The Red Army retakes Rostov

On 28 November 1941, barely a week after the Germans captured Rostov-on-Don, units of Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s German 1st Panzer Army began to pull out of the city. Three Soviet armies of the Southern Front were attacking them from the east, from the south across the frozen Don, and from the north. The next day, 29 November, after three days of street fighting, Rostov was back in Soviet hands. It was the first major city the Red Army had recaptured in this war, and at the same time the first serious retreat of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. It led to the dismissal of one of Hitler’s most senior commanders, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.

The Red Army’s recapture of Rostov is often dated to 28 November. Here the sources differ by a day. The first units of the Soviet 56th Army crossed the ice of the Don and broke into the city as early as 27 November, and on 28 November the Germans, with Rundstedt’s consent, began to evacuate it; that date is given in many Soviet studies and biographies of commanders. According to Russian operational studies, however, the city was completely cleared only on 29 November, and it was on that day that the Sovinformburo announced it. The German retreat to the Mius river lasted until 2 December.

The second stage of the counter-offensive

The Soviet counter-attack began on 17 November, the same day on which Kleist set off for Rostov. The new 37th Army of Major General Anton Lopatin, supported by the flanks of the 18th and 9th Armies, struck the northern flank of the 1st Panzer Army. It advanced slowly, but by 23 November it had reached the Tuzlov river, a few dozen kilometres north of Rostov. The German troops in the city now found themselves in a narrow, projecting salient whose supply line ran along the coast of the Sea of Azov.

A Stavka directive of 24 November set the objective: to destroy Kleist’s panzer group and take the Rostov and Taganrog area, reaching the Mius. The most promising course was a drive on Taganrog: reaching the sea would have cut off all German forces around Rostov from the rest of Army Group South. The Commander-in-Chief of the South-Western Direction, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, and the commander of the Southern Front, Colonel General Yakov Cherevichenko, nevertheless decided to send the main forces of the 37th Army straight at Rostov in order to retake the city as quickly as possible. The regrouping took three days. Russian military historians judge this decision critically: instead of encircling the entire 1st Panzer Army, it now threatened only the two motorised divisions that remained in the city. Soviet intelligence also failed to notice that Kleist had begun withdrawing his panzer divisions from around Rostov.

Assault across the ice

On the morning of 27 November three armies set off for Rostov along converging axes. The 37th Army attacked from the north towards Sultan-Saly and the western suburbs; the 9th Army of Major General Fyodor Kharitonov from the north-east towards Bolshiye Saly and from the direction of Novocherkassk. The 56th Army of Lieutenant General Fyodor Remezov, subordinated to the Southern Front since 23 November, attacked from the left bank of the Don in three groups. The eastern group, under Major General Aleksei Grechkin, advanced from the Krasny Dvor area against the eastern districts; the central group – with two rifle divisions, an NKVD regiment and the Rostov people’s militia regiment – went from Bataysk straight across the river towards the centre; and the western group, the strongest, from the Azov area towards the western suburbs and Chaltyr.

The ice on the Don was thin. The infantry crossed it under German machine-gun fire, and heavy weapons could not be brought over in the first wave. Even so, on 27 November the first sub-units of the 56th Army seized footholds on the right bank and entered the city. Street fighting began with the rearguards of the SS division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and the 60th Motorised Infantry Division.

Kleist assessed the danger faster than his superiors. Without waiting for approval from above, he shifted both panzer divisions north to the Tuzlov to face the 37th Army, also threw in the Slovak motorised division that had until then been guarding the coast, and under cover of these forces began to lead the rest of his troops out of the city. On 28 November Rundstedt approved the abandonment of Rostov. That day heavy fighting was still going on in the streets, but German columns were already falling back westwards towards Chaltyr and Taganrog. On 29 November the 37th Army broke through the German defences north of Sultan-Saly, the 56th Army took Chaltyr, and units of the 56th and 9th Armies completed the clearing of the city. That day Stalin sent a telegram of congratulation, later published in the press, in which he saluted the troops of the 9th and 56th Armies “headed by Generals Kharitonov and Remezov” for raising the Soviet banner over Rostov.

Rundstedt against Hitler

For many weeks Rundstedt had been arguing that his exhausted armies should go over to the defensive for the winter. Now he concluded that Rostov could not be held and decided to pull the 1st Panzer Army back all the way to the Mius, about 70 kilometres to the west, where the front could rest on the river and a shorter line. When Hitler learned of this, he forbade the retreat and demanded that the troops halt on a line closer to Rostov. Rundstedt replied that he would not carry out the order, adding, according to the text cited by historians: “If confidence in my leadership no longer exists, I ask to be replaced by someone who has the necessary confidence of the high command.” Hitler took him at his word. During the night of 30 November–1 December 1941 he relieved Rundstedt, and on 1 December he gave Army Group South to the commander of the 6th Army, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, a Nazi general and author of the October order on the “conduct of the troops in the East”.

