The Kharkov offensive

At 6.30 a.m. on 12 May 1942 Soviet artillery opened fire on two sectors of the front east and south of Kharkiv. After an hour of artillery preparation and air strikes, at around 7.30 a.m., the infantry moved forward with tanks. So began the offensive known in the literature as the Kharkov operation or the Second Battle of Kharkov. It was directed by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, commander of the South-Western Direction and at the same time of the South-Western Front. His armies were to outflank Kharkiv with two pincers, from the north-east and from the south, encircle General Friedrich Paulus’s German 6th Army, which was defending the city, and recapture the second-largest city of Soviet Ukraine, taken by the Germans in October 1941. The first days brought the Red Army success. Within a week, however, it was clear that the offensive had stalled and that the Germans were preparing a blow of their own precisely where the Soviet grouping was weakest.

Many war chronologies describe, under 12 May, a plan in which General Fyodor Kharitonov’s 9th Army was to strike first, towards Krasnohrad and then Poltava, followed by General Avksentiy Gorodnyansky’s 6th Army, which after taking Krasnohrad was to wheel north and link up with the 28th and 57th Armies cutting the railway from Belgorod to Kharkiv. In fact the armies played different roles. The thrust on Krasnohrad was made not by the 9th Army but by Major General Leonid Bobkin’s army group, while the 9th and 57th Armies, which belonged to the neighbouring Southern Front, did not attack at all but covered the southern flank of the whole operation. The northern pincer was formed by the 28th Army together with part of the 21st and 38th Armies; the 57th Army was not there. Both assault groups set off on the same day, not one after the other.

The Izium salient

The offensive grew out of the winter fighting. In January 1942, as part of the general offensive ordered by Stalin, the South-Western and Southern Fronts carried out the Barvenkovo–Lozovaya operation. They broke through the front between Balakliia and Sloviansk, crossed the Donets, took Barvenkovo and Lozova, the main supply base of the German 17th Army, and cut the railway lines south of Kharkiv. They did not achieve their aim of cutting off the German forces on the Sea of Azov. What remained on the western bank of the Donets, however, was a deep salient, roughly 100 kilometres across, around Izium and Barvenkovo, with a narrow base of about 80 kilometres on the river. The Russians saw it as a springboard for an attack on Kharkiv and on towards the Dnieper; the Germans saw it as a dangerous wedge driven between their 6th and 17th Armies. In Directive No. 41 of 5 April Hitler named the salient explicitly as one of the objectives of the preliminary operations before the great summer offensive.

Timoshenko’s plan

In the second half of March the military council of the South-Western Direction – Timoshenko, the council member Nikita Khrushchev and the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Ivan Bagramyan – proposed to Moscow a great offensive by three fronts, the Bryansk, South-Western and Southern, which was to carry the Red Army as far as the line Gomel–Kiev–Cherkasy–Mykolaiv. The Stavka rejected the plan because it had no reserves for it. The Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, and his deputy, General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, advised a strategic defence in the spring. Stalin, however, agreed to a series of attacks with limited objectives, and on 10 April Timoshenko presented a narrower plan: an operation by the South-Western Front alone against Kharkiv, of whose success, he assured Moscow, he was certain. The Stavka accepted it. In his order of the day for 1 May Stalin called for 1942 to become the year of the final rout of the German forces.

The plan provided for two converging blows. The main one was to come from the northern part of the Izium salient: Lieutenant General Avksentiy Gorodnyansky (PL)’s 6th Army was to advance straight on Kharkiv from the south, while on its left flank Major General Leonid Bobkin’s army group, made up of rifle divisions and the 6th Cavalry Corps, was to make for Krasnohrad (today Berestyn), cutting Kharkiv off from the west and screening the attack from the direction of Poltava. Once the front had been broken, two new tank corps, the 21st and 23rd, were to be committed to the gap. The second blow was to come from a small bridgehead on the Donets at Staryi Saltiv and from the area of Vovchansk: it was led by Lieutenant General Dmitry Ryabyshev’s 28th Army, supported by the flanks of Major General Vasily Gordov’s 21st Army and Major General Kirill Moskalenko’s 38th Army. The two arms were to meet west of Kharkiv. The southern face of the salient, more than 170 kilometres long, was covered by Lieutenant General Kuzma Podlas’s 57th Army and Major General Fyodor Kharitonov’s 9th Army of Lieutenant General Rodion Malinovsky’s Southern Front. For this they had a mere eleven rifle divisions and one brigade.

