The Germans in Smolensk

On the evening of 15 July 1941 the leading regiment of the German 29th Motorised Division broke into the outskirts of Smolensk from the south-west. Through the night and all the following day, 16 July, its men fought in the streets of the old city on the Dnieper against a rifle regiment, militia battalions, workers’ self-defence units and an NKVD convoy troops regiment. By evening the Germans held the southern, left-bank part of the city, with the walled old centre and the cathedral; the defenders withdrew across the river and blew the bridges behind them. Smolensk – a regional capital, an important railway junction on the Warsaw–Moscow line and for centuries the “key” to the Russian capital – lay less than 400 kilometres from the Kremlin. The Germans had reached it in under four weeks from crossing the border.

Popular chronologies record under 16 July that Guderian’s tanks reached Smolensk, increasing the threat to Moscow, and under 28 July that the Germans “press on Smolensk”. Both statements are broadly accurate but need filling out. The city was taken not by tanks but by motorised infantry of Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s panzer group, and 16 July marked not the end of the fight for Smolensk but its beginning. The northern part of the city and its surroundings were fought over for almost two more weeks, and to the east of it three Soviet armies, almost completely cut off from the rest of the front, battled for a fortnight to break out of the encirclement.

From the Dnieper to Smolensk

The road to Smolensk opened on 9–11 July, when the Germans took Vitebsk and Guderian’s three corps crossed the Dnieper between Orsha and Bykhov. From then on both German panzer groups, as at Minsk, pushed east separately and without the infantry, which was still finishing off the Białystok–Minsk pocket. From the north, from Vitebsk, Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 headed for Demidov and Velizh, which it took on 13 July, and then turned south: on 15 July the 7th Panzer Division reached the Smolensk–Moscow highway and railway near Yartsevo, some 50 kilometres east of Smolensk, and cut them. From the south General Joachim Lemelsen’s XLVII Motorised Corps advanced from Kopys through Krasny on Smolensk itself. Its leading 29th Motorised Division was commanded by Generalmajor Walter von Boltenstern.

On the Soviet side the defence of the Moscow direction had been conducted since 10 July by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, as Commander-in-Chief of the Western Direction and at the same time commander of the Western Front. After Stalin’s call of 3 July to fight “to the last drop of blood”, Moscow demanded counter-attacks from him in every sector. On 13 July, on the southern wing, the 21st Army retook Rogachev and Zhlobin and threatened Guderian’s rear near Bobruisk, but in the north the attacks on Vitebsk failed. On 14 July Timoshenko reported to the Stavka that the troops, after a long retreat and hasty replenishment, were “unreliable”, that there had been cases of units fleeing before aircraft and tanks, and that new divisions were arriving by rail in disorder – rear services in the first trains, fighting troops at the end. That same day near Orsha Captain Ivan Flyorov’s battery used BM-13 rocket launchers in battle for the first time; they were soon nicknamed “Katyushas”.

The battle for the city

Smolensk was to be defended by Lieutenant General Mikhail Lukin (PL)’s 16th Army, brought up at the turn of June and July, but its two divisions stood far from the city, north of the Dnieper. The garrison of Smolensk itself was weak: one regiment of the 64th Rifle Division, an NKVD convoy battalion, and destruction battalions made up of militiamen, workers and Komsomol members. The rifle regiment was almost entirely wiped out trying to stop the Germans on the approaches. According to the German corps’s war diary, the men of the 71st Motorised Regiment fought “extremely fierce battles” after dark on 15 July, under fire from windows and cellars, and in places the fighting came to hand-to-hand combat. During the night of 15–16 July the remnants of the defenders crossed to the right bank of the Dnieper and blew up two road bridges.

The fall of Smolensk enraged Stalin. An order of the State Defence Committee of 16 July stated that the command of the Western Front was riddled with an “evacuation mood” and was taking the surrender of Smolensk lightly, which it judged a crime bordering on treason, and ordered that the city must on no account be given up. Divisions of the 19th and 16th Armies, falling back from Vitebsk and Orsha, were thrown into the fight. On 17 and 18 July districts in the northern part of the city changed hands repeatedly. In the fighting on the southern outskirts the commander of the German 17th Panzer Division, General Karl von Weber, was mortally wounded by a shell splinter. Between 14 and 19 July the 29th Motorised Division lost almost a thousand killed and wounded – the most of any of Guderian’s divisions.

