The liberation of Oryol and Belgorod

On 5 August 1943, in the space of a single day, the Red Army recaptured two cities lying at opposite ends of the Kursk salient. In the morning troops of the Bryansk Front cleared the Germans out of Oryol, a regional capital and the main communications hub of the German salient that since the autumn of 1941 had jutted into the Soviet front in the direction of Moscow. That same day, more than 250 kilometres further south, units of the Steppe Front entered Belgorod, from where a month earlier the offensive of the German Army Group South had been launched. At midnight in Moscow, on the orders of Joseph Stalin, guns thundered out a salute to the victorious troops for the first time in the war.

Both cities fell in the course of the two Soviet counter-offensives with which the Battle of Kursk ended: Operation Kutuzov against the Oryol salient and Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev on the southern flank of the Kursk salient. That they fell on the same day was a coincidence, but Soviet propaganda immediately made it a symbol – and historians have come to see the first weeks of August as the moment when the Germans finally lost the initiative on the Eastern Front.

The Oryol salient and Operation Kutuzov

Oryol fell into German hands on 3 October 1941, when Guderian’s 4th Panzer Division drove into the city, which was unprepared for defence, in the first days of Operation Typhoon – before the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets had even closed. After the Soviet winter counter-offensive of 1941/1942 a broad salient took shape around the city, projecting eastwards between Bryansk and Kursk. In 1943 it became the northern base of the German plan for Operation Citadel: it was from here that General Walter Model’s Ninth Army struck towards Kursk on 5 July, while the northern and eastern faces of the salient were held by the overstretched Second Panzer Army.

The Soviet command had prepared a counter-stroke against this salient even before the German offensive. The Oryol offensive, named after Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, began on 12 July – the day of the Battle of Prokhorovka, when Model’s attack had been at a standstill for a week. General Vasily Sokolovsky’s Western Front struck from the north, led by General Ivan Bagramyan’s 11th Guards Army, and General Markian Popov’s Bryansk Front from the east, straight at Oryol. On 15 July General Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Central Front, which had only just repulsed the Ninth Army, joined the attack from the south. The operations of the fronts were coordinated on behalf of the Stavka by Marshal Georgy Zhukov and – in the south – by the Chief of the General Staff, Aleksandr Vasilevsky.

The breakthrough was rapid only in Bagramyan’s sector: within a few days he had driven several dozen kilometres deep and was threatening the Oryol–Bryansk railway, the only supply artery of both German armies. Elsewhere the attack bogged down in defences of great depth: over a year and a half the Germans had turned the villages and small towns of the salient – Bolkhov, Mtsensk, Karachev and Oryol itself – into strongpoints prepared for all-round defence. Model, to whom Hitler had now subordinated both armies, pulled in division after division from the Kursk front and shifted them from one threatened sector to another, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers, especially in tanks.

Retreat to the Hagen position

Hitler, who had called off Citadel on 13 July, for another two weeks forbade the surrender of even a scrap of the salient. He changed his mind only after the overthrow of Mussolini on 25 July: he needed divisions for Italy, and a shorter front line would free them. On 26 July he agreed to the evacuation of the entire Oryol salient and a withdrawal to the Hagen position, being hastily built at its base, east of Bryansk. The retreat began in the last days of July and proceeded in stages, from one intermediate line to the next; on 29 July Soviet troops took Bolkhov.

The retreating German forces employed scorched earth tactics. Behind the departing columns bridges, track and railway stations were blown up, factories, depots and crops were destroyed, villages were burnt, and the civilian population fit for work was driven westwards together with livestock and food stocks. German orders made it clear that the Red Army was to enter territory that for many months would be unable to feed either troops or inhabitants. Army Groups Centre and South were to use the same methods throughout the autumn of 1943 in their retreat to the Dnieper.

The fight for Oryol

Oryol itself was attacked by General Aleksandr Gorbatov’s 3rd Army and the 63rd Army of the Bryansk Front, and from the south by units of the Central Front. On 1 August they went over to the pursuit of the retreating enemy, and by 3 August they had outflanked the city from the north. Soviet commanders knew that German engineer units in the city were preparing to blow up the bridges over the Oka, buildings and factories, and they hastened the assault to prevent it. The fighting for the city began on 4 August; by evening Soviet troops held the eastern part of Oryol, and by the morning of 5 August they had cleared the whole city of Germans, although some of the bridges and buildings had already been blown up.

Oryol had endured almost twenty-two months of occupation. The first to enter the city were the 5th, 129th and 380th Rifle Divisions, which were rewarded with the honorific “Oryol”. It was not, however, a battle for the city on the Stalingrad model: the main German forces were already falling back towards the Hagen line, and in Oryol it was chiefly strong rearguards that fought, covering the retreat and the destruction of the city.

