The Germans take Rostov

On 21 November 1941 German troops took Rostov-on-Don, a large city and railway junction where the Don flows into the Sea of Azov. It was captured by General der Kavallerie Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Motorised Corps of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army. The city was entered by the 13th and 14th Panzer Divisions, the 60th Motorised Infantry Division and Josef “Sepp” Dietrich’s motorised SS division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. The Soviet 56th Army under Lieutenant General Fyodor Remezov, which had been defending Rostov, withdrew across the Don. For German propaganda this was the ideal finale to the autumn campaign in the south: the Wehrmacht stood at the gates of the Caucasus and its oil.

Rostov is often described as an important junction on the southern sector of the front, and rightly so. The date usually given, 21 November, is also correct, though it needs filling out: German tanks had reached the outskirts as early as 19 November, and on 20 November there was street fighting in the city. During the night of 20–21 November the Soviet command ordered a retreat to the left bank of the Don, and on 21 November the whole of the city on the right bank was in German hands. The German victory, however, proved short-lived. Since 17 November, the very day Kleist had set off for Rostov, a new Soviet army had been attacking his exposed northern flank.

The gateway to the Caucasus

According to the 1939 census Rostov-on-Don had more than half a million inhabitants. It was a regional capital, a centre of the engineering industry and the most important communications hub between central Russia and the Caucasus: here the railway from Moscow and Voronezh crossed the Don and ran on south to the oilfields of Maikop, Grozny and Baku. Whoever held Rostov could close or open the road to the Caucasus. That is why it was called the “gateway to the Caucasus”, and as early as August, when he changed the direction of the offensive, Hitler had decided that cutting the USSR off from Caucasian oil was a more important objective than Moscow itself.

After the destruction of two armies of the Southern Front on the Sea of Azov at the beginning of October, the road to Rostov seemed open. Kleist’s tanks crossed the Mius and on 17 October took Taganrog, some 70 kilometres from Rostov. Then came the rasputitsa. The autumn rains turned the steppe roads into a quagmire, supply columns got stuck, and fuel and ammunition reached the front days late. For several weeks the 1st Panzer Army advanced, as German reports put it, “metre by metre”. In the same period the neighbouring 6th Army took Kharkiv and Manstein’s 11th Army broke into the Crimea, but neither could now support Kleist.

The commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, believed that his troops were at the end of their strength. On 3 November, at his headquarters in Poltava, he urged the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, that the armies should halt and dig in for the winter. Hitler, however, demanded a further advance: to the Don, then on to Maikop and even to the Volga. Rundstedt, 65 years old and in poor health, complied.

The first attempt: through Shakhty

The Soviet Southern Front, commanded since 5 October by Colonel General Yakov Cherevichenko, had been badly weakened by the October defeats. Its 12th, 18th and 9th Armies were seriously short of men and equipment, because the reserves were going to Moscow. The immediate defence of Rostov was entrusted to the separate 56th Army, formed from mid-October in the North Caucasus by Remezov, who had earlier commanded the group holding the Germans at Taganrog. The army built a belt of fortifications around Rostov and Novocherkassk. Units made up of the city’s inhabitants also took up the defence: the Rostov people’s militia regiment and the 339th Rifle Division, formed locally.

The Germans, knowing that the route along the coast and the railway from Taganrog was the most strongly defended, decided to bypass Rostov from the north. On 5 November the 1st Panzer Army attacked Major General Fyodor Kharitonov’s 9th Army in the direction of Shakhty and Novocherkassk. Russian studies stress that in the Dyakovo area the defenders used for the first time on such a scale a system of anti-tank strongpoints covering one another with fire. By 16 November the Germans had advanced only a dozen or so kilometres on the main axis and had not broken through the front. Kleist therefore changed his plan: instead of a wide outflanking movement he decided to strike almost directly at Rostov from the north-west, through Bolshiye Saly, and with Mackensen’s corps also from the west, through Chaltyr.

Meanwhile a different plan was maturing on the Soviet side. The German thrust into the 9th Army’s defences had lengthened the northern flank of the 1st Panzer Army, which was only thinly covered by XIV Motorised Corps and XLIX Mountain Corps. On 8 November the Commander-in-Chief of the South-Western Direction, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, presented Stalin with a plan for a counter-offensive, and the next day the Stavka approved it. From divisions taken from various armies of the South-Western Front and from meagre reserves, a new 37th Army was formed in the area of Kamensk-Shakhtinsky under Major General Anton Lopatin. On 15–16 November it moved up into the front line between the 18th and 9th Armies. It was to strike south into the rear of Kleist’s corps and reach the Sea of Azov near Taganrog.

17 November: two attacks on one day

After the first frosts had hardened the roads, the 1st Panzer Army set off for Rostov at eight in the morning on 17 November. According to Russian studies the 37th Army went over to the attack an hour later, together with the flanks of the neighbouring armies. The two sides had similar numbers of men and aircraft, but in this sector the Germans had roughly a twofold superiority in tanks – according to Russian calculations about 250 against 120.

