The liberation of Voronezh

War chronologies record under 26 January 1943 that “Soviet troops recapture Voronezh”. According to Soviet and Russian sources, the last German units had left the city – or rather its ruins – a day earlier: on 25 January troops of General Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 60th Army cleared Voronezh of the enemy, and that date is celebrated in the city as its day of liberation. 26 January, on the other hand, was the day on which the fate of Germany’s allied armies on the Don was being decided – and the day of the battle of Nikolayevka, in which the remnants of the Italian Alpine Corps broke out of encirclement. The recapture of Voronezh crowned two operations: the Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh operation, in which the Red Army destroyed the Hungarian Second Army, and the Voronezh–Kastornoye operation, which drove the German Second Army back from the Don.

Half a year in the front line

Voronezh was the first objective of Case Blue, the German summer offensive of 1942. On 6 July the Germans entered the city but took only the part on the western bank of the Voronezh River; the left-bank districts and bridgeheads on the right bank, including at Chizhovka, remained in Soviet hands. For more than half a year the front ran through the middle of the city. Street fighting, artillery fire and bombing by both sides turned Voronezh into one of the most devastated cities of the Soviet Union: according to a post-war state commission, 18,000 houses had been destroyed, some 92 per cent of the housing stock. The Germans deported most of the population who had not managed to flee from the occupied part of the city, and in the summer of 1942 they shot several hundred Jews who had remained there on its outskirts.

When the main forces of Case Blue moved down the Don, across the great bend of the river towards Stalingrad and into the Caucasus, the Voronezh sector was taken over by the Germans and their allies. The city itself and the front to its north were held by General Hans von Salmuth’s German Second Army. South of Voronezh, along nearly two hundred kilometres of the Don, stood General Gusztáv Jány’s Hungarian Second Army, which the Hungary of Admiral Miklós Horthy had sent east in the spring of 1942 in accordance with the German plans of Directive No. 41. With its rear services it numbered about 200,000 men; it was also accompanied by labour service companies in which Hungarian Jews, unarmed and treated with cruelty, built fortifications and roads. Further south, around Rossosh, the front was closed by General Gabriele Nasci’s Italian Alpine Corps – three mountain divisions, Tridentina, Julia and Cuneense, and the Vicenza infantry division – part of General Italo Gariboldi’s Italian Eighth Army.

These troops were the weakest link in the German front. The Hungarian and Italian divisions had two infantry regiments each, obsolete anti-tank weapons, few tanks and inadequate winter equipment. Since the autumn they had been fighting the Soviet bridgeheads on the right bank of the Don at Uryv and Korotoyak and had failed to eliminate them. After the encirclement of the Sixth Army in November and the destruction in December of the main forces of the Italian Eighth Army in Operation Little Saturn, their southern flank was hanging in the air. Germany’s reserves, modest as they were, were being swallowed up by attempts to save the troops trapped at Stalingrad, supplied by a failing airlift, by the defence of Rostov and by the retreat from the Caucasus.

The Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh operation

The plan of General Filipp Golikov’s Voronezh Front provided for three thrusts. From the north, out of the Uryv (Storozhevoye) bridgehead, General Kirill Moskalenko’s 40th Army was to attack; from the centre, out of the bridgehead at Shchuchye, the 18th Independent Rifle Corps; and from the south, from Kantemirovka, General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army. The pincers were to close around Alexeyevka and Ostrogozhsk, behind the backs of the Hungarians and Italians. Before the operation the Voronezh Front received substantial reinforcements, including nearly nine hundred tanks, and on the breakthrough sectors it achieved a superiority in artillery of several times over.

On 12 January reconnaissance battalions of the 40th Army, striking from the Uryv bridgehead, discovered how weak the Hungarian defence was, and so the main attack went in a day earlier than planned, on 13 January. On 14 January the 18th Corps and the 3rd Tank Army joined the attack. In frosts of up to 30 degrees below zero the Hungarian front-line divisions were shattered within a few days, and the German armoured reserve that was meant to support them was too weak to stop the advance. On 15 and 16 January Soviet tanks broke into Rossosh, where the headquarters of the Alpine Corps was located. On 18 January units of the 40th Army and the 3rd Tank Army met around Alexeyevka, trapping a large part of the Hungarian, Italian and German forces between the Don and the Oskol; on 20 January the Red Army took Ostrogozhsk.

Jány waited a long time for permission to withdraw, which Hitler and the German command of Army Group B were unwilling to give. When a withdrawal finally became possible, it took the form of a flight of infantry columns, baggage trains and wounded across the snow-covered steppe under constant attack by tanks, cavalry and aircraft. On 24 January Jány issued an order of the day in which he declared that the Second Army had “lost its honour” and accused his soldiers of cowardice – a document that long remained a symbol in Hungary of the command’s indifference to the fate of its own troops.

