The Korsun pocket

Around midday on 28 January 1944 the spearheads of two Soviet fronts met in the Ukrainian town of Zvenyhorodka. From the north-west came the 233rd Tank Brigade of the 6th Tank Army (PL) of the 1st Ukrainian Front; from the south-east, units of the 20th Tank Corps of the 5th Guards Tank Army of the 2nd Ukrainian Front. Attacks launched four and two days earlier from opposite sides of a German salient jutting out to the Dnieper had cut it off at its base. Behind the backs of the Soviet tank crews, in the area of Korsun and Kaniv, were two German army corps – General Wilhelm Stemmermann’s XI and General Theobald Lieb’s XLII – some 56,000–60,000 soldiers in all.

That day the ring was still thin: it consisted of strung-out armoured columns, and the infantry of the two fronts closed a continuous inner front of encirclement only between 31 January and 3 February. Nevertheless, 28 January became established as the day on which the pocket – called the Cherkassy pocket by the Germans and the Korsun–Shevchenkovsky pocket by the Russians – became a fact. The fighting that ended it – the German relief attempt and the night breakout of 16–17 February – belongs to the following month.

The salient on the Dnieper

In the autumn of 1943 the Red Army, having won the Battle of the Dnieper, stood on the right bank of the river. The liberation of Kiev on 6 November and later gains near Cherkasy, Kremenchuk and Dnipropetrovsk wrecked the idea that the Wehrmacht would spend the winter behind the fortifications of the Eastern Wall, which in this sector existed largely only on maps. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, asked throughout the autumn for permission to shorten the front and withdraw troops from sectors that could not be held. Adolf Hitler refused: he wanted to hold the Dnieper bend, the Nikopol bridgehead with its manganese ore and access to the Crimea, and he regarded every kilometre given up without a fight as political damage.

In December the Eastern Front was still swaying under German counter-attacks from around Zhytomyr, but at the turn of the year both Soviet fronts outflanked the German wings. In the north General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin’s 1st Ukrainian Front struck from Kiev on 24 December, recaptured Zhytomyr and Berdychiv, and at the beginning of January reached the pre-war Polish border in Volhynia. In the south General of the Army Ivan Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front took Kirovohrad on 8 January. Between these two breaches, on the stretch from Kaniv on the Dnieper through Korsun to the area of Smila, the Germans still held on the river a salient about 100 kilometres wide, projecting eastwards – one of the last sectors of the front in Ukraine still resting on the Dnieper. Hitler saw it as a springboard for the future recapture of Kiev; the Soviet command saw a ready-made target for a repeat of Stalingrad.

The plan of two pincers

The idea of cutting off the salient with attacks from both sides was put to the Stavka by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who as its representative was coordinating the operations of both Ukrainian fronts. Joseph Stalin approved it in mid-January. Konev was to strike from the south-east with the 4th Guards Army and the 53rd Army and push into the breach the 5th Guards Tank Army of Colonel General Pavel Rotmistrov, a veteran of Prokhorovka. Vatutin was to attack from the north-west with his flank armies – the 27th and 40th – together with Lieutenant General Andrei Kravchenko’s newly formed 6th Tank Army. The latter had been created from two corps only a few days before the battle and had, according to various returns, between about 100 and 200 tanks and self-propelled guns. The two arms of the pincers were to meet in the area of Zvenyhorodka and Shpola, and behind them two rings were to be formed: an inner one to strangle the encircled forces and an outer one facing any relief attempt.

The Germans expected an attack. In the second half of January the war diary of General Otto Wöhler’s Eighth Army, which defended the greater part of the salient, recorded a growing concentration of Soviet troops, and Manstein warned of the danger to both corps. Permission to withdraw them, however, was not forthcoming, and Army Group South’s reserves were at the same time tied down in fighting near Vinnytsia and Uman, where a German counter-attack had just inflicted heavy losses on Vatutin.

