The First Panzer Army withdraws from the Terek

Under the date 1 January 1943 many war chronologies record that “the German 1st Panzer Division withdraws from the Terek”. The name is mistaken: what fell back from the Terek was not a division but the whole First Panzer Army under General Eberhard von Mackensen, the eastern wing of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s Army Group A. At that time the 1st Panzer Division belonged to an entirely different sector of the front – Army Group Centre, with which it had fought in the Rzhev salient in November and December 1942. The date, on the other hand, is correct: the first German divisions left their positions on the Terek on the night of 31 December to 1 January. So began the withdrawal from the Caucasus, which lasted throughout January and which the chronologies sum up under 21 January as “further victories of the Red Army in the Caucasus”.

An order that came late

After the failed attack on Ordzhonikidze in November 1942 the First Panzer Army stood on the Terek, in an arc from Mozdok to Nalchik at the foot of the Caucasus, more than 600 kilometres from Rostov. To the west the Seventeenth Army held the lower Kuban, the mountain passes above the coast and Novorossiysk without its port. The encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the failure of the relief attempt and the offensive on the middle Don had, however, brought Rostov – through which ran all of Kleist’s lines of communication – within reach of Soviet tanks. Supplying the encircled troops through the airlift was failing, and the airfields from which the aircraft flew were falling one after another into the hands of the Red Army.

Adolf Hitler long refused to allow a withdrawal from the Caucasus. He gave way only in the last days of December, under pressure from the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Kurt Zeitzler, and Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, and agreed to a retreat. The order of 28 December was a half-measure: the First Panzer Army was to fall back in stages to the north-west, towards Salsk and the lower Manych, but the Seventeenth Army was to remain on the Black Sea. Nor were the troops allowed to abandon heavy equipment or supplies, which slowed the march.

The withdrawal in the first days of January

Mackensen withdrew according to a plan prepared back in December, from one line to the next, covering himself with strong rearguards. The first bound led from the Terek to the river Kuma and its tributary the Zolka, where German engineers had prepared fortifications in advance. On 3 January Soviet troops entered the abandoned town of Mozdok, and on 3 or 4 January, depending on the source, Nalchik. The Germans blew up bridges, railway lines and depots behind them; they also evacuated from the Caucasus some of the inhabitants who had collaborated with the occupier, as well as volunteer units recruited from the local population.

The pursuit was conducted by the Northern Group of Forces of the Transcaucasian Front under General Ivan Maslennikov. Soviet studies themselves admit that it set off late – according to Russian sources the pursuit proper began only on 3 January – and that it was clumsily handled: units became intermingled, communications failed, and in the first three days Maslennikov’s divisions advanced a mere 25–60 kilometres. On 7 January, on the instructions of the General Staff, the Group’s cavalry corps and armoured units were combined into a cavalry-mechanised group under General Nikolai Kirichenko, which was to break through to Nevinnomyssk or Armavir and bar the Germans’ road to the north-west. It did not get there in time.

On 10 and 11 January the Red Army recaptured the spa towns of the Caucasian Mineral Waters – Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk, Yessentuki and Mineralnye Vody – as well as Georgiyevsk and Budyonnovsk. On 16 January the Stavka (Supreme Headquarters) rebuked the command of the Transcaucasian Front and Maslennikov for failing to carry out their task of encircling the enemy and demanded decisive action. It made little difference. The First Panzer Army, though shelled and attacked from the air, kept its formations intact.

The race for Rostov

The real danger to Kleist came not from the mountains but from the north-east. On 1 January General Andrei Yeremenko’s former Stalingrad Front, renamed the Southern Front that day, advanced on Rostov and Salsk. By the middle of January its leading units, including General Rodion Malinovsky’s 2nd Guards Army, stood 50–60 kilometres from Rostov. Had they reached the Don crossings, both armies of Army Group A would have been cut off. What prevented this was Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, the remnant of the force that had tried to relieve Stalingrad in December. It fought on the Manych and on the approaches to Rostov to keep open the corridor through which the troops from the Caucasus could pass.