Reichenau tried to carry out Hitler’s instruction, but that very day he found that Rundstedt had been right: Soviet troops were breaking into the German defences, and the intermediate line had no natural features to rest on. Through the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, he asked for permission to retreat to the Mius, and on the evening of 1 December Hitler gave way. On 3 December he flew to the army group’s headquarters at Poltava. There he heard from Reichenau, from the army group’s chief of staff and from the commander of the Leibstandarte, his old comrade Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, that Rundstedt’s decision had been correct. He also met Rundstedt himself, called the affair a misunderstanding and suggested he take leave to restore his health. On 5 December the old field marshal left Poltava and never returned to the Eastern Front.

Rundstedt’s dismissal was the first of many that winter. Within a few weeks, as the Red Army went over to the counter-offensive before Moscow, Hitler dismissed the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, and took over the post himself, and many army and corps commanders also lost their commands, Heinz Guderian foremost among them.

Retreat to the Mius

From 30 November to 2 December the 1st Panzer Army withdrew to the Mius, covered by rearguards on successive intermediate lines. The pursuit was weak. Soviet rifle divisions advanced 4–5 kilometres a day, and the only mobile group, consisting of two cavalry divisions and General Grechkin’s tank brigade, was stopped by the Slovaks on the road to Taganrog. The Germans brought four divisions over from the Kharkiv area and stabilised the front on the Mius. Soviet attacks on this line in December brought no success. The Mius front held until the summer of 1942.

The Red Army threw the Germans back 60–80 kilometres on a broad sector and removed for that winter the threat of their breaking through to the Caucasus. It did not, however, achieve the Stavka’s main aim: to encircle and destroy Kleist’s army. Russian studies cite as the reasons the haste with which the counter-offensive was prepared, the troops’ poor tactical training, and Timoshenko’s mistake in directing the main blow at Rostov instead of Taganrog.

A bloody week

After entering the city, the Soviet troops and authorities began to count the victims of the week-long occupation. According to Soviet data cited by Rostov historians, German units shot several hundred civilians during that time, most of them in the Proletarsky district and in the former Nakhichevan, where fighting with scattered Soviet units lasted longest. Among the cases mentioned are some 200 people killed near the Armenian cemetery, 43 people, including women and children, shot in a bread queue, about 90 people, mostly elderly, disabled and children, detained and murdered near the Gorky Theatre, and 60 Jews shot on 36th Line. These figures come from Soviet reports drawn up immediately after the liberation and cannot always be verified today, but the fact of mass executions in reprisal for shots fired at German patrols is well documented.

The symbol of those days became Viktor Cherevichkin, a 16-year-old vocational school pupil. In defiance of an order of 22 November requiring pigeons to be destroyed, he hid his birds. On 28 November, as the Germans were already leaving the city, he was caught releasing pigeons near a headquarters building and shot. A photograph of his body with a dead pigeon in his hand, taken by the Soviet photojournalist Max Alpert, was among the documents of German crimes presented at the Nuremberg trial.

Losses

According to a Russian tabulation of Red Army losses in the Rostov operation, from 17 November to 2 December the Southern Front and the 56th Army lost 15,264 killed, missing and captured and 17,847 wounded and sick, more than 33,000 men in all. Soviet figures credited the Germans with some 30,000 killed and wounded and the loss of more than 150 tanks, but these numbers are inflated. Modern estimates of German losses in the battle of Rostov range from about 20,000 to 30,000 men, and the sources disagree on the point. What is certain is that the 1st Panzer Army lost the capacity for major offensives for many months, and that in December not a single division was transferred from Army Group South to the Moscow front.

Place in the war

The recapture of Rostov was the Red Army’s first such clear-cut victory of 1941. Earlier, in September, Zhukov’s troops had driven the Germans out of the Yelnya salient, but that was a local operation after which the Germans themselves shortened their front. At Rostov, for the first time, an entire German panzer army had to give up a large city and fall back several dozen kilometres, and the field marshal who allowed it lost his post. The commander of the Italian expeditionary corps, General Giovanni Messe, later wrote that the Soviet counter-attack came as a tremendous surprise to Germany’s allies and dispelled the illusion of imminent victory. Some historians also point out that at Rostov, where the frost and snow were milder than before Moscow, the Germans were defeated nonetheless, which counsels caution in explaining their winter defeats by the weather alone.

Rostov opened a series of Soviet successes that winter: on 5 December the counter-offensive before Moscow began, and on 9 December Soviet troops retook Tikhvin near Leningrad. The dispute over the retreat to the Mius also heralded a change in German command: from that winter Hitler increasingly forbade retreats and decided the movements of divisions himself. The Germans returned to Rostov in July 1942, on their way to the Caucasus and Stalingrad. The renewed loss of the city prompted Stalin to issue Order No. 227, “Not a step back”. Soviet troops finally liberated Rostov on 14 February 1943.