From 24 to 28 January

Konev began on 24 January with a reconnaissance in force by forward battalions, which at several points broke into the German positions at the junctions between divisions. The success was so clear that on 25 January the main forces of the 4th Guards and 53rd Armies went over to the attack, and that same day Rotmistrov’s corps entered the breach. In the thaw the dirt roads across the Ukrainian black earth turned into mud, but T-34 tanks and American lorries supplied under Lend-Lease coped with it better than German wheeled vehicles. The German 11th and 14th Panzer Divisions counter-attacked around Kapitanivka and briefly cut off the spearheads of the 5th Guards Tank Army from the infantry following them. Rotmistrov, however, did not turn back but pressed on westwards.

On 26 January Vatutin attacked from the north-west. The 6th Tank Army, inexperienced and weaker than had been assumed, broke through the German defences more slowly than Rotmistrov, and only after forming a strong mobile group from the 5th Mechanised Corps – based on Major General Mikhail Savelyev’s 233rd Tank Brigade – did it manage to get into the enemy’s rear through Lysianka. On the morning of 28 January this group set off for Zvenyhorodka, in the afternoon it was fighting in the streets of the town, and tanks of Rotmistrov’s 20th Tank Corps entered it from the south-east. The tank crews of the two fronts formed an all-round defence and waited for the infantry to arrive.

Who was trapped in the pocket

The encirclement trapped two corps, which were soon placed under the command of the Eighth Army: Stemmermann’s XI Army Corps and Lieb’s XLII Army Corps. They consisted of six weakened divisions – the 57th, 72nd, 88th and 389th Infantry Divisions, Corps Detachment B (made up of the remnants of several divisions destroyed earlier) and SS-Gruppenführer Herbert Otto Gille’s 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking. Attached to Wiking was SS-Sturmbrigade Wallonien – Belgian volunteers under SS-Sturmbannführer Lucien Lippert, among whom served the leader of the Walloon Rexists, Léon Degrelle – as well as the Estonian SS volunteer battalion Narwa. Also trapped in the pocket were several thousand Soviet citizens serving the Germans as auxiliaries – the so-called Hilfswillige – and thousands of Ukrainian civilians from the surrounding villages who found themselves caught between the combatants.

The number of men encircled is disputed. The German archives and the studies based on them – the German official history Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (volume 8, in a chapter by Karl-Heinz Frieser) and the works of Douglas Nash and of Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson – give from about 56,000 to 59,000 men, including a large proportion of rear services. The divisions were on average at just over half their establishment strength, and all the armour gathered in the pocket amounted to a few dozen tanks and assault guns, mostly Wiking’s. Soviet studies listed more formations in the pocket and put the strength of the force considerably higher, which to this day remains one of the sources of the discrepancies in loss estimates.

As early as 28 January the Luftwaffe began supplying the encircled troops by air; transport aircraft landed at a field airstrip near Korsun and flew out the wounded. Over the following days the Soviet infantry sealed the ring: on 31 January units of the 27th Army and the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps met near Olshana, and on 3 February, after the arrival of the main forces of the 4th Guards Army, the inner front of encirclement was continuous. Konev assured Stalin that the encircled enemy would not escape, and in Moscow people began to speak of a “second Stalingrad”. The comparison with the Battle of Stalingrad, however, proved exaggerated.

February: relief and breakout

For the relief Manstein assembled two panzer corps: General Hermann Breith’s III from the west and General Nikolaus von Vormann’s XLVII from the south. At Hitler’s demand the first attacks at the beginning of February were not only to punch a corridor through but also to encircle part of the Soviet forces in turn. This ambitious plan foundered on the weakness of the divisions, the thaw and Soviet reserves; Breith lost several days before he could direct his attack straight at Lysianka on 11 February. Meanwhile the ring was shrinking. On 8 February Soviet envoys delivered to Stemmermann and Lieb a call to surrender, which was rejected; appeals were also made to the encircled troops by radio and in leaflets by German prisoners from the National Committee for a Free Germany and the League of German Officers, among them General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach. Around 12 February, when the German attack threatened the sector of Vatutin’s 27th Army, Stalin handed the destruction of the pocket entirely to Konev – according to Zhukov’s memoirs at Konev’s own request, according to Konev on Stalin’s initiative. Zhukov and Vatutin received a sharp reprimand from the Stavka. On 14 February the 52nd Army took Korsun together with its airfield.

