The Yelnya offensive

At 7.30 a.m. on Saturday 30 August 1941 some 800 Soviet guns, mortars and rocket launchers opened fire on the German positions around Yelnya, a small town on the Desna some 80 kilometres south-east of Smolensk. Half an hour later the divisions of Major General Konstantin Rakutin’s 24th Army went into the attack. They were to strike the base of the German salient from the north and the south, encircle the divisions defending it and open the way westwards. The operation was directed by the commander of the Reserve Front, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, who a month earlier had been removed from his post as Chief of the General Staff. A week later the Germans abandoned the salient, and on 6 September Soviet soldiers entered the ruins of Yelnya. In the USSR this was hailed as the Red Army’s first victory of the war.

The Yelnya offensive began on 30 August. It was not, however, the first Soviet attack on Yelnya: Soviet troops had been assaulting the salient intermittently since July, and 30 August marked the start of yet another blow, the best prepared of them. Russian studies close the operation on 6 or 8 September.

The Yelnya salient

Yelnya had been taken on 19 July by the 10th Panzer Division of Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s panzer group, supported by the SS Das Reich Division. This was in the days when the Germans were fighting for Smolensk and closing a pocket to the east of it. Guderian, instead of helping to close the encirclement, pushed part of his forces further east to seize the high ground above the Desna as a springboard for an advance on Vyazma and Moscow. The panzer divisions reached Yelnya on the last of their fuel and ammunition and could go no further. The result was a salient projecting deep into the Soviet defences, with a front more than 70 kilometres long and a single supply road at its base – the point of the German front closest to Moscow.

To the Soviet command the salient was a threat: from it the Germans could strike at Vyazma and the rear of the forces defending the Moscow axis. From the second half of July the newly formed divisions of the 24th Army attacked it almost daily. Rakutin, a pre-war officer of the NKVD Border Troops, had commanded the army since 15 July. Attacks launched straight from the march, without reconnaissance or adequate artillery, brought heavy losses and gains of a few kilometres at most. The first offensive after the formation of the Reserve Front, at the beginning of August, also collapsed after two days, and further attacks in the middle of the month likewise failed to break the defence.

When at the beginning of August the fighting in the Smolensk pocket came to an end, the salient became, for the Germans, the scene of positional warfare of a kind the Wehrmacht had not yet known in the east. The panzer divisions and Das Reich were withdrawn in August to refit, and their place was taken by the infantry of General of Infantry Friedrich Materna’s XX Army Corps, from Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s 4th Army. The soldiers dug in under incessant Soviet artillery fire; the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, called the fighting at Yelnya a typical example of positional warfare. The commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, noted on 15 August that it was hard to decide whether it was better to hold the salient or give it up: if the Russians kept attacking, holding it did not pay; if they stopped, it would serve as a base for a further advance eastwards and as a shield for the railway junction at Smolensk. In the end the salient was not given up – in August the German staffs were still counting on an early resumption of the march on Moscow.

Zhukov’s preparations

The Reserve Front was created on 30 July east of Smolensk, behind the line of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s Western Front. Zhukov took it over after a dispute with Joseph Stalin: as Chief of the General Staff he had proposed withdrawing the troops in Ukraine behind the Dnieper, giving up Kiev, and striking at the Yelnya salient. According to his memoirs, Stalin called the idea of surrendering Kiev “nonsense”, and Zhukov asked to be relieved of his post. The front received several newly formed armies, poorly trained and short of tanks and artillery. Two of them, the 24th and 43rd, took up positions in the front line facing the salient and on the axis of Roslavl, which Guderian had taken at the beginning of August.

On 21 August, after further unsuccessful attacks, Zhukov ordered Rakutin to call them off and prepare a new, stronger blow. On 25 August the Stavka approved his plan. The 24th Army was to strike the base of the salient with two groupings: from the north the 102nd Tank Division and the 107th and 100th Rifle Divisions, and from the south the 106th Motorised Division and the 303rd Rifle Division. Two divisions, the 19th and 309th, were to pin the Germans down from the east, while others closed off the lines of retreat. By 3 September the German grouping was to be destroyed, and the army was to continue westwards towards Pochinok. In the south the 43rd Army was to attack towards Roslavl.

A key role was assigned to the artillery. The Reserve Front’s artillery chief, Major General Leonid Govorov, concentrated in the 24th Army ten regiments of corps artillery, anti-tank artillery and High Command reserve artillery, together with batteries of BM-13 rocket launchers, and organised artillery reconnaissance and a fire plan. According to Russian studies, the Soviets had a one-and-a-half-fold superiority in artillery, while in manpower the forces were roughly equal: the 24th Army numbered some 60,000 men at the outset, and the German corps defending the salient some 70,000, with about 500 guns and mortars and a battalion of assault guns. The Soviet weakness was air power: the army was given only about 20 aircraft for reconnaissance and fire correction, with no fighters or bombers.

The offensive at Yelnya was part of a wider plan. The Stavka wanted to exploit the pause in the German advance on the Moscow axis. At the turn of August and September three Soviet fronts went into action: Timoshenko’s Western Front at Dukhovshchina, north-east of Smolensk; the Reserve Front at Yelnya and Roslavl; and Lieutenant General Andrei Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front, which was to strike the flank of Guderian’s group as it was turning south – following the August decisions of Adolf Hitler – into the rear of the Soviet forces defending Kiev.

