The Lwów–Sandomierz offensive begins

On 13 July 1944, three weeks after the start of the great offensive in Belorussia, the southern wing of the Eastern Front also went over to the attack. The troops of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front attacked the German Army Group North Ukraine in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. That day a thrust towards Rawa Ruska (Rava-Ruska) began, and the next day – according to some sources – a second one, aimed at Lwów (Lviv). So began the operation that Soviet historiography called the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive. Within seven weeks it drove the Germans out of the whole of Eastern Galicia – the last part of the Ukrainian SSR within the borders Moscow had recognised since 1939 – encircled a German corps at Brody, and ended in a bridgehead across the Vistula at Sandomierz.

The front in western Ukraine in the summer of 1944

In the spring of 1944 the Red Army swept across the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine. During the offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine Soviet troops reached the Carpathians and the Prut, and the 1st Ukrainian Front – commanded from March, after the death of General Nikolai Vatutin, by Marshal Georgy Zhukov – took Tarnopol and encircled the German 1st Panzer Army near Kamianets-Podilskyi, although the latter managed to break out to the west. As early as January the front’s troops had crossed Poland’s pre-war border in Volhynia. The spring thaw and the exhaustion of the troops brought the front to a halt in April on a line that, in the 1st Ukrainian Front’s sector, ran roughly from southern Volhynia past Brody and Tarnopol (Ternopil) to the foothills of the Carpathians. In May command of the front passed to Konev, previously commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front and the victor of Korsun.

At the turn of spring and summer the Soviet high command – the Stavka – prepared a series of blows along the whole length of the front. The main one fell on 22 June in Belorussia, where Operation Bagration shattered the German Army Group Centre within two weeks. The Germans had expected the Red Army to strike in Ukraine, in the direction of Lwów, and had concentrated most of their armoured reserves there. When the Belorussian front collapsed, some of these divisions were sent north, while the Red Army pressed on westwards – on 3 July it took Minsk, and on 13 July, the day Konev’s offensive began, it ended the fighting for Wilno. Konev’s offensive was to exploit this weakening: to destroy Army Group North Ukraine, take Lwów and reach the San and the Vistula.

Forces and plan

Konev commanded the strongest front of the Red Army in the summer of 1944. According to Soviet figures, repeated in the statistical study edited by Grigoriy Krivosheev, the 1st Ukrainian Front numbered about a million men; other Russian tallies give about 1.2 million, more than 2,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 14,000–16,000 guns and mortars, and some 2,800–3,200 aircraft of the 2nd Air Army. The front included no fewer than three tank armies – General Mikhail Katukov’s 1st Guards, General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Guards and General Dmitry Lelyushenko’s 4th Tank Army – as well as two cavalry-mechanised groups and the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. Zhukov, as Stavka representative, was at this time coordinating the operations of the left wing of the 1st Belorussian Front and of the 1st Ukrainian Front.

Facing them was Army Group North Ukraine. Until the end of June it was commanded – formally, according to some sources, for a few weeks longer – by Field Marshal Walter Model, but when the front in Belorussia collapsed Hitler sent him to rescue Army Group Centre, and on 28 June Colonel General Josef Harpe took over command in the south. Harpe had under him General Erhard Raus’s 1st Panzer Army, General Walther Nehring’s 4th Panzer Army and the Hungarian First Army in front of the Carpathians. Estimates of his strength vary widely: Western studies speak of some 400,000 Wehrmacht soldiers and a few hundred tanks and assault guns, Soviet ones – which also count the Hungarians and rear units – of nearly 900,000. After several panzer divisions had been transferred to Belorussia, Harpe’s reserve consisted chiefly of four weakened panzer divisions: the 1st, 8th, 16th and 17th.