For most of January Hitler wavered over where the First Panzer Army should go. He wanted as much of it as possible to head not for Rostov but west, to the Kuban, where a bridgehead was to be formed for a future new offensive into the Caucasus. Manstein, faced with the collapse of the entire southern wing of the front, demanded the opposite: panzer divisions on the Don. Only on 24 January did Hitler agree that the whole First Panzer Army should pass through Rostov and join Army Group Don. The Seventeenth Army alone was to remain in the Kuban, reinforced by some of Mackensen’s units that had not managed to turn north in time.

The victories of 21 January and the days that followed

As the Germans moved towards Rostov, the Red Army occupied the towns they abandoned. On 17 January troops of the Northern Group entered Cherkessk, and on 21 January Stavropol, the administrative centre of Ordzhonikidze Krai (renamed Stavropol Krai at the time). Since 1935 the city had been called Voroshilovsk; the Soviet authorities restored its old name on 12 January 1943, while it was still under occupation, and on 21 January the Red Army entered Stavropol itself. It is this day that the chronologies describe as the day of “further victories in the Caucasus”.

Two days later Kirichenko’s cavalry-mechanised group, after a cross-country march over the snow-covered steppe, linked up near Salsk with the 28th Army of the Southern Front. The forces advancing from the Caucasus and from the Don had joined hands, but too late to encircle anyone: the German columns had already passed through. On 23 January, or a day later according to other sources, troops of the 9th and 37th Armies recaptured Armavir, an important railway junction on the Kuban. On 24 January the Stavka turned the Northern Group of Forces into a separate North Caucasus Front under Maslennikov and gave it a task it was unable to accomplish: to strike at Tikhoretsk and Rostov and destroy the retreating German forces before they crossed the Don.

In three weeks the Northern Group advanced 400–450 kilometres. It was one of the fastest Soviet offensives of that winter, but also, as Soviet historians admitted, essentially a pursuit of an enemy who set the pace of his own retreat. Meanwhile, on the western wing, General Ivan Petrov’s Black Sea Group of Forces, which was to cut the Germans off from Krasnodar, did not move until 16 January. Its advance became bogged down in the thaw, sleet and the mud of flooded rivers.

Place in the history of the war

The withdrawal of the First Panzer Army was one of the most skilfully executed German operations of the winter of 1942–1943. At the turn of January and February its main forces passed through Rostov and joined Army Group Don, and the Germans held the city itself until 14 February. A few weeks later Mackensen’s divisions took part in Manstein’s counter-stroke, which recaptured Kharkiv in March and stabilised the southern front for several months. Had Hitler agreed to the withdrawal a few weeks earlier, and had the Seventeenth Army also headed for Rostov rather than the Kuban, Manstein would have had considerably more forces at his disposal in February.

Kleist received his field marshal’s baton on 1 February 1943. The Red Army went on to recapture Maykop (29 January), Krasnodar (12 February) and Rostov, but failed to encircle either of the armies of Army Group A, although that had been the aim of the whole North Caucasus operation. The Seventeenth Army shut itself up in the Kuban bridgehead and on the Taman Peninsula, where heavy fighting on the ground and in the air went on in the spring and summer of 1943. The offensive into the Caucasus for whose sake Hitler had ordered the bridgehead held never took place; in September and October 1943 it was evacuated across the Kerch Strait to the Crimea.

For the people of the North Caucasus the end of an occupation that had lasted from a few months to well over a year was not the end of their suffering. The occupiers left behind ruined towns and the traces of executions and the graves of murdered Jews – among other places in Mineralnye Vody, where thousands of people were shot in September 1942. The Soviet authorities, for their part, accused entire nations of collaboration and in 1943–1944 deported the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars to Central Asia and Siberia. From the standpoint of the war as a whole, January 1943 finally ended the German dream of Caucasian oil: after the defeat at Stalingrad and the withdrawal from the Terek, the Wehrmacht never again came so close to Grozny and Baku.