The liberation of Gomel

On the morning of 26 November 1943 units of the Soviet 11th and 48th Armies entered Gomel – a major railway junction on the Sozh river in south-eastern Belarus. The Germans, threatened with encirclement, had abandoned the city during the night. It was the first regional centre of the Byelorussian SSR to be recovered by the Red Army, and the culmination of the Gomel–Rechitsa operation, conducted since 10 November by the Belorussian Front (PL) under General of the Army Konstantin Rokossovsky.

Popular chronologies give under this date only the vague statement that “the Red Army offensive in Ukraine continues”. It is true but describes nothing in particular, and the most important event on the Eastern Front that day took place not in Ukraine but in Belarus: the capture of Gomel.

Background: the front on the Sozh and the Dnieper

Gomel had fallen into German hands on 19 August 1941, when the 2nd Army and Guderian’s panzer group, turned south after the Battle of Smolensk, rolled through eastern Belarus on their way to Kiev. For more than two years the city served as a rear base of Army Group Centre: it held German transit camps for prisoners of war (Dulag 220 and Dulag 121), a prison and forced labour camps. The Jews of Gomel – who before the war made up a substantial part of the population – were confined by the Germans in four ghettos in the autumn of 1941 and murdered in mass executions outside the city on 3–4 November 1941. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission gave a figure of about 4,000 murdered, but later findings, based on documents from 1944 and on further execution sites, indicate that there were at least 10,000 victims.

After the victory in the Kursk salient and the liberation of Oryol, Rokossovsky’s Central Front moved west on 26 August 1943 into the gap between Army Groups Centre and South. In September it forced the Desna, took Chernihiv and reached the Dnieper at the mouth of the Pripyat. On its right wing Soviet troops crossed the old border of Belarus – taking, among other places, Komarin and Dobrush – and at the end of September approached Gomel itself. Here the advance stalled: the city was strongly fortified and formed one of the strongpoints of the German Eastern Wall (Panther–Wotan line), and the Germans had concentrated considerable forces between the Sozh and the Dnieper.

On 10 October the armies of the disbanded Bryansk Front were added to the Central Front, among them General Ivan Fedyuninsky’s 11th Army and General Alexander Gorbatov’s 3rd Army, and on 20 October the front was renamed the Belorussian Front. On the German side Gomel was defended by the 9th Army, commanded from November by General Josef Harpe in place of Walter Model, while to its south, towards the Pripyat, stretched General Walter Weiss’s 2nd Army. The commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, was badly injured in a car accident at the end of October, and command passed to Field Marshal Ernst Busch.

Rokossovsky judged that a frontal assault on Gomel would be too costly. He decided to bypass the city: to shift forces secretly to the south, force the Dnieper near Loev and strike at Rechitsa, so as to cut the railway lines linking Gomel with the west and threaten the whole German grouping with encirclement.

The Gomel–Rechitsa operation

The attack began on 10 November from the bridgehead at Loev. The main blow was struck by General Pavel Batov’s 65th Army, supported by the 1st Guards Don Tank Corps and the 9th Tank Corps and by two Guards cavalry corps; alongside it part of General Prokofy Romanenko’s 48th Army attacked. After several days of heavy fighting to widen the bridgehead, the German defences cracked on a broad sector. On the night of 14–15 November Soviet troops cut the railway and the road from Gomel to Kalinkovichi, and on 16 November Guards tanks and the infantry of the 19th Rifle Corps reached the outskirts of Rechitsa. The town was taken on 18 November; that evening Moscow for the first time fired an artillery salute in honour of the liberation of a town in Belarus. The railway bridge over the Dnieper linking Rechitsa with the German Gomel grouping was seized by the Russians on 21 November.

The Germans tried to counter-attack. On 18–19 November they struck with tanks and the 192nd Infantry Division near Korovatichi, north of Rechitsa, and fought hard there for two days, but they failed to close the breach. Meanwhile the 48th Army forced the Berezina where it flows into the Dnieper and seized a bridgehead south of Zhlobin, while the 61st Army advanced towards Mozyr. The breach in the German defences was about a hundred kilometres wide.