Konev’s plan envisaged two thrusts. The northern one – by General Vasily Gordov’s 3rd Guards Army, General Nikolai Pukhov’s 13th Army and Katukov’s tank army – was to advance from the area of Łuck (Lutsk) and Horochów (Horokhiv) towards Rawa Ruska. The southern one – by General Pavel Kurochkin’s 60th Army, General Kirill Moskalenko’s 38th Army and the two tank armies of Rybalko and Lelyushenko – was to advance from near Tarnopol towards Lwów. The two thrusts were to meet west of Brody, trapping the German troops defending there. Konev concentrated his forces on very narrow breakthrough sectors – a few dozen kilometres in all – with an artillery density of over 200 guns and mortars per kilometre of front. The plan was approved in Moscow, and the front command issued its orders on 10 July.

13 July: the thrust towards Rawa Ruska

The attack was to begin a few days later, but reconnaissance changed the plan. The German command, having learned from earlier offensives, intended to pull its troops back from the first position to the second before the expected artillery bombardment, so that the Soviet fire would fall on empty trenches. According to Russian studies, reconnaissance aircraft discovered on the previous day that the Germans had already begun to withdraw on the Rawa Ruska axis. Konev decided not to wait, and on the morning of 13 July, roughly two days ahead of schedule, he sent in the reinforced forward battalions of the 3rd Guards Army and the 13th Army, without a lengthy artillery preparation.

The blow struck the withdrawing units of the German XLII Army Corps and the already battered 291st and 340th Infantry Divisions. On the first day Soviet troops advanced west of Horochów to a depth of ten to fifteen kilometres, and by 15 July about 20 kilometres. Nehring threw his reserves, the 16th and 17th Panzer Divisions, into a counter-attack, but according to German figures the two had only a few dozen serviceable tanks between them, and their thrust near Drużkopol soon stalled. On 16 July Konev committed General Viktor Baranov’s cavalry-mechanised group to the breach, and on 17 July Katukov’s tank army. The cavalry and tanks drove deep towards the Bug at Kamionka Strumiłowa (Kamianka-Buzka) and cut off the German troops near Brody from the west.

The corridor at Kołtów

On the Lwów axis the attack, launched on 14 July after a heavy artillery preparation, went much harder. The German defences here were deeper, and in reserve stood two panzer divisions, the 1st and 8th, which on 15 July counter-attacked from the area of Płuhów and Zborów and threw the Soviet troops back several kilometres. The counter-attack failed partly through the Germans’ own fault: according to German accounts, the commander of the 8th Panzer Division, contrary to orders, led his columns along the open Złoczów–Zborów road, where they were massacred by Il-2 ground-attack aircraft. The commander was relieved, and the division was out of action for several days.

Meanwhile Kurochkin’s 60th Army managed to punch a narrow breach in the German defences near the village of Kołtów in the area of Złoczów (Zolochiv) – according to Russian descriptions 4–6 kilometres wide and some ten to fifteen kilometres long. Konev then took a decision that historians count among the riskiest of his career. On 16 July he sent the whole of Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army into this corridor, and on 17 July Lelyushenko’s 4th Tank Army. The tank columns passed under fire from German artillery on the hills on both sides and beat off flank counter-attacks. According to Russian studies, this was the only time in the German–Soviet war that two tank armies were committed to battle through such a narrow breach. The gamble paid off: the tank armies got into the rear of the German XIII Corps and drove west towards Lwów and Busk.

The Brody pocket

Brody, in June 1941 the scene of one of the largest tank battles of the first days of the German–Soviet war, became a trap for the Germans three years later. The salient around the town was held by General Arthur Hauffe’s XIII Army Corps – several infantry divisions, Corps Detachment C and the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, formed in 1943 in the District of Galicia from Ukrainian volunteers and known as “Galizien”. For this division, some 11,000 strong, it was the first battle. When both Soviet thrusts drove deep, the German command counted too long on a counter-attack restoring the front and failed to withdraw the corps in time.

