchina, north-east of the city, and against the German salient at Yelnya, which the troops of the Reserve Front under General of the Army Georgy Zhukov recaptured at the beginning of September. Hitler, meanwhile, settled the dispute with his generals on 21 August and sent Guderian’s tanks south, towards Kiev, where the largest pocket of the war was formed in September. On 28 August Hitler and Benito Mussolini visited the battlefield at Uman. Army Group Centre moved on Moscow only on 30 September and 2 October – five weeks later than Bock, Halder and Guderian had wanted.