The forces assembled were large. Russian studies state that some 640,000 men and about 1,200 tanks took part in the operation; the American historian David Glantz puts all the troops of both fronts involved at more than 765,000. The preparations, however, went badly. The spring thaw, the rasputitsa, delayed the regrouping, troops were moved about chaotically, and reconnaissance of the enemy was poor. Moskalenko later wrote that in these circumstances it was no surprise that the German command had “seen through our intentions”.

The Germans were preparing a blow too

The Russians did not know that the enemy was preparing to attack in the same place. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group South was planning Operation Fridericus: cutting off the Izium salient with two blows at its base, by the 6th Army from the north, from the Balakliia area, and by General Ewald von Kleist’s army group, made up of the 1st Panzer Army and the 17th Army, from the south, from the area of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. The final orders were issued on 30 April, and the start of the attack was set for 18 May. Paulus, who had commanded the 6th Army only since January, submitted his final plan on 10 May. For Fridericus and the subsequent summer offensive the divisions of Army Group South had been brought up to full strength in the spring, and around Kharkiv stood panzer divisions that Soviet reconnaissance had failed to detect. Timoshenko’s offensive thus pre-empted the German attack by six days.

The first days

In the north the attack of the 28th Army and the neighbouring flanks of the 21st and 38th Armies ran into the positions of General Karl-Adolf Hollidt’s German XVII Corps and part of VIII Corps. Every village was fought over. At Nepokryta the Germans counter-attacked three times, and at Ternova an encircled battle group of the 294th Infantry Division held out for several days, supplied from the air. On the first day the Russians advanced at most about 10 kilometres, and Moskalenko discovered that instead of the one division he had expected, two stood facing his army. Within the first three days the leading Soviet units came to within a dozen or so kilometres of Kharkiv, at the best point about 20 kilometres. On 13 May and the following days, however, Paulus launched counter-attacks by the 3rd and 23rd Panzer Divisions, with which he halted the northern arm. By 14 May the 28th Army had practically lost its offensive power.

In the south things went better. The 6th Army and Bobkin’s group struck the sector of General Walter Heitz’s German VIII Corps, including the weak 454th Security Division, made up of second-line troops; Hungarian units were also stationed there. The front gave way, and within three days the Russians had advanced 25–50 kilometres. The 6th Cavalry Corps went round Krasnohrad from the north, east and south, and the spearheads of the 6th Army stood 20–25 kilometres from the southern outskirts of Kharkiv. Timoshenko, however, hesitated to commit the tank corps that were to exploit the success; they stood too far behind the front and entered the battle only on 16–17 May, by which time the Germans had brought up their reserves.

14 May: the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s decision

The German command reacted quickly. The strongest close-support air corps in the east, General Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, was then fighting in the Crimea, where General Erich von Manstein’s 11th Army was just smashing the Crimean Front on the Kerch Peninsula. It is often said that on 14 May Hitler ordered part of Richthofen’s forces to be shifted north to Kharkiv, and that by the end of the day the Germans had begun to gain air superiority. This is broadly true, with one qualification. The original order to transfer the whole corps was rescinded: Richthofen stayed in the Crimea, and only some of his units were sent to Kharkiv. They came under General Kurt Pflugbeil’s IV Air Corps of General Alexander Löhr’s Luftflotte 4. By 15 May Pflugbeil had received four bomber wings and a wing of Ju 87 dive-bombers. Richthofen protested, believing that this endangered victory in the Crimea, and complained that the high command treated the air force as the “whore of the army”.

From 14–15 May the Luftwaffe dominated the battlefield. It bombed supply columns, tanks and the rear areas of the Soviet armies, and dropped ammunition and food to encircled German garrisons. The Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, later named the air attacks as the main reason the Soviet offensive was stopped.

The same day brought a second important decision. Bock initially wanted to rescue Paulus by moving divisions to him from the south. Hitler and Halder decided otherwise: instead of patching up the front at Kharkiv, Kleist was to strike the base of the salient from the south as soon as possible, in a cut-down, “one-armed” version of Fridericus, without waiting for the 6th Army, which was pinned down by fighting in the north. The date was brought forward from 18 to 17 May. Around Sloviansk and Kramatorsk General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps was assembling with the 14th and 16th Panzer Divisions, together with the infantry divisions of XLIV and LII Corps.

