Kleist's counter-offensive

On 18 May 1942, the second day of the German counter-stroke at Kharkiv, the tanks of III Panzer Corps reached the Donets at Izium and broke into the southern part of the town. From that moment the Soviet forces which since 12 May had been attacking Kharkiv from the great salient on the western bank of the Donets had an ever narrower corridor at their backs. General Ewald von Kleist’s army group was driving into the base of the salient from the south, and the next day General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army set out from the north to meet it. The Stavka and Marshal Semyon Timoshenko grasped the danger only on 19 May, and only then ordered the 6th Army to break off its attack and turn back. By then it was too late.

Many war chronologies state under 18 May that Kleist launched his counter-offensive on that day and that on the very first day his spearheads reached the mouth of the Oskil on the Donets, sharply narrowing the base of the salient. The date is in fact a day out. Kleist’s attack had opened a day earlier, at dawn on 17 May; 18 May was already the second day of fighting. On the first day the Germans advanced 6–10 kilometres towards Barvenkovo. They reached the Donets in the Izium area, not far from where the Oskil flows into it, on 18 May. The description of the consequences, on the other hand, is accurate: with its roads and communications cut, the 9th Army began to lose cohesion and ceased to cover the 6th Army, which, wheeling north towards Kharkiv, was badly placed to parry a blow from the south.

The blow from the south

The original plan for Operation Fridericus provided for cutting off the Izium salient with two simultaneous blows at its base: by the 6th Army from the north and by Kleist’s army group from the south. The Soviet offensive, however, pinned down the 6th Army at Kharkiv. On 14 May Hitler, on the advice of the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, ordered Kleist to attack alone, without waiting for Paulus, and a day earlier than planned. In this situation the commander of Army Group South, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, had to defend Kharkiv with the 6th Army alone, supported by the air force.

Kleist’s group consisted of the 1st Panzer Army and the 17th Army. The spearhead of the attack was General Eberhard von Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps with the 14th and 16th Panzer Divisions, supported by the infantry divisions of XLIV and LII Corps. They struck from the area of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk against the south-eastern face of the salient, held by Major General Fyodor Kharitonov’s 9th Army of the Southern Front. On a very wide sector his army had only a few rifle divisions and little anti-tank weaponry, and the Southern Front’s reserves stood far away.

The Luftwaffe dominated the battlefield. General Kurt Pflugbeil’s IV Air Corps, reinforced in the preceding days by units brought from the Crimea, where the Crimean Front had recently been routed, was flying hundreds of sorties a day. Reconnaissance aircraft identified targets and corrected artillery fire, and bombers answered calls from the ground troops within about 20 minutes. Soviet columns, with few anti-aircraft guns and with their railheads a hundred kilometres to the rear, were easy targets. According to German figures, on 18 May the air force alone destroyed 130 tanks and 500 vehicles.

On 17 May Timoshenko reported the German attack to Moscow and asked for reinforcements, but he did not break off the advance on Kharkiv. Neither that day nor on 18 May did he accept the proposal to turn the main forces of the 6th Army and Major General Leonid Bobkin’s army group against Kleist. On the contrary, he assured Stalin that the threat from the direction of Kramatorsk was exaggerated. Stalin therefore rejected the proposals of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Aleksandr Vasilevsky, and on the evening of 18 May also the request of the military council member Nikita Khrushchev.

18 May: on the Donets

On the morning of 18 May some 150 German tanks were advancing on Izium. Timoshenko sent the 343rd Rifle Division there from reserve, with orders to cross the Donets and occupy the southern approaches to the town. It did not arrive in time: at around noon the Germans took the southern part of Izium. During the night the division drove them out of the town and, together with the 5th Cavalry Corps, covered the crossings over the Donets, but the German columns simply bypassed Izium to the west and turned north, deep into the salient. Meanwhile the 9th Army was falling apart. Its divisions were retreating partly across the Donets and partly into the depths of the salient, and its headquarters was losing contact with them. Lieutenant General Kuzma Podlas’s 57th Army to the west found its right flank exposed.