On 16 July, the day the Germans entered Smolensk, a senior lieutenant of artillery from the shattered 14th Tank Division was taken prisoner near Liozna, between Vitebsk and Smolensk: Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s eldest son. German propaganda soon made him the subject of leaflets. He died in 1943 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

The Smolensk pocket

The entry of the 29th Division into Smolensk and the arrival of Hoth’s tanks at Yartsevo trapped three Soviet armies in a semi-encirclement north and east of the city: Lukin’s 16th, Lieutenant General Ivan Konev’s 19th and Lieutenant General Pavel Kurochkin’s 20th – about twenty divisions, according to Soviet studies. They were linked to the rest of the front only by a narrow corridor between Yartsevo and Smolensk and the crossing over the Dnieper at Solovyovo, which was under artillery fire and air attack. Between the spearheads of Hoth and Guderian there remained a gap a dozen or so kilometres wide. On 17 July Major General Konstantin Rokossovsky arrived at front headquarters and, from units hastily gathered near Yartsevo – one tank division, the remnants of other formations and soldiers emerging from the encirclement – built up a group that over the following days prevented Hoth from closing the ring.

The Germans, too, lacked the strength to end the battle quickly. Instead of turning his tanks north towards Hoth, Guderian pushed the 10th Panzer Division and the SS Division “Das Reich” further east; on 19 July they took Yelnya on the Desna, some 80 kilometres south-east of Smolensk, where they formed a forward salient pointing towards Moscow. Bock held this against him: these were precisely the divisions needed to close the pocket. On the northern wing Hoth’s LVII Corps took Velikiye Luki on 19 July, but had to give it up again as early as 21 July. At the same time the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, was noting in his diary a “decline in morale” in the higher headquarters, brought about by the ferocity of the fighting, the exhaustion of the troops and the late arrival of the infantry, which had only begun to reach Smolensk on 16 July.

The Soviet command decided to exploit this moment. On 20 July Stalin instructed Timoshenko to form shock groups from divisions of the newly raised reserve armies and retake Smolensk. Five operational groups – under General Vasily Khomenko, General Stepan Kalinin, General Ivan Maslennikov, General Vladimir Kachalov and Rokossovsky – went over to the attack from 23 July from the north, east and south-east: from the area of the town of Bely, from near Yartsevo and from near Roslavl. The groups struck at different times, on wide frontages and without sufficient support, and none of them broke through to Smolensk. They did, however, force the German panzer divisions onto the defensive on the outer ring and cost them heavy losses; Guderian admitted that the situation in the Roslavl area became critical. From 19 July the Western Front was commanded by Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko, while Timoshenko retained command of the whole direction.

28 July: the Germans press on Smolensk

In the last week of July the German infantry corps at last reached Smolensk. They began to crush the pocket from the west and cut it into pieces, leaving Hoth and Guderian free to concentrate on closing it. On 26 July, after three weeks of resistance, encircled Mogilev fell. During the night of 26–27 July German divisions attacked the Solovyovo crossing from both sides and took it: the ring around the 16th and 20th Armies, which also took in the remnants of the 19th Army, was closed. On 28 July – the day under which chronologies write of German pressure on Smolensk – the Soviet divisions abandoned the northern part of the city under enemy pressure. Timoshenko, who learned of this only from the morning report of the following day, ordered Kurochkin and Lukin to retake the city at once; the counter-attack of 29–30 July collapsed with heavy losses. Also on 28 July Rokossovsky’s group, reinforced by a fresh rifle corps, retook Yartsevo, and in the first days of August it reopened the crossings over the Dnieper. By 4–5 August some of the encircled troops, above all from the 20th Army, had broken out to the east.

The changes reached the high command as well. At the end of July the Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, proposed to Stalin that the troops be pulled back across the Dnieper and Kiev given up before the Germans closed an even larger pocket there. Stalin rejected this advice and on 30 July removed him from the General Staff; Zhukov took over the Reserve Front, formed east of Smolensk, and in August began preparing an attack on the German salient at Yelnya. On the same day Timoshenko again took direct command of the Western Front.