17 May: Krasnohrad and the telephone calls to Moscow

For 17 May, war chronologies record that in the north the attack of the 28th and 57th Armies bogged down in front of Paulus’s 6th Army, which Hitler had, unusually, not bound by a “not one step back” order, and which, thanks to the preparations for the summer offensive, was at full strength and superbly equipped. According to the same accounts, in the south the 9th Army routed Romanian troops, took Krasnohrad and advanced on Poltava, while Timoshenko, alarmed by the capture of prisoners from many different armoured units on his left flank, had Khrushchev ask the Stavka for permission to halt the offensive, which was refused.

The picture of the northern sector is broadly accurate, except that the attacking armies there were the 28th, 21st and 38th. Paulus did indeed conduct an elastic defence, giving ground and counter-attacking. In the south, Krasnohrad was not taken. Bobkin’s cavalry reached the town and went round it on three sides, but the German 305th Infantry Division, freshly brought up, struck its flank and removed the threat to Poltava. The 9th Army was not advancing west but standing on the defensive on the southern face of the salient. The Romanian troops – the Romanian VI Corps – covered the western and south-western part of the German front around the salient; the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies arrived on the Eastern Front only in the summer.

At dawn on 17 May Kleist’s counter-attack opened, and on the very first day it broke through the positions of the 9th Army. Timoshenko reported it to Moscow and asked for reinforcements, but judged that he could deal with the threat with his own forces without breaking off the advance on Kharkiv. Vasilevsky, who as Deputy Chief of the General Staff was standing in for the ailing Shaposhnikov, proposed to Stalin on the evening of 17 May and again on 18 May that the offensive be halted and the forces of the 6th Army and Bobkin’s group be turned against Kleist. Citing Timoshenko’s assurances, Stalin refused. According to Bagramyan’s memoirs, as late as the morning of 18 May Timoshenko was assuring Stalin by telephone that there was no need to pull the main forces away from the Kharkiv axis.

According to Vasilevsky, Khrushchev’s famous telephone call took place on the evening of 18 May. Khrushchev rang him and asked him to put the proposal to halt the offensive to Stalin once more. Vasilevsky replied that he had already done so several times and that Stalin had rejected his proposals precisely on the strength of the reports of the Direction’s military council. He advised Khrushchev, as a member of the Politburo, to approach Stalin himself. Stalin spoke to him through Georgy Malenkov and confirmed the order to continue the offensive. Khrushchev later described the scene as proof of Stalin’s guilt. In his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 he said that Stalin, against all common sense, had rejected the military council’s proposal and ordered the encirclement of Kharkiv to continue even though his own groupings were threatened with encirclement, and that the result was the loss of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The memoirs of Vasilevsky, Zhukov and Bagramyan show a more complicated picture: until 18 May Timoshenko and Khrushchev themselves had been assuring Moscow that the situation was under control, and they asked for the offensive to be broken off only when it was too late to save it. Responsibility for the disaster is thus shared between Stalin and the command of the Direction.

Place in the war

The Kharkov offensive was the largest of a series of spring operations with which Stalin wanted to exploit the winter victory at Moscow and forestall the German blow, which he again expected on the Moscow axis. It showed that the Red Army could now break through German defences but could not yet exploit a breakthrough: the tank corps entered the fight too late, the air force lost the battle for air superiority, and the command failed to secure the flank against which, as the map itself made plain, the Germans were bound to strike.

Within the next few days the counter-offensive of Kleist and Paulus trapped the Soviet forces in the Barvenkovo pocket. Among those killed or missing there were the deputy commander of the South-Western Front, Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko, Gorodnyansky, Podlas and Bobkin. According to the Russian statistical study edited by Grigori Krivosheev, Soviet losses amounted to 277,190 men, including 170,958 killed, missing and taken prisoner; the Germans announced the capture of some 240,000 prisoners. Their own losses are estimated at about 20,000 men. At the end of June Stalin wrote to the military council of the South-Western Front that the defeat was equal to the disaster of Samsonov’s and Rennenkampf’s armies in East Prussia in 1914. The punishments, however, were mild: Bagramyan was removed as chief of staff, while Timoshenko and Khrushchev kept their posts for the time being.

The defeat at Kharkiv opened the way for the German summer offensive. When Case Blue began on 28 June, the South-Western and Southern Fronts no longer had the reserves to stop it. That summer the German armies reached Voronezh, the Don and Stalingrad and pushed into the Caucasus. Khrushchev returned to Kharkiv for the rest of his life: in 1956 as an example of Stalin’s “military genius”, and later in his memoirs, where he described it as one of the hardest experiences of the war.