On the evening of 18 July the spearheads of the two Soviet groupings met near Busk and the ring closed. Various estimates put the number of men encircled at between 30,000 and 45,000. Attempts to break through from outside and from within failed, and on 22 July Soviet troops split the pocket into pieces. Hauffe was killed during the attempt to break out, and the commanders of several divisions were killed or captured. According to German documents, some 15,000 men made their way back to their own lines in small groups, among them – according to various estimates – between 1,500 and 3,500 soldiers of the Galizien division. Soviet communiqués spoke of some 30,000 killed and 17,000 prisoners at Brody; Western historians regard these figures as inflated. The history of the Galizien division remains a subject of dispute among Polish, Ukrainian and Russian historians to this day – for some it was a collaborationist Waffen-SS formation, for others an attempt to create the nucleus of a Ukrainian army.

Lwów, the San and the Vistula

After the defeat at Brody, the front of Army Group North Ukraine split in two: the 4th Panzer Army fell back towards the Vistula, and the 1st Panzer Army and the Hungarians towards the Carpathians. From 22 July Soviet tanks were fighting in the suburbs of Lwów. The Home Army under Colonel Władysław Filipkowski (“Janka”) joined the fighting in the city, intending, in accordance with the plan of Operation Tempest (Akcja „Burza”), to greet the incoming troops as the city’s rightful authority. On 27 July the Germans abandoned Lwów; on the same day Soviet troops took Przemyśl and Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk). A few days later the NKVD arrested the officers of the Lwów Home Army, and its soldiers were disarmed. For Poles, Lwów was a Polish city, occupied since 1941 by the Germans, who immediately after entering it had murdered a group of Lwów professors and then murdered almost the entire Jewish population of the city; for Stalin it was part of the Ukrainian SSR, into which it had been incorporated after the Soviet invasion of September 1939.

The left wing of the front meanwhile forced the San, and at the end of July the spearheads of Katukov’s tank army reached the Vistula; on the evening of 29 July the crossing at Baranów began, and on 31 July Katukov’s main forces crossed the river. Until the end of August the Germans, reinforced by divisions brought from other sectors, tried in vain to throw the Russians back across the river – in this fighting they used Tiger II heavy tanks in battle on the Eastern Front for the first time. On 18 August Soviet troops took Sandomierz, and on 29 August the front went over to the defensive. According to Krivosheev’s figures, the operation cost the Red Army some 65,000 killed and missing and more than 224,000 wounded and sick – 289,000 men in all. Karl-Heinz Frieser estimates German losses at around 137,000.

Place in the war

The Lwów–Sandomierz offensive is often overshadowed by the simultaneous destruction of Army Group Centre in Belorussia, but its consequences were not much smaller. Within seven weeks Army Group North Ukraine lost most of its divisions – according to Russian studies, eight were destroyed and more than thirty lost half their strength or more – and in the second half of July the German front in the east was torn into two parts, linked from then on only by a roundabout route through Slovakia and Hungary. The Germans lost Eastern Galicia together with the oilfields around Drohobycz (Drohobych) and Borysław (Boryslav), and Soviet troops stood at the foot of the Carpathians, from where in the autumn they would strike across the mountains towards Slovakia.

The most important lasting gain proved to be the Sandomierz bridgehead. It was from there that in January 1945 Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front launched the offensive that within a few weeks carried it through Kraków and Upper Silesia to the Oder. For his direction of the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive Konev was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for the first time on 29 July 1944.

For Poland the offensive meant the end of German occupation in the south-east of the country and, at the same time, the beginning of a new dependence. Soviet troops were taking Lwów, Przemyśl, Rzeszów and Sandomierz in the same weeks in which the Polish Committee of National Liberation, subordinate to Stalin, was set up in Moscow, while Home Army units that had emerged from the underground to fight the Germans were disarmed and their commanders arrested. Lwów, which after the war found itself within the Ukrainian SSR, was left in 1944–1946, under the so-called repatriations, by most of its Polish inhabitants. In the lands of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia liberated by the Red Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army continued to fight Soviet rule for several more years.