North of Kharkiv, the same day, the 3rd Panzer Division broke through to Ternova and relieved the German battle group that had been encircled there for a week. The 28th Army’s attack had stalled for good. South of the city the spearheads of the Soviet 6th Army and the tank corps were still pushing towards Kharkiv. The further they went, the deeper they entered a sack whose bottom Kleist was just beginning to tie.

19 May: Paulus moves from the north

On 19 May the divisions of III Panzer Corps reached a line from the southern edge of Izium to Kamyshevakha and forced the Bereka river at Petrovske. That day, on Bock’s orders, the 6th Army also went over to the attack. Paulus, whose divisions had spent a week beating off Soviet attacks at Kharkiv, struck southwards from the north, from the German bridgehead on the Donets at Andriivka, west of Balakliia, to meet Kleist. Only a few dozen kilometres now separated the two German groups.

It is often said that on this day the Stavka, increasingly aware of the danger, ordered Lieutenant General Avksentiy Gorodnyansky (PL)’s 6th Army to halt its attack, but that Timoshenko was by then thinking only of saving what he could. That is correct. Only on the afternoon of 19 May did Timoshenko recognise the gravity of the situation, and Stalin agreed to break off the offensive. At 7 p.m. Timoshenko issued combat order No. 00320: the main forces of the 6th Army, with five rifle divisions and the 21st and 23rd Tank Corps, were to regroup covertly, turn east and, together with the 9th and 57th Armies, destroy the German grouping at Barvenkovo. An army that had been advancing north-west for a week now had to turn its front through almost 180 degrees, under constant air attack and without air cover. Some sources date the actual halt of the advance on Kharkiv to 20 May.

20 May: Kostenko in the salient

Under 20 May, war chronologies record that as the spearheads of Kleist and Paulus drew closer, Timoshenko sent his deputy, Lieutenant General Fyodor Kostenko, into the salient to organise a withdrawal or save as many troops as possible. This is essentially true. On 19–20 May Timoshenko placed the forces in the salient – the 6th Army, Bobkin’s group and the 57th Army – under a single command, known as the Kostenko group or the Southern Group. Kostenko, who had himself commanded the South-Western Front from December 1941 to April 1942 and then become Timoshenko’s deputy, was given a task that could no longer be accomplished. The same day the commander of the 9th Army, Kharitonov, was relieved of his post.

On 20 May the Soviet 2nd Cavalry Corps attacked the western flank of the German armoured wedge at Gavrilovka and briefly halted it. The Germans, however, brought up infantry, including the 1st Mountain Division, which took over flank protection, and the tanks pressed on northwards. Ju 87 dive-bombers destroyed five main bridges over the Donets and damaged four others, while Ju 88 bombers attacked the retreating columns. Every day of delay reduced the chances of getting the troops out of the salient.

Place in the war

Kleist’s counter-offensive was one of the most skilfully conducted Wehrmacht operations of 1942. The Germans let the Russians drive deep into their front, held Kharkiv with the help of air power and reserves, and then struck the exposed flank. Marshal Georgy Zhukov later wrote that the danger of a German counter-stroke against the left flank of the salient was evident at a glance at the map. The one-armed version of Fridericus, adopted in haste on 14 May, proved more effective than the original, because it struck forces that had themselves advanced far to the west.

On 22 May the spearheads of the 14th Panzer Division met units of the 6th Army south of Balakliia; according to some sources, the ring was finally closed on 23 May. The Barvenkovo pocket held the 6th and 57th Armies, Bobkin’s group and part of the 9th Army. By the end of May the Germans had destroyed the encircled forces. Kostenko, Gorodnyansky, Podlas and Bobkin were killed or went missing. According to Russian statistical data, the Red Army lost some 277,000 men in the operation as a whole, including more than 170,000 killed, missing and taken prisoner; the Germans claimed about 240,000 prisoners.

The victory at Kharkiv gave the Germans exactly what Directive No. 41 had set as the aim of the preliminary operations. The Izium salient was gone, and the South-Western and Southern Fronts had lost their best troops and reserves. In June Army Group South carried out two more smaller operations, Wilhelm and Fridericus II, and on 28 June the great summer offensive began. The same Paulus who closed the Barvenkovo pocket in May found himself encircled at Stalingrad half a year later.