Manstein's counter-offensive

At the beginning of March 1943 the situation on the southern wing of the Eastern Front was reversed in just two weeks. As late as mid-February the Red Army had been advancing: it had retaken Kharkiv and Rostov, and its spearheads were approaching the Dnieper. On 5 March the troops of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein were finishing off the remnants of the Soviet 3rd Tank Army south of Kharkiv, and German panzer divisions stood a dozen or so kilometres from the city. Only three days later, on 8 March, the Germans were already pressing an attack designed to outflank Kharkiv from the west and north. The gains made by the Red Army in the Donets and Kharkiv area after Stalingrad had largely been thrown away.

The Germans called this fighting the Donets campaign; in Soviet historiography it consisted of the final, unsuccessful phase of the offensive operations in the Donbas and around Kharkiv, and of the Kharkov defensive operation (from 4 March). Today the whole is usually referred to as the Third Battle of Kharkov.

The Red Army at the end of its strength

In the winter of 1943 the Soviet command assumed that the Germans, after their defeat on the Volga, were beaten and retreating behind the Dnieper. The Stavka and the front commanders planned for the offensive to roll on without a pause all the way to the river, and perhaps beyond. Colonel General Nikolai Vatutin’s South-Western Front was advancing through the Donets Basin towards the Sea of Azov and the Dnieper crossings. Its spearhead was the mobile group of Lieutenant General Markian Popov, with four tank corps, alongside which advanced the 6th Army (PL). To the north, Colonel General Filipp Golikov’s Voronezh Front, having taken Kursk, Belgorod and Kharkiv, was heading further west, towards Poltava and Sumy.

In reality both fronts were exhausted. Since January they had each covered several hundred kilometres across the snow-covered steppe, far from working railway lines, and supplies could not keep up with the troops. Rifle divisions often numbered 3,500–4,000 men, and some only 1,000–1,500. Popov’s group, which in February had cut the railway supplying the German troops on the Mius at Krasnoarmeysk (today Pokrovsk), had only a few dozen serviceable tanks left. There was a shortage of fuel, ammunition and spare parts, and the air force, lacking airfields close to the front, gave the ground forces almost no support.

On the German side the situation was the reverse. The front had shortened after the withdrawal from the Caucasus and the Don, and Manstein’s Army Group South had received reinforcements – above all the fresh SS Panzer Corps of SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser, with the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Das Reich and Totenkopf divisions. Also earmarked for the counter-stroke were Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army and the First Panzer Army of General of Cavalry Eberhard von Mackensen, which after the retreat from the Don had been regrouped to the north-west.

The backhand blow

Manstein’s plan, later known as the “backhand blow” (Schlagen aus der Nachhand), was to let the enemy advance deep into the German dispositions and then strike at his overextended flanks. On 17–19 February Adolf Hitler stayed at Manstein’s headquarters in Zaporizhzhia and finally agreed that the Soviet groupings between the Donets and the Dnieper should be destroyed first and Kharkiv retaken only afterwards.

On 19 February the SS Panzer Corps struck south from the Krasnohrad area (today Berestyn) into the flank of the 6th Army, and on 20 February the XLVIII Panzer Corps of the Fourth Panzer Army moved off from the south. The Das Reich division took Pavlohrad, and on 22 February the Totenkopf division joined the attack. At the same time the XL Panzer Corps of the First Panzer Army attacked Popov’s group at Krasnoarmeysk. Soviet aircraft spotted the German regrouping, but front headquarters took it to be cover for a further withdrawal. On 21 February Vatutin refused to allow Popov’s group to pull back and ordered it to keep attacking, although it had only some 25 tanks left. The 25th Tank Corps, which was pushing towards Zaporizhzhia, got some 100 kilometres ahead of the main forces, ran out of fuel and was cut off.

By 24 February Popov’s group had been surrounded and destroyed, although a considerable number of its men broke out to the north. At the end of February parts of the 6th Army and the 1st Guards Army were also threatened with encirclement. Only around 25 February did the Stavka agree to a withdrawal. The South-Western Front’s retreat to the line of the Donets lasted until 3 March and was accompanied by heavy fighting. On 26 February the commander of the Totenkopf division, Theodor Eicke, the former inspector of concentration camps, was killed when his liaison aircraft was shot down over Soviet positions.

The toll of this phase is known mainly from German figures. In his memoirs Manstein stated that his troops had counted some 23,000 Soviet dead on the battlefield, taken 9,000 prisoners and captured or destroyed 615 tanks and 354 guns. The small number of prisoners was due to the fact that the German panzer divisions lacked the infantry to seal the pockets tightly, and many Soviet soldiers escaped to the northern bank of the Donets, abandoning their equipment. Soviet figures for the front’s losses in these weeks are given in aggregate for whole operations and are difficult to compare with the German ones.

The defeat of the 3rd Tank Army

As the South-Western Front began to collapse, on 22 February the Stavka decided to come to its aid with forces of the Voronezh Front. Sent south against the SS Panzer Corps were Lieutenant General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Tank Army (PL) – the same army that two weeks earlier had entered Kharkiv – and part of the 69th Army. Rybalko’s tank corps had only a fraction of their establishment of tanks left, and his rifle divisions had been weakened by the February fighting. The march along thawing roads under attack by German Ju 87 dive-bombers cost him further losses, and for lack of fuel and ammunition the attack was postponed to 3 March. At the same time the army was formally placed under the South-Western Front.

