The liberation of Smolensk

During the night of 24–25 September 1943 units of the Soviet 31st and 5th Armies crossed the Dnieper and broke into Smolensk, while units of the 68th Army entered the city from the east. In the morning the German rearguard withdrew westwards, and after more than two years of occupation the city was back in Soviet hands. That same day the 10th Army took Roslavl, more than a hundred kilometres to the south. The liberation of the city was the culmination of a two-month operation that pushed the front 200–250 km westwards and finally drove the Wehrmacht back from Moscow.

The gateway to Moscow

For centuries Smolensk had been regarded as the key to Moscow: it lies on the shortest route from the west, in the land bridge between the upper Dnieper and the Dvina along which the armies of Napoleon marched in 1812 and those of Hitler in 1941. The Germans entered Smolensk on 16 July 1941, and the Battle of Smolensk held up their march on the Soviet capital for nearly two months. After the defeat at Moscow in the winter of 1941–1942 the front in this area froze. For a year and a half Smolensk and its surroundings housed the headquarters of Army Group Centre, and it was west of the city, in the forest near Gnezdovo, that in the spring of 1943 the Germans discovered the graves of Polish officers murdered by the NKVD.

By the summer of 1943 Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s Army Group Centre was already on the defensive in this sector. In the north, facing the Kalinin and Western Fronts, stood Colonel General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s Third Panzer Army and the Fourth Army under General of Infantry Gotthard Heinrici. The front here had not moved for five months, and in places for a year and a half, so the Germans had had time to build five or six defensive belts with a total depth of 100–130 km, anchored on rivers, forests and marshes. Towns such as Yelnya, Dukhovshchina and Spas-Demensk had been turned into strongpoints. According to Russian studies, Kluge had 44 divisions in the sector of the coming offensive – about 850,000 men, 8,800 guns and mortars and about 500 tanks and assault guns, supported by some 700 aircraft.

After the failure of the German offensive at the Kursk salient, the Red Army seized the initiative along the whole front. In August it liberated Oryol and Belgorod, and on 23 August Kharkiv. The main Soviet effort was directed south, towards Ukraine and the Dnieper. The offensive against Smolensk was meant to support it: to tie down German reserves in the central sector, prevent them from being shifted south and, at the same time, push the front back from Moscow, 250–300 km away.

Operation Suvorov

The plan of the operation, named after the 18th-century field marshal Alexander Suvorov, had been in preparation since the end of June. The main blow was to be struck by the Western Front under Colonel General (from 27 August General of the Army) Vasily Sokolovsky in the direction of Spas-Demensk and Roslavl, while its right wing, together with the left wing of General Andrei Yeremenko’s Kalinin Front, was to attack towards Yartsevo, Dukhovshchina and on to Smolensk. In the south General Markian Popov’s Bryansk Front attacked towards Bryansk. The operations were coordinated on behalf of the Stavka by Marshal of Artillery Nikolai Voronov.

According to Soviet figures, at the start of the operation the two fronts had about 1,253,000 men, 20,640 guns and mortars, 1,436 tanks and self-propelled guns and about 1,100 aircraft. The numerical advantage was considerable but not overwhelming: rifle divisions averaged 6,500–7,000 men, ammunition was sufficient for two to two and a half units of fire, and fuel was short from the very first days. At the beginning of August Joseph Stalin visited the headquarters of the Western and Kalinin Fronts – according to most accounts, his only wartime trip near the front line. A few days later, on 5 August, Moscow for the first time celebrated a victory with an artillery salute – for Oryol and Belgorod.

August: a breakthrough that stalled

After a day of reconnaissance in force, the offensive opened on 7 August at 6.30 a.m., following an artillery preparation of nearly two hours, with the 5th, 10th Guards and 33rd Armies. From the first hours it met fierce resistance and counter-attacks from well-prepared positions; on the first day the Soviet troops advanced only a few kilometres. Sokolovsky committed the 68th Army from reserve, while Kluge brought three divisions from Oryol, including the 2nd Panzer Division. Things went better on the left wing, where the 10th Army broke through weaker defences and on 13 August took Spas-Demensk. An attempt to exploit this success, however, ended badly: the 5th Mechanised Corps, lacking anti-aircraft cover, suffered heavy losses from German dive-bombers and had to be withdrawn.