On 16 February Manstein, without waiting for Hitler’s decision, radioed the encircled troops the order to break out, under the password “Freiheit” (Freedom). During the night of 16–17 February three columns set off from the area of the village of Shenderivka towards the spearheads of III Panzer Corps a few kilometres away. A rearguard remained with Stemmermann, and some 1,450 seriously wounded men were left at Shenderivka with medical staff. The first units reached the German positions near Lysianka before dawn, but Hill 239, over which the route was to lead, turned out to be held by Soviet tanks. The columns veered south, abandoned almost all their heavy equipment and in the morning came under fire from tanks and charges by Cossack cavalry. Thousands of soldiers waded through the icy water of the swollen Hnylyi Tikych stream; many drowned or died of exposure. General Stemmermann was killed during the breakout when his car was hit by a Soviet anti-tank shell; Lippert had fallen a few days earlier in the defence of Nova Buda.

The final tally remains disputed. According to findings based on German archives, about 36,000 men broke out of the pocket, and more than 4,000 wounded had earlier been flown out – so in all about two-thirds of those encircled were saved, while roughly 19,000 were lost as killed, missing and captured. The Soviet side, on the other hand, announced that the Germans had lost 55,000 killed and 18,200 prisoners, which, given the actual strength of the force, cannot be reconciled with the German documentation. Russian statistical studies put Soviet losses in the whole operation at more than 80,000 men, including about 24,300 killed, dead and missing. The surviving Germans, however, came out of the pocket without guns, tanks or vehicles, and six divisions had to be withdrawn for rebuilding. On 20 February 1944 Konev was promoted to Marshal of the Soviet Union, and Degrelle received the Knight’s Cross from Hitler’s own hands.

Place in the war

The Korsun pocket was not a second Stalingrad. The Soviet command failed to destroy the encircled forces completely, and two-thirds of them made it back to their own lines – albeit as men, not as an army. At the same time it was the first operation since Stalingrad in which the Red Army had trapped a large German force in a pocket, held both rings despite a strong relief attempt and forced the enemy to abandon all its heavy equipment. The stubborn defence of the salient on the Dnieper cost Army Group South several divisions just when it needed every reserve, and drawing the panzer corps to Korsun exposed other sectors.

The Soviet command exploited this at once. In February Vatutin’s right wing took Rivne and Lutsk, and the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts captured Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih. In March all the Ukrainian fronts launched a great offensive that within a few weeks carried them through Uman to the Dniester and the Prut, to the Romanian border; near Kamianets-Podilskyi the whole German First Panzer Army was encircled and broke out to the west only in April. Manstein, who had been arguing with Hitler for months over freedom of manoeuvre, was dismissed on 30 March 1944 and never received another command. Vatutin did not live to see the end of this campaign: on 29 February he was seriously wounded in an ambush by a unit of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Volhynia and died in Kiev in mid-April.

Korsun also became one of the most disputed episodes of the war in the east. Soviet historiography, beginning with Sergei Smirnov’s sketch “Stalingrad on the Dnieper”, presented the battle as the complete destruction of the encircled forces; German propaganda presented it as a victorious relief operation that had saved heroic comrades-in-arms. Only research based on the archives of both sides made it possible to establish that the truth lay in between: it was a clear, though costly, Soviet victory that did not bring the annihilation of the two corps but hastened the expulsion of the Germans from right-bank Ukraine. The whole battle forms part of the wider Dnieper–Carpathian operation – the largest Soviet offensive of the winter and spring of 1944, which coincided with the lifting of the siege of Leningrad in the north of the front.