The course of the offensive

The first days gave no promise of success. After the artillery preparation on 30 August, the infantry advanced in two days by as little as about two kilometres in some sectors. The Germans counter-attacked to hold the neck of the salient. On 1 September Halder noted heavy attacks on the Yelnya salient, which he linked to an expected general enemy offensive. Things went even worse in the south. On 30 August the 43rd Army broke through the defences of the German 23rd Infantry Division, and its 109th Tank Division drove in some 12 kilometres, but the next day the Germans threw the 10th Panzer Division and the 267th Infantry Division against it, struck its flanks and encircled it. Until 5 September the remnants of the division tried to break out of the pocket across the Desna; most of its men were killed or captured, and the division itself was soon disbanded. The attack on Roslavl failed, and the commander of the 43rd Army, Major General Dmitry Seleznyov, lost his post.

At Yelnya the offensive gathered pace on 3 September. By the evening the northern and southern groupings of the 24th Army had narrowed the neck of the salient to 6–8 kilometres and threatened to encircle the whole of Materna’s corps. The German command did not wait. Halder and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, flew to Bock’s headquarters and concluded that the salient was no longer worth holding; according to some studies, Hitler himself finally gave his consent to the withdrawal. From 3 September the German divisions, covered by strong rearguards, withdrew from the salient to a prepared line across its base. On 5 September Halder wrote with satisfaction that the enemy had gone on shelling the abandoned positions for a long time before cautiously occupying them with infantry, and that the undetected withdrawal was a fine piece of command.

On the evening of 5 September units of the Soviet 19th Rifle Division broke into Yelnya, and Major General Ivan Russiyanov’s 100th Division occupied the villages north of the town. On 6 September the town was in Soviet hands. By 8 September the 24th Army had cleared the entire salient, advancing some 25 kilometres in all, and then halted on the Ustrom and Striana rivers, on a new German defensive line prepared in advance. Attempts to go further failed. The intended encirclement of the German corps did not come off: most of its divisions got out of the salient in good order, albeit with heavy losses.

The other blows by the Soviet fronts achieved even less. The Western Front’s offensive at Dukhovshchina, under way since mid-August, bled both sides white but did not recapture Smolensk, and the Bryansk Front failed to stop Guderian heading south. On 10 September the Stavka ordered the fronts of the western axis to go over to the defensive.

Losses and destruction

According to the Russian survey of losses edited by Grigori Krivosheev, the Reserve Front troops that took part in the operation – the 24th and 43rd Armies, some 103,000 men in all – lost 31,853 men between 30 August and 8 September: 10,701 killed, missing and captured, and 21,152 wounded and sick. The American historian David Glantz estimates that the 24th Army lost nearly 40 per cent of its combat strength. According to figures cited by historians, the German XX Corps lost some 23,000 killed, wounded and missing in the fighting for the salient between 8 August and 8 September; the 4th Army had not made good these losses by the end of the year. Soviet accounts, both wartime and later, gave much higher figures for German losses, which are not borne out by the documents.

The land from which the Germans withdrew was in ruins. The British correspondent Alexander Werth, who visited the Yelnya area in September with a group of foreign journalists – the first to be allowed to go to the front – described the town, which before the war had had a population of more than ten thousand, as completely destroyed. According to the accounts he gathered, the Germans had taken men and women fit for work to the rear, and on the last night before the withdrawal they had locked the remaining inhabitants in the church and systematically set fire to the houses. The surrounding villages had been burned, and the people who survived were living in cellars and dugouts.

The first victory and the birth of the Guards

The Yelnya operation was a limited success: the Red Army recovered a strip of land a few dozen kilometres deep, but failed to encircle the Germans or to push further, and lost more men than its opponent. Even so, its significance went far beyond the scale of the fighting. For the first time since 22 June the Wehrmacht had been forced to withdraw on a substantial stretch of front, and for the first time Soviet troops had recaptured a town taken by the Germans. The Soviet press turned Yelnya into a great triumph. Werth wrote that it had been blown up beyond its real importance, but conceded that for people in the USSR it was the first scrap of land anywhere in Europe to have been taken back from the Wehrmacht. German communiqués spoke of a planned “shortening of the front”.

Yelnya was also bound up with the birth of the Soviet Guards. On 18 September 1941 an order of the People’s Commissar of Defence conferred the title of Guards on four rifle divisions: the 100th and 127th, which had fought at Yelnya, and the 153rd and 161st of the Western Front. They became the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Guards Rifle Divisions. On 26 September the 107th and 120th Divisions from Yelnya were also made Guards divisions. The title, which harked back to the old, pre-revolutionary Guards tradition, brought the soldiers higher pay and the units priority for replacements, and from then on it became the highest distinction for Red Army formations.

Place in the war

For Zhukov, Yelnya was a passport to the most difficult assignments. A few days after the operation ended Stalin sent him to Leningrad, where the Germans were already before the city, and in October, when the front before Moscow collapsed, he entrusted him with its defence. The legend of Yelnya became one of the pillars of Zhukov’s fame; historians also stress, however, that his offensive was costly and that the only success of the three fronts was paid for with defeats at Dukhovshchina and Roslavl.

The offensives of August and September 1941 on the Moscow axis had a double effect. They bled Army Group Centre and deprived it of freedom of action for two months, but they weakened just as badly the Soviet armies that would have to defend the capital in the autumn. On 2 October the Germans resumed their advance on Moscow, and in the first days of Operation Typhoon they encircled most of the forces of the Western, Reserve and Bryansk Fronts at Vyazma and Bryansk. In the Vyazma pocket the 24th Army was destroyed, and Major General Rakutin was killed on 7 October while trying to lead his men out of it. The Germans retook Yelnya at the beginning of October, and the Red Army recaptured it for good only on 30 August 1943, exactly two years after the start of the first Yelnya offensive.