North of Gomel further armies of the front went over to the attack. From 12 November Fedyuninsky’s 11th Army fought its way through the fortifications on the Sozh on the northern approaches to the city, and on 22 November, together with the 63rd Army, it broke through the defences near Kostyukovka and reached the railway and the road from Gomel to Zhlobin. The 3rd and 50th Armies, attacking further north still, took Propoisk and on 25 November reached the Dnieper near Novy Bykhov. By the evening of 25 November Soviet troops were closing in on Gomel from three sides.

26 November

The threat of encirclement forced the German command to retreat. On the night of 25–26 November units of the 9th Army began to abandon the city and the land between the Sozh and the Dnieper; some of them, heading for Rechitsa, ran into the positions of the 48th Army. In the morning the 217th and 96th Rifle Divisions of the 11th Army entered Gomel from the north and east, and the 7th and 102nd Rifle Divisions from the south-east. According to Soviet accounts, the red flag was raised over the city power station and the fire tower. In the evening Moscow marked the capture of Gomel with a salute from 224 guns.

The city the Soviet troops recovered was a ruin. According to post-war figures, about 80 per cent of its buildings had been destroyed, and of some 144,000 inhabitants in 1940 fewer than 15,000 remained. The retreating Germans blew up factories, bridges and railway installations and, according to Soviet accounts, deported part of the able-bodied population westwards. Belarusian partisans, very numerous in the forests of Polesia, wrecked railway lines and attacked the retreating transports throughout the operation.

The Gomel–Rechitsa operation lasted until 30 November. In the course of it the troops of the Belorussian Front advanced up to 130 kilometres and reached a line east of Rogachev and south of Novy Bykhov, threatening the southern wing of Army Group Centre and hampering its communications with Army Group South. According to the tallies of General Grigori Krivosheev’s team, Soviet losses amounted to about 21,600 killed and missing and about 66,500 wounded and sick. German medical reports cited in the literature show some 3,200 killed and 12,000 wounded for the armies defending this sector between 11 and 30 November; these figures do not include the missing and prisoners.

The front in Ukraine at the end of November

The vague phrase about an “offensive in Ukraine” does, however, capture the picture of the whole southern sector of the front. After the liberation of Kiev on 6 November, General Nikolai Vatutin’s 1st Ukrainian Front advanced rapidly westwards: it took Fastiv, Zhytomyr on 12 November and Korosten on 17 November. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, had, however, assembled fresh panzer divisions in the 4th Panzer Army, among them the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and from mid-November he launched a counter-offensive. General Hermann Balck’s XLVIII Panzer Corps retook Zhytomyr on 19 November and Brusyliv on 23 November; near Zhytomyr encircled units of the Soviet 60th Army did not break through to their own lines until 20 November. By the end of the month the Germans had also recaptured Korosten. On the last day of November the front settled on the line Chernyakhiv – Radomyshl – Stavyshche. Manstein had pushed Vatutin’s forces back, but he had not managed to destroy them or to get anywhere near Kiev.

Further south, General Ivan Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front – which after the neighbouring front’s capture of Dnipropetrovsk was attacking from bridgeheads on the right bank of the Dnieper towards Kryvyi Rih and Kirovohrad – forced the river near Cherkasy on 13 November and began weeks of fighting for the city. On the lower Dnieper the Germans held the Nikopol bridgehead, while the 17th Army in the Crimea had been cut off from the mainland since the beginning of November; Soviet troops made landings on the Kerch Peninsula. In all these places the fighting went on without a break, although the autumn mud and the exhaustion of both sides slowed operations.

Significance

The capture of Gomel, like the earlier liberation of Smolensk, meant that the Red Army had moved on from fighting for Russia and Ukraine to fighting for Belarus. For Army Group Centre it heralded a serious threat: its southern wing now hung over the Pripyat Marshes of Polesia, and its link with Army Group South was growing ever weaker. The operation also tied down German forces that could not be shifted to Kiev during Manstein’s counter-offensive.

In the winter of 1943–1944 the Belorussian Front conducted further costly and only partly successful attacks in the area of Kalinkovichi, Mozyr, Rogachev and Zhlobin; in February 1944 it was renamed the 1st Belorussian Front. The decisive blow in Belarus came only in the summer of 1944 with Operation Bagration, which shattered Army Group Centre and carried Rokossovsky’s troops to the Vistula. Gomel, rebuilt from the first weeks after its liberation, was the temporary seat of the government of the Byelorussian SSR from December 1943 to July 1944, before it returned to liberated Minsk.