Polkovodets Rumyantsev and Belgorod

On the southern face of the salient, General Nikolai Vatutin’s Voronezh Front, bled white in the July defensive battle, needed three weeks to replenish its men and tanks. Meanwhile, from 17 July, the South-Western and Southern Fronts were attacking on the Donets and the Mius, drawing German panzer divisions there, including two SS divisions from Prokhorovka. On 3 August, after a massive artillery preparation, Vatutin and the commander of the Steppe Front, General Ivan Konev, launched the Belgorod–Kharkov offensive, named after the 18th-century Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev. The operations of both fronts were coordinated by Zhukov.

The blow fell on the junction between the German Fourth Panzer Army and Army Detachment Kempf, north-west of Belgorod. General Mikhail Katukov’s 1st Tank Army and General Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army, rebuilt after their July losses, poured into the breach and within two days had penetrated several dozen kilometres into the German positions. Belgorod itself, defended by divisions of General Erhard Raus’s XI Army Corps, was attacked by the 69th Army and the 7th Guards Army of the Steppe Front. On 5 August, after a day of fighting, the 89th Guards and 305th Rifle Divisions broke into the city and had taken it by evening; both were awarded the honorific “Belgorod” for it.

Belgorod – first taken by the Germans in October 1941, liberated in February 1943 and lost again in March during Manstein’s counter-offensive – was a city in ruins. According to Soviet figures, of some 34,000 pre-war inhabitants only about 150 people were found there; the rest had been deported, taken away for forced labour, evacuated or killed.

The first salute

Late on the evening of 5 August, at about 11.30 p.m., the announcer Yuri Levitan read out over the radio an order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. In it Stalin thanked the troops who had liberated Oryol and Belgorod, named the commanders of the fronts and armies, and ordered that at midnight the capital should salute them with twelve artillery salvoes from 120 guns. The decision had been taken that same day, so blank ammunition had to be gathered in haste from military depots; the guns were placed at various points around the city so that the salvoes could be seen and heard all over Moscow. The same order gave the divisions that had distinguished themselves in the fighting honorific titles taken from the liberated cities.

The idea was above all a propaganda one, and it proved lasting. By the end of the war Moscow had fired more than three hundred such salutes, their scale – the number of salvoes and guns – matching the importance of the victory. Stalin’s orders, read in Levitan’s voice, became for the people of the USSR the daily measure of the Red Army’s progress. Oryol and Belgorod still bear the title of “cities of the first salute” and celebrate 5 August as their day.

From Oryol to the Hagen line

The loss of Oryol did not halt the German retreat but hastened it. Soviet troops followed the enemy through burnt villages and wrecked roads, while German rearguards made a stand on each successive intermediate line. On 15 August units of the Bryansk and Western Fronts took Karachev, halfway between Oryol and Bryansk. On 18 August Soviet troops came up against the Hagen position, and the Oryol offensive came to an end. The front had moved some 150 kilometres westwards, and the salient from which, as recently as the spring, the Germans could still contemplate a blow towards Moscow had ceased to exist.

The victory was costly. According to the tally compiled by General Grigori Krivosheev’s team on the basis of Soviet archives, Operation Kutuzov cost the Red Army some 430,000 killed, wounded and missing, including more than 112,000 irrecoverable losses, as well as some 2,500 tanks and self-propelled guns destroyed or damaged – more than the defeat of Citadel itself. German losses in the operation are estimated at about 86,000 men. Some Soviet commanders were dissatisfied with the result: Rokossovsky later wrote that instead of encircling the enemy they had merely “pushed him out of the salient”, and that two strong converging blows on Bryansk would have achieved far more. Zhukov was of a similar opinion.

In the south, Polkovodets Rumyantsev was only just getting into its stride. After taking Belgorod, Vatutin’s tank armies pressed on towards Bohodukhiv and Okhtyrka to cut Kharkiv off from the west, while Erich von Manstein brought up SS panzer divisions from the south to stop them. The issue in this sector was decided only in the second half of August.

Significance

5 August 1943 was the first day on which the Red Army recaptured cities in summer, at the height of the campaigning season, rather than in winter, when German offensives had exhausted themselves – as at Moscow in December 1941 or after Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943. The first salute in Moscow was a sign that the Soviet leadership regarded the turning point as permanent. Belgorod, which had already changed hands once in 1943, and Oryol were never retaken by the Germans.

The loss of the Oryol salient also meant that the Wehrmacht no longer had anywhere from which to threaten Moscow. At the end of August the headquarters of the exhausted Second Panzer Army was withdrawn from the front and transferred to the Balkans to replace the Italians, and Army Group Centre now had to defend itself on a line it had not had time to fortify. In August the Smolensk offensive was launched against it, and in September Soviet troops liberated Bryansk and Smolensk.

In the south the offensive begun at Belgorod led to the liberation of Kharkiv on 23 August and then developed into a general advance across the whole of Left-Bank Ukraine. In the autumn of 1943 the Red Army reached the Dnieper and crossed it, and in November it recaptured Kiev. The strategic initiative on the Eastern Front, lost by the Germans at Kursk in July, passed permanently into Soviet hands in August.