The offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine

In the first week of March 1944 one of the Red Army’s largest offensives of the entire war began in Right-Bank Ukraine – the lands lying west of the Dnieper. Three fronts attacked in turn: on 4 March the 1st Ukrainian Front, which Marshal Georgy Zhukov had commanded for only a few days; on 5 March Marshal Ivan Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front; and on 6 March the 3rd Ukrainian Front under General of the Army Rodion Malinovsky. After a few days of fighting, the front of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South and of the neighbouring Army Group A under Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist had been torn open in several places, and the German divisions, wading through the thaw mud, were falling back towards the Southern Bug and the Dniester.

War chronologies record under 8 March that the Red Army’s offensive on a broad front west of the Dnieper had forced the Germans into a great retreat. That is essentially accurate, with one qualification: 8 March was not the day the offensive began but the moment when all three thrusts – launched over the previous four days – were developing at once. By that day Zhukov’s tanks were already fighting hard for the Lwów–Odessa railway between Tarnopol (Ternopil) and Proskurov, Malinovsky’s cavalry had burst into Novyi Buh, where the headquarters of the German 6th Army was located, and Konev’s tanks were nearing Uman. On the same day Adolf Hitler signed an order on “fortresses” (feste Plätze), which was meant to halt the retreat but in practice condemned the garrisons of many towns to encirclement.

Soviet historiography called the whole campaign, which lasted from the end of December 1943 to mid-April 1944, the Dnieper–Carpathian offensive. The March attacks were its second and decisive stage.

After Korsun

The offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine had begun in the last days of 1943 with an attack on Zhytomyr and Berdychiv, and in January and February 1944 it brought about the encirclement of two German corps near Korsun. On the night of 16–17 February the encircled troops broke out of the pocket, but left all their heavy equipment behind; the Battle of Korsun, now over, had cost the Germans well over ten thousand killed and captured. In the north, the right wing of the 1st Ukrainian Front had crossed Poland’s pre-war border as early as January, and in February it took Równe (Rivne) and Łuck (Lutsk). In the south, the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts eliminated the German bridgehead at Nikopol in February and captured Kryvyi Rih.

The Wehrmacht in Ukraine was exhausted. Manstein’s and Kleist’s divisions had been retreating without respite since the summer of 1943 – from Kursk, through the Battle of the Dnieper and the loss of Kiev – and Hitler consistently refused to allow the front to be shortened, as Manstein demanded. Many divisions numbered only a few thousand men, and at the beginning of March the German 1st Panzer Army had, according to German returns, a mere few dozen serviceable tanks and assault guns.

Vatutin and Zhukov

The new attack by the 1st Ukrainian Front had been prepared by its commander until then, General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin. On 29 February 1944 (28 February in some sources), near the village of Myliatyn in Volhynia, far behind the front line, his cars ran into a detachment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Vatutin was seriously wounded in the thigh and died in Kiev on 15 April. On 1 March command of the front was taken over by the representative of Supreme Headquarters, Marshal Zhukov, who until then had been coordinating the operations of both Ukrainian fronts. The operations of the 3rd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts were coordinated at this time by Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky.

The plan, approved by the Stavka on 18 February, envisaged an attack from the Shepetivka area – from a salient driven into the German defences during the Rivne–Lutsk operation in February – due south towards Tarnopol, Proskurov (today Khmelnytskyi) and on to the Dniester. Such a thrust would cut the Lwów–Odessa railway, the last trunk line linking the German forces in Ukraine with the General Government and the Reich, and threatened to pin the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies against the Carpathians. The 2nd Ukrainian Front was to strike from the Zvenyhorodka area towards Uman and on to the Bug, and the 3rd Ukrainian Front from beyond the Inhulets river towards Mykolaiv and Odessa.