On the first day the 37th Army advanced a dozen or so kilometres, and by 21 November another dozen or so, overcoming the resistance of a motorised division and part of a panzer division that the Germans threw into counter-attacks. It was a slow and costly advance: the Soviet command had prepared it in haste, the infantry co-operated poorly with the tanks and artillery, and because of the weather the air force was almost inactive until 20 November. In the first days the Germans took it for a local operation of the kind they had already repulsed many times in this war, and did not halt their march on Rostov.

The fight for the city

On 19 November German tanks broke through to the north-eastern outskirts of Rostov, into the rear of the 56th Army. Throughout 20 November fighting raged on the close approaches to the city and then in its streets. Soviet rifle divisions, broken up into groups, held out around the main railway station, in the centre and along the river, where the Germans were trying to seize the crossings over the Don. The fighting for Green Island in the Don was particularly fierce. The defenders lost many guns and tanks as well as three armoured trains. During the night of 20–21 November the 56th Army command ordered a retreat to the left bank of the river, to the area of Bataysk, and eastwards towards Novocherkassk.

The most valuable prize was to be the railway bridge over the Don. According to German accounts and some Russian studies, the 1st Battalion of the Leibstandarte forced its way onto it before it could be blown. According to the history of the bridge itself, however, Soviet sappers did manage on 21 November to blow its southern span and an auxiliary bridge alongside it. The Germans failed to establish a bridgehead on the left bank of the Don from which they could have pushed on to the Caucasus.

German communiqués announced the capture of some 10,000 prisoners in the fighting for Rostov. Some of them were taken by the Leibstandarte, which over the following days guarded the city and the bank of the Don. Its commander, SS-Obergruppenführer Dietrich, was one of the men closest to Hitler, and the division bore the Führer’s name. German propaganda presented the capture of Rostov by “his” guard as proof that the Red Army was still retreating, even though at that very moment the November offensive against Moscow was under way, from which the Germans were also expecting a decision.

Occupation

For the inhabitants who had not managed, or had not wished, to flee across the Don, occupation began. The Soviet authorities had evacuated some industrial plants and offices to the east beforehand, but most of the population had stayed in the city. On 22 November the German command ordered the destruction of all pigeons kept by the inhabitants, fearing that they would be used to carry messages across the river. In districts where scattered Soviet units and local volunteers were still firing on German patrols, the occupiers responded by shooting civilians at random. The week of German rule in Rostov went down in the memory of its inhabitants as the “bloody week”, and its victims were counted only after the Red Army returned.

Too far

Kleist took Rostov with the last of his strength. After five months of fighting his panzer divisions had only a fraction of the tanks with which they had begun the war, the motorised infantry had been decimated, and supplies, hauled over hundreds of kilometres of wrecked railways and sodden roads, could not keep up with the troops. The frosts arrived, and the soldiers had no winter clothing. Tank and lorry engines had to be warmed up for hours, lubricants and fuel thickened, and automatic weapons jammed. Kleist warned his superiors that his left flank was exposed and that in the frost his tanks were losing their fighting value. His warnings were ignored.

On the very day Rostov was taken, Kleist had to send the first units back out of the city northwards to the Tuzlov river, where the 37th Army was approaching. On 22 and 23 November Lopatin’s troops advanced another 25 kilometres or so and reached the Tuzlov. Between them and the coast of the Sea of Azov there remained an ever narrower strip through which ran the supply routes of Mackensen’s corps. The SS division Wiking was thrown into the fighting around Rostov from XIV Corps, and a few days later so was the Slovak motorised division, which until then had been guarding the coast. The Soviet 56th Army, placed under the Southern Front on 23 November, was meanwhile regrouping beyond the Don for an attack across the frozen river.

Place in the war

Rostov was the easternmost point the Wehrmacht reached on the southern wing of the front in 1941, and one of the last successes of the German offensive that autumn. Its capture was supposed to open the road to the Caucasus, but in reality it laid bare all the weaknesses that Rundstedt had been pointing out for weeks: exhausted troops, overstretched supply lines, a lack of reserves and of preparations for winter. As at Moscow, which the Germans were approaching in those same days, it turned out that the Wehrmacht could still take important objectives but could no longer hold them.

A week later a Soviet counter-offensive drove the Germans out of Rostov, and Rundstedt, who had ordered a withdrawal to the Mius in defiance of Hitler’s prohibition, was relieved of his command during the night of 30 November–1 December. It was the Wehrmacht’s first serious retreat of the war and the first large city to be retaken by the Red Army. The Germans returned to Rostov in the summer of 1942 in Case Blue (Fall Blau), whose objective was once again the Caucasian oilfields. Soviet troops finally liberated the city in February 1943, after the German defeat at Stalingrad.