The Kalinin Front, which attacked towards Dukhovshchina on 13 August, advanced 6–7 km in five days of fighting; on the first day, according to Soviet sources, the Germans made 24 regiment-strength counter-attacks. In the second half of August the offensive came to a halt along its entire length. Marshal Voronov later listed the causes in his memoirs: the German command had expected the attack, the defences were exceptionally strong, many divisions – especially those from the reserve – were poorly trained in breaking through multi-belt defences, tanks were in short supply, and the infantry relied too heavily on the artillery. Even so, the August fighting fulfilled one of the operation’s aims: the Germans had to bring divisions to Smolensk from other sectors, including from Oryol and Bryansk.

Yelnya and Bryansk

Meanwhile the situation along the entire Eastern Front had turned against the Germans. The collapse of the Oryol salient and the loss of Kharkiv meant that the existing axis of advance towards Roslavl no longer made sense, and the Stavka shifted the main effort west – to Yelnya, regarded as the key to Smolensk. In August and September 1941 the same Yelnya had been the scene of the first successful Soviet counter-offensive of the war. After a week of replenishment, on 28 August, following an hour and a half of artillery fire, the 10th Guards, 21st and 33rd Armies attacked on a narrow 36-kilometre sector. The breakthrough succeeded: in a single day the 2nd Guards Tank Corps reached the outskirts of Yelnya, and on 30 August the Germans abandoned the town. At the beginning of September Soviet troops took Dorogobuzh and reached the Dnieper east of Smolensk.

In the south the Bryansk Front exploited a weakness in the German defences near Dubrovka, north of Bryansk, and by an outflanking move forced the Germans to abandon the city, which Soviet troops entered on 17 September. On the main axis, however, the offensive again lost momentum. At the beginning of September Sokolovsky’s divisions, at less than 60 per cent of their establishment strength, were advancing two kilometres a day, and near Yartsevo and west of Yelnya they bogged down in the forests and on successive prepared lines. On 7 September the Stavka halted the offensive for a second time.

The Panther position and the final assault

The Germans, too, were preparing to retreat. On 11 August Hitler signed the order to build the Eastern Wall (Ostwall) – a line of fortifications that was to run from the Gulf of Finland along the Narva, Lake Peipus and the Velikaya River, then through Vitebsk, Mogilev and Gomel and along the Dnieper to the Black Sea. Its northern and central part, known as the Panther position, ran in a belt from several dozen to more than a hundred kilometres west of Smolensk. The order itself was an admission that the Wehrmacht was no longer capable of offensive action in the East; when it was signed, on most sectors the fortifications existed only on maps.

After a week of regrouping the offensive opened for the third time. On 14 September, after an 80-minute artillery preparation, the 39th Army (soon to be taken over by Lieutenant General Nikolai Berzarin) and the left wing of the Kalinin Front’s 43rd Army broke through the defences on a 30-km sector and during the night of 18–19 September took Dukhovshchina. The Western Front struck a day later: on 16 September the 31st Army captured the heavily fortified railway junction of Yartsevo, and the 10th Army crossed the Desna. The defences in front of Smolensk cracked, and the Fourth Army was threatened with encirclement. The German command agreed to a withdrawal to the Panther position, behind the Sozh and the Pronya. The Stavka, judging the enemy to be beaten, ordered Sokolovsky to liberate Smolensk and to take Orsha and Mogilev by 10–12 October; Yeremenko was to capture Vitebsk by 10 October. On 21 September Demidov, north-west of Smolensk, fell.

25 September

The last fight for Smolensk was short. The Germans defended the city with rearguards, covering the withdrawal of the main body of the Fourth Army to the west. During the night of 24–25 September units of the 31st and 5th Armies crossed the Dnieper off the march, and units of the 68th Army entered the city from the east; after a night of street fighting, by the morning of 25 September Smolensk was in Soviet hands. That evening Moscow celebrated the liberation of Smolensk and Roslavl with a salute of twenty artillery salvoes, and the divisions and regiments that had distinguished themselves in the fighting received the honorific titles “Smolensk”, “Yelnya”, “Yartsevo” or “Roslavl”.