The regrouping took place in the worst conditions imaginable. General Pavel Rybalko’s 3rd Guards Tank Army and the 4th Tank Army covered between 200 and 350 kilometres on sodden roads, by night and under concealment, while a simulated concentration of troops on the front’s left wing was meant to deceive the Germans. According to Soviet figures, on the eve of the attack the 1st Ukrainian Front numbered some 650,000 men and more than 1,400 tanks and self-propelled guns; fuel, however, was short – stocks were expected to last for barely three days. Zhukov nevertheless decided to attack, because every day’s delay gave the Germans time to rebuild their front. Their command was in any case expecting a blow and had moved several panzer divisions from the Uman area to the region of Starokostiantyniv and Shepetivka, which Soviet intelligence failed to detect in time.

Zhukov’s blow

At 8 a.m. on 4 March, after a heavy artillery preparation, General Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s 60th Army and General Andrei Grechko’s 1st Guards Army went over to the attack. The German front broke at the junction of the 4th and 1st Panzer Armies, and the 4th Tank Army and the 3rd Guards Tank Army were committed to the breach. Within two days the Soviet forces had advanced 25–50 kilometres, encircling and destroying smaller German groupings on the way. A gap more than a hundred kilometres wide opened at the junction of the two German armies. On 9 March units of the 1st Guards Army took Starokostiantyniv, and the spearheads of the 60th Army reached Tarnopol and began fighting for the city.

The objective was the Tarnopol–Proskurov railway. For the Germans it was a matter of life and death, and they brought in nine panzer divisions, including the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler”, as well as three infantry divisions transported from the Reich, France and Poland. From 7 March they counter-attacked along the whole sector from Tarnopol to Proskurov. Zhukov wrote in his memoirs that a battle flared up here such as had not been seen since Kursk, and that for eight days the enemy tried to throw his troops back to their starting positions. Around 10 March the Soviet advance on the main axis stalled: both sides had exhausted themselves in the fighting for the railway junctions around Volochysk, Tarnopol and Proskurov, and the Soviet tanks stood idle for lack of fuel, which was being flown in. On the right wing the 13th Army took Dubno and Krzemieniec (Kremenets) in mid-month; on the left the 18th and 38th Armies captured Khmilnyk and pushed on towards Zhmerynka and Vinnytsia.

Uman

The 2nd Ukrainian Front advanced fastest. On 5 March six armies attacked on a sector 175 kilometres long, among them three tank armies – the 2nd, the 5th Guards and the 6th. Soviet historians later stressed that this was the first time three tank armies had carried out a breakthrough together on a narrow sector of the front, and in the thaw season at that. The tanks went into action on the very first day, on the third they crossed the Hirskyi Tikych river without stopping and set off in pursuit of the German 8th Army. On 10 March Soviet units took Uman, a major road and supply hub where the fleeing Germans had abandoned hundreds of vehicles and tanks bogged down in the mud; Soviet communiqués spoke of enormous booty, the scale of which cannot be verified precisely. A few days later Konev’s spearheads crossed the Southern Bug on a broad front – over captured bridges and on pontoons, boats and rafts.

On the Inhulets and the Bug

On 6 March the 3rd Ukrainian Front went over to the offensive. It struck from bridgeheads it had won in the last days of February on the western bank of the swollen Inhulets, against General Karl-Adolf Hollidt’s German 6th Army – an army re-formed after Stalingrad and bled white in February at Nikopol and Kryvyi Rih. The main blow was delivered by the 8th Guards Army of General Vasily Chuikov, the defender of Stalingrad. Into the breach went General Issa Pliyev’s cavalry-mechanised group, which in rain and mud that swallowed lorries moved faster than the infantry. On the morning of 8 March its cavalry and tanks burst into Novyi Buh, surprising German trains unloading at the railway station; the town housed the headquarters of the 6th Army and its depots. Hollidt’s front was cut in two.