The dispute over the next objective: Directives Nos 33 and 34

The Battle of Smolensk coincided with a dispute that was to decide the fate of the whole campaign. Directive No. 21 of December 1940 had not settled what was to follow the destruction of the Red Army west of the Dvina and the Dnieper; in it, Moscow was to come only after Leningrad had been taken. In mid-July, when the front had moved several hundred kilometres from the border and Army Groups North and South had fallen behind Army Group Centre, Adolf Hitler decided to use its tanks on the flanks.

On 19 July he signed Directive No. 33. Once the fighting at Smolensk was over, Guderian’s panzer group was to turn south-east to destroy, together with Army Group South, the Soviet armies in Ukraine west of the Dnieper, while Hoth’s group was to turn north to support the advance on Leningrad. Army Group Centre was to advance on Moscow with infantry alone. A supplement of 23 July widened these tasks further: after the battles in Ukraine, Guderian’s tanks were to advance on Kharkov and on beyond the Don towards the Caucasus. The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, Halder, Bock, Guderian and Hoth all believed that forces should be concentrated against Moscow, where the main Soviet forces stood and the country’s railways converged. On 27 July, at a conference at Bock’s headquarters at Novy Borisov, they were presented – as Guderian recalled – with instructions in line with the new directive: after the destruction of the forces at Smolensk, not to advance further on Moscow but to turn against the Soviet forces on the flanks, with Guderian’s group to strike south-west, towards Gomel.

Events at Smolensk, however, forced a pause. On 30 July Hitler signed Directive No. 34, which postponed the tasks of Directive No. 33 “for the time being”. Army Group Centre was to go over to the defensive, and both panzer groups were to be withdrawn from the line for about ten days to rest and refit. For the first time since 22 June the German army group on the main axis had come to a halt. Hitler took his final decision only in August.

Its place in the war

When the fighting in the pocket died down at the beginning of August, Bock reported more than 300,000 prisoners taken and more than three thousand tanks destroyed or captured. Three more Soviet armies had been smashed at Smolensk, and on 1 August Guderian’s group struck at Roslavl, where it encircled Kachalov’s group; its commander was killed trying to break out, and Stalin, believing false reports, declared him a traitor in Order No. 270 of 16 August (he was rehabilitated in 1953). The battle did not, however, end as the battle of Minsk had. Tens of thousands of soldiers got out of the pocket, and at Yelnya and Dukhovshchina the Red Army kept attacking Army Group Centre throughout August and into early September. At the beginning of September Zhukov’s troops eliminated the Yelnya salient; it was the Red Army’s first successful offensive of the war. According to the Russian compilation of losses edited by Grigori Krivosheev, in the Battle of Smolensk, counted from 10 July to 10 September, Soviet forces lost almost 760,000 men, including more than 486,000 killed, missing and taken prisoner. German losses were many times smaller, but far higher than in previous campaigns.

The battle’s most important consequence was time. Army Group Centre stood at Smolensk for almost two months. On 21 August Hitler settled the dispute with his generals: Guderian’s panzer group turned south into the rear of the South-Western Front, and in September closed the largest pocket of the war at Kiev. The Germans set off for Moscow only at the turn of September and October, in Operation Typhoon, which bogged down in the autumn mud and the winter frosts on the approaches to the capital. After the war Wehrmacht generals blamed the defeat at Moscow on the “turn towards Kiev”; historians point rather to the fact that already at Smolensk the German panzer divisions were worn out, supplies were falling short, and the Red Army had proved able to field new armies faster than the Germans could destroy them.

Smolensk remained under German occupation for more than two years. The city’s Jews were shut in a ghetto and murdered in 1942. In mid-July 1941 the forest near Katyn and Gnezdovo station, a dozen or so kilometres west of Smolensk, where in the spring of 1940 the NKVD had shot Polish officers from the Kozelsk camp, also passed into German hands. The Germans announced the discovery of the graves in April 1943, and for half a century Moscow maintained that the Polish prisoners had fallen into German hands in the summer of 1941 and been murdered by the Germans. This version of the Katyn massacre, built on the date of the German advance on Smolensk, was a lie that Russia retracted only in 1990. The Red Army retook Smolensk on 25 September 1943.