Estimates of the losses vary widely. According to Soviet figures, more than 70,000 Hungarian and Italian soldiers were taken prisoner in the Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh operation, and their dead were estimated at over 50,000; the Red Army’s irrecoverable losses were put at only about 4,500 men. Hungarian studies usually state that of some 200,000 men the Second Army lost more than 100,000 killed, missing, wounded and captured that winter; some estimates speak of 120,000–150,000. Among the victims were also many Jews of the labour service, who had no protection whatever during the retreat. The defeat on the Don is often called the greatest catastrophe in the history of the Hungarian army.

The retreat of the Alpini and the battle of Nikolayevka

The Alpine Corps, standing on the Don south of the Hungarians, was not attacked frontally, but after the breakthroughs on both flanks it found itself encircled. General Nasci gave the order to withdraw only on the evening of 17 January, when Soviet tanks were already deep in his rear. A mass of tens of thousands of men set off westwards – according to some accounts about 40,000 – made up of Alpini, soldiers of other Italian units, Germans and Hungarians, many of them unarmed, frostbitten, without food or fuel. Only General Luigi Reverberi’s Tridentina division had really kept its fighting power; it led the columns and cleared the way for them in a succession of clashes.

On the morning of 26 January the head of the Tridentina reached the village of Nikolayevka (today Livenka in Belgorod Oblast), which was defended by a Soviet Guards rifle division dug in behind a railway embankment. The fighting lasted all day. Towards evening Reverberi – by tradition with the cry “Tridentina avanti!” – led into the attack everyone who was able to walk, stragglers from other units included. The defence was broken and the columns escaped from the pocket. On 1 February the remnants of the corps reached the German lines. The losses were enormous: the Cuneense division ceased to exist, of the Julia’s 15,000 men about 1,200 survived according to Italian figures, and of the Tridentina roughly a third. Tens of thousands of Italians were taken prisoner; a great many of them died of hunger, cold and disease on the marches, in the transports and in prisoner-of-war camps. The memoirs of survivors such as Mario Rigoni Stern and Eugenio Corti made this retreat one of the central themes of Italian memory of the war.

The Voronezh–Kastornoye operation

The destruction of the Hungarians and Italians exposed the southern flank of the German Second Army, which was still holding an arc from Voronezh to Livny. The Soviet command decided to encircle it at once. On 24 January, in a blizzard, the 40th Army with the 4th Tank Corps struck on the southern flank, and on 25 January Chernyakhovsky’s 60th Army moved off from the east. Threatened with encirclement, the Voronezh garrison began to withdraw, and that same day, 25 January, the city was completely cleared. On 26 January the 13th and 38th Armies of General Max Reiter’s Bryansk Front attacked from the north.

On 27 and 28 January tanks of the 4th Tank Corps reached Kastornoye, the railway junction that was the meeting point of the advancing armies, and took it after fighting around 28–29 January. Several German divisions and the remnants of Hungarian ones – two army corps in all – were trapped in the pocket between Voronezh and Kastornoye. The ring was not tight, however, because the Stavka ordered Golikov and Reiter to leave only the minimum necessary forces around the pocket and to turn their main forces towards Kursk and Kharkiv. Some of the encircled troops broke out westwards in the first half of February at the cost of heavy losses; the operation was deemed to have ended on 17 February.

Place in the history of the war

Within two weeks in January 1943 the front on the upper Don, from Voronezh to Kantemirovka, ceased to exist. A gap several hundred kilometres wide opened in the German line, through which the Red Army set off in February towards Kursk, Belgorod and Kharkiv. These successes, achieved alongside the destruction of the Stalingrad pocket, encouraged the Stavka to believe that the whole German front in the south was collapsing. This soon proved premature: in March Manstein’s counter-stroke retook Kharkiv, and the salient around Kursk, which reached far to the west precisely because of the winter’s gains, became in July 1943 the stage for the next great battle.

For Germany’s allies January on the Don was a turning point. The Hungarian Second Army ceased to exist as a fighting force; its remnants returned home in the spring. The government of Miklós Kállay, with Horthy’s knowledge, began cautiously to seek contacts with the Western Allies and refused to send major new formations to the front. The defeat was also a blow to Benito Mussolini: the Italian forces in the east, the ARMIR, lost about 85,000 killed and missing that winter according to official Italian figures, and the remnants of the Eighth Army were withdrawn to Italy in the spring of 1943. The discontent these losses caused in the army and in society contributed to the dictator’s fall in July of that year. Hitler, for his part, blamed the allies for the collapse of the front, although it was he who had stretched the Axis forces along the Don and given them neither the weapons nor the reserves they needed.

Voronezh came out of the war a city of ruins. Rebuilding took many years, and part of the destroyed regional hospital building, known as the Rotunda, was left standing as a memorial. In 2008 the city, which had been in the front line for more than two hundred days, received the Russian title of “City of Military Glory”.