Pliyev then turned south, into the rear of the Germans defending the lower Inhulets. On the southern wing the 28th Army forced the Dnieper at Kakhovka and on 13 March liberated Kherson. Several German corps found themselves encircled in the area of Bereznehuvate and Snihurivka. On 13 March Hollidt ordered them to break out westwards in small groups, or even individually; a large proportion of the men slipped through gaps in the Soviet ring towards Mykolaiv and across the Bug, but they abandoned almost all their artillery and transport. According to Soviet figures, some 13,700 Germans were taken prisoner. One infantry division was disbanded, and several others lost half their strength. Soviet historians called this fighting the Bereznegovatoye–Snigirevka operation; on the German side it was “the 6th Army’s second winter battle”. In the second half of March Malinovsky’s troops reached the Bug and the approaches to Mykolaiv.

The fortress order and the mud

Hitler responded to the collapse of the front not by permitting a retreat but with an order. On 8 March 1944 he signed Führer Order No. 11 on “fortress” commandants (feste Plätze) and combat commandants. Designated towns – road and railway junctions – were to defend themselves to the last man, allowing themselves to be encircled and so tying down enemy forces, and their commandants answered for this with their lives directly to Hitler. Tarnopol was among the places declared a fortress; the town’s German garrison was surrounded at the end of March. In practice the order meant that, instead of shortening the front, the Germans left thousands of soldiers in towns whom they had no means of relieving or supplying.

The troops of both sides fought in the rasputitsa – the spring thaw, when the black earth of Ukraine turns into mud several tens of centimetres deep. German motor vehicles and lighter tanks sank on the roads, and retreating columns abandoned equipment that could not be pulled out. The broad-tracked T-34 tanks and the American Studebaker all-terrain lorries supplied under Lend-Lease coped better; the infantry often carried ammunition on their backs, and horses and oxen hauled the guns. For the German command, which had counted on the mud giving it a spring lull in the fighting, the pace of the Soviet advance came as a surprise.

Place in the war

The March attacks sealed the fate of German rule in Ukraine. On 17 March Konev’s spearheads crossed the Dniester, and on 26 March they reached the Prut, the border the Soviet Union had regarded as its own since the seizure of Bessarabia in 1940. On 20 March the 1st Ukrainian Front took Vinnytsia. Zhukov’s offensive, renewed on 21 March, split the front of Army Group South in two: the 4th Panzer Army fell back into Eastern Galicia, while General Hans-Valentin Hube’s 1st Panzer Army, some 200,000 men, was encircled at the end of March in the area of Kamianets-Podilskyi and only escaped from the pocket, fighting its way westwards, at the beginning of April. The Lwów–Odessa railway was cut for good; from then on the German forces in the south had to be supplied by a roundabout route through Romania.

Hitler looked for culprits. On 30 March he dismissed Manstein and Kleist, replacing them with Field Marshal Walter Model and General Ferdinand Schörner; at the beginning of April the two army groups were renamed Army Group North Ukraine and Army Group South Ukraine, although little of Ukraine remained in their hands. Malinovsky took Mykolaiv at the end of March and Odessa on 10 April. Encircled Tarnopol fell on 15 April. The Red Army’s approach to the Carpathians and to the borders of Hungary and Romania was one of the reasons why the Germans occupied Hungary in March and kept an ever closer watch on Romania.

The Dnieper–Carpathian offensive, which petered out in April in the Carpathian foothills, near Iași and on the lower Dniester, was the Red Army’s largest operation of the winter and spring of 1944. Soviet forces advanced 250–450 kilometres, wrested almost the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine from the Germans, and entered the territory of pre-war Poland in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia as well as Romanian soil. On the southern wing of the front the Wehrmacht lost dozens of divisions and vast quantities of equipment, and a front that in the autumn of 1943 had still rested on the Dnieper moved deep into Central Europe. From its spring positions in Ukraine the Red Army struck in the summer of 1944 towards Lwów and the Vistula, and in August into Romania, which within a few days was wrenched out of its alliance with Germany.