On 3 March Rybalko’s 15th Tank Corps collided with the advancing SS divisions and was immediately forced onto the defensive. The Totenkopf division broke through its lines and linked up with its own units attacking from the south, closing the ring around the corps. The 12th Tank Corps, whose supply routes the Leibstandarte and Das Reich were threatening to cut, also went over to the defensive. By 5 March the 3rd Tank Army had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist as an operational formation – only a few groups of soldiers, without tanks or heavy weapons, broke out northwards from the pockets south of Kharkiv. Among those killed was the commander of the 15th Tank Corps, Major General Vasily Koptsov.

Meanwhile, on 25 February, the newly formed Central Front of Colonel General Konstantin Rokossovsky, made up in part of armies transferred from Stalingrad, began an offensive north of Kursk. It was to strike towards Bryansk and Oryol and get into the rear of Army Group Centre. In places the front advanced several dozen kilometres, but the defeat in the south meant that in March the Stavka had to halt this offensive as well and divert some of its forces to the threatened Kharkiv sector.

The advance on Kharkiv

The destruction of Popov’s group, the 6th Army and the 3rd Tank Army opened a wide gap between the Soviet armies. As early as 28 February Army Group South issued orders for an advance towards Kharkiv. According to Soviet studies, on 4 March the SS Panzer Corps and the XLVIII Panzer Corps attacked the remnants of the 3rd Tank Army defending the approaches to the city, and at first made slow progress. Between 1 and 5 March the Fourth Panzer Army covered some 80 kilometres and came to a halt a dozen or so kilometres south-west of Kharkiv. On 6 March the Leibstandarte seized a bridgehead on the Mzha river, opening the road to the city.

On 7 March Manstein decided to continue the advance despite the approaching spring thaw. He did not want to attack the city frontally or to bypass it to the east. The Fourth Panzer Army was to pass Kharkiv to the west and then close it off from the north, cutting the defenders off from the rest of the Voronezh Front. The Grossdeutschland motorised division returned to the fighting, striking at the junction of the 69th Army and the remnants of the 3rd Tank Army. On 8 and 9 March the SS Panzer Corps broke through northwards, separating the Soviet 69th and 40th Armies, and on 9 March it wheeled east to complete the encirclement. The Stavka threw more rifle divisions and tank corps of the South-Western Front into the threatened sector, but they went into action piecemeal and could not stop the Germans. According to Soviet figures, the gap between the 69th Army and the 3rd Tank Army was some 45 kilometres wide on 9 March, and 60 kilometres a day later.

The Czechoslovaks at Sokolovo

In this fighting, for the first time in the history of the Eastern Front, a foreign unit fought alongside the Red Army – the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion, commanded by Ludvík Svoboda, formed at Buzuluk on the Samara from Czechoslovak émigrés and prisoners of Soviet labour camps and numbering just under a thousand men. The battalion was sent to the line of the Mzha south-west of Kharkiv. On 8 March, at the village of Sokolovo, the company of First Lieutenant Otakar Jaroš defending it held off an attack by German tanks and infantry all day. Jaroš was killed in the fighting and in April 1943 became the first foreigner to be posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The fighting for the Mzha crossings lasted until 9 March, and the battalion’s positions were abandoned a few days later, when the Germans outflanked Kharkiv. For the Czechoslovaks, Sokolovo became a symbol and the beginning of the army that in 1944 and 1945 fought alongside the Red Army in the Carpathians and in Slovakia.

Thaw and exhaustion

The German advance was helped by the frost: the frozen steppe and rivers allowed tanks to move off the roads. At the beginning of March, however, the rasputitsa set in – the spring thaw that every year turned Ukraine’s roads into mud. Manstein knew he had only a few weeks. His original plan had three stages: the destruction of the Soviet groupings in the south, the recapture of Kharkiv, and finally a joint attack with Army Group Centre on the Soviet forces jutting forward around Kursk. The last stage never took place – because of the thaw, and because Army Group Centre, itself under attack by Rokossovsky, lacked the strength to cooperate.

Both sides were exhausted. The German panzer divisions usually had a few dozen serviceable tanks each, and the SS Panzer Corps, Manstein’s strongest formation, was suffering ever heavier losses. The Red Army, however, had lost far more: within two weeks an offensive that was supposed to reach the Dnieper had turned into a defensive battle for Kharkiv.

Place in the war

Manstein’s counter-offensive was a painful lesson for Joseph Stalin and the Stavka. In the winter of 1941–1942, and again in the spring of 1942 in the Second Battle of Kharkov, the Soviet command had overestimated its own strength and underestimated the Wehrmacht’s capacity for a swift counter-stroke. In February 1943 the mistake was repeated: the Stavka read the German regrouping as a retreat and until the last moment ordered its exhausted armies to keep attacking. At the same time the Soviet fronts, although they suffered heavy losses, were not encircled in their entirety as in May 1942, and most of the troops managed to withdraw behind the Donets.

For the Germans it was their greatest success in months and proof that, even after Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht could still win battles of manoeuvre. A few days earlier Hitler had entrusted Heinz Guderian with rebuilding the armoured forces, and the victory on the Donets strengthened the conviction in the German high command that the initiative in the east could be regained in the summer of 1943. The success had its limits, however: the Germans did not recover Kursk or Luhansk (Voroshilovgrad), and their losses in men and equipment were harder to replace than the Soviet ones.

A few days after 5 March the SS divisions reached the outskirts of Kharkiv. On 11 March they entered the city, and on 14 March the Germans announced its capture; on 18 March they also retook Belgorod. Then the thaw brought the fighting to a halt along the whole southern sector of the front. Between Oryol and Belgorod there remained a Soviet salient around Kursk, jutting westwards. It was there, in July 1943, that the Germans launched their last great offensive in the east, Operation Citadel, and the Battle of Kursk ended in their defeat and finally handed the initiative to the Red Army. Kharkiv, recaptured by the Germans in March, was liberated for the second and last time on 23 August 1943.