The soldiers entered a city in ruins. According to figures from the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, which must be treated with caution, some 7,300 of the city’s roughly 8,000 buildings had been destroyed – both in the fighting of 1941 and during the occupation and the retreat, when German engineers blew up the bridges, the railway junction and the industrial plants. Of the nearly 170,000 pre-war inhabitants, according to the same figures, about 20,000 remained in the city. The rest had been deported to forced labour in Germany, had died or had fled; the Germans had murdered the Jews of Smolensk in 1941–1942, and in the Dulag 126 prisoner-of-war camp on the outskirts tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners died of hunger, disease and executions. The German scorched-earth policy covered the whole Smolensk region: according to Soviet calculations, about 80 per cent of urban buildings and half of rural ones were destroyed. According to his biographers, the Fourth Army’s commander, Heinrici, did not carry out the order to burn the entire city before the retreat, which does not alter the fact that his troops left scorched earth behind them.

Katyn in Soviet hands

In the last days of September the Red Army also took the Katyn Forest near Gnezdovo, a dozen or so kilometres west of Smolensk. In the spring the Germans had revealed the crime there – the mass graves of Polish officers, prisoners from the Kozelsk camp, shot in the spring of 1940 on the orders of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The exhumations carried out by the Germans, the International Medical Commission and the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross pointed to the NKVD as the perpetrator, and when the Polish government asked the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate, Moscow broke off relations with it. The Germans knew perfectly well what the loss of Katyn meant. On 29 September Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that Katyn had had to be given up and that the Bolsheviks would no doubt soon “discover” that it was the Germans who had shot the Polish officers.

Goebbels’s prediction came true. That autumn a special team of the NKVD and the SMERSH counter-intelligence arrived at the site, headed by Vsevolod Merkulov – in 1940 one of the organisers of the crime – and Sergei Kruglov. For three months, at graves sealed off from the outside world, its officers opened the pits, planted forged documents dated 1941, coached witnesses and intimidated inconvenient ones. Only on 13 January 1944 did the Politburo set up the commission headed by Nikolai Burdenko (PL), which after a couple of weeks’ work announced on 26 January that the Polish prisoners had been murdered by the Germans in the autumn of 1941. The Soviet Union tried unsuccessfully to have this lie written into the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL), and maintained it until April 1990, when it admitted that the crime had been committed by the NKVD.

The balance of the operation

After the liberation of Smolensk, the troops of the Western Front pursued the retreating Germans for another week: they crossed the Sozh, took Mstislavl and Krichev, and on 2 October came up against the Panther position on the line Rudnya – Lenino – Dribin – the Pronya River, already on the territory of the Byelorussian SSR. On the Vitebsk axis the Kalinin Front reached the Usvyaty – Rudnya line by 30 September but did not break German resistance. On 2 October the operation was brought to an end. In less than two months Soviet troops had advanced 200–250 km on a front about 400 km wide and recovered the Smolensk region and part of the Kalinin region.

The victory was costly. According to the study by the team of General Grigori Krivosheev, the two fronts lost 451,466 men, of whom 107,645 were killed, died or went missing, as well as 863 tanks and self-propelled guns and 303 aircraft. Russian authors attribute this to the fact that the troops had three times to break through prepared defences anew, with a chronic shortage of ammunition and fuel and weak support from bomber aircraft. There are no reliable overall figures for German losses; Soviet sources claimed that seven enemy divisions had been destroyed and fourteen had suffered heavy losses. The strategic effect mattered most: according to Soviet calculations, the operation tied down some 55 German divisions around Smolensk, divisions that were missing in the south, on the Dnieper.

Place in the war

The liberation of Smolensk closed a chapter that had opened in July 1941. The Wehrmacht had been pushed off the shortest route to Moscow for good, and the threat to the capital that had preoccupied the Stavka for two years ceased to exist. At the same time as the Smolensk operation, the Battle of the Dnieper was under way: at the end of September the Red Army seized its first bridgeheads on the right bank of the river, and on 6 November 1943 it liberated Kiev. By the end of 1943 the German front was split by the Pripet Marshes, and Army Group Centre and Army Group South found it ever harder to shift forces between them.

On the western axis, the Western Front’s first offensives against the Panther position – in October 1943 and in the winter of 1943–1944 – cost a great deal and achieved little. In one of them, on 12–13 October 1943, the Polish 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division, formed in the USSR under Stalin’s patronage, went into action at Lenino, on the eastern edge of Belarus. The front in the central sector barely moved until June 1944, when Operation Bagration destroyed Army Group Centre and opened the Red Army’s road to the Vistula.

For Poles, Smolensk has remained a city bound up with Katyn. The Katyn lie, whose preparation began in the weeks after the city’s liberation, weighed on Polish–Soviet relations for almost half a century.