Russia at war 1941-1945

Bagramian at their head. The General Staff of the South-West Front and members of its War Council, having been unable to find a single plane, followed Bagramian with 800

men, but were cut off by German tanks. Near Lokhvitsa, a battle raged for two days in the course of which General Kirponos was mortally wounded and M. A. Burmistrenko, a

member of the War Council and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian

Communist Party, as well as the Chief of Staff of the Army Group, General Tupikov,

were killed. Only very few members of the General Staff escaped. Tens of thousands of soldiers, officers and political personnel died in the unequal struggle, or were taken prisoner, many of them wounded.

[Ibid., p. 110, It is understood that Budienny, Timoshenko and Khrushchev escaped by air from Kiev.]

The Germans claim that the Wehrmacht captured no fewer than 665,000 prisoners in the Kiev encirclement. According to the History there were 677,085 men on the South-Western Front at the beginning of the Kiev operation. But of these a total of 150,541 men had escaped encirclement. The troops that were encircled fought on through the greater part of September and suffered very heavy losses, while others succeeded in breaking out. Not more than one-third of the number of troops who had been originally surrounded were taken prisoner.* These Russian statistics would reduce the number of prisoners

taken to about 175,000. One cannot help suspecting that the truth must lie somewhere half-way between the Russian and the German figures.

The question remains whether Stalin was not perhaps right, after all, to have clung to the Kiev salient for as long as he did. Paradoxically, the History suggests that this German victory in the Ukraine hopelessly upset Hitler's time-table.

[IVOVSS, vol. II, p. 111.]

This, indeed, coincides with the prevalent German view. In the opinion of some of the leading German generals, the time wasted on the Kiev operation very largely upset the plans of the German High Command to reach Moscow before the winter had set in. Thus

Haider considered that the Battle of Kiev was the greatest strategic mistake in the Eastern campaign, an opinion shared by Guderian, who spoke of the Battle of Kiev as a great

tactical victory, but doubted that great strategic advantages were to be derived from it.

[Guderian, op. cit., pp. 225-6.]

Guderian found some comfort, though not very much, in the thought that although "the planned assault on Leningrad had to be abandoned in favour of a tight investment" the prospects for occupying the Donets Basin and reaching the Don were now good. It is not quite clear, though, whether, at the time, he entirely agreed with the OKH's belief "that the enemy was no longer capable of creating a firm defensive front or offering serious resistance in the area of Army Group South".

In any case, however, the Germans had torn a 200-mile gap in the Russian front in the Ukraine, and, in the next two months, they occupied the whole Eastern Ukraine and

nearly the whole Crimea, and were not thrown some distance back until after they had captured Rostov.

Although Odessa was to rank officially among the four "hero cities" (the others being Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad), its defence against one German and eighteen

Rumanian divisions between August 5 and October 16 by the Special Maritime Army

under General Petrov was in reality something of a side-show in the general pattern of the war in 1941.

[ It was long after the war that, on Khrushchev's initiative, Kiev was added to the "hero cities". In military quarters this decision was sharply criticised, one colonel, who had gone right through the whole war, telling me: "Hero city, my foot! It was one of our worst skedaddles."]

Reaching the Black Sea coast at the beginning of August, the enemy had cut off Odessa from the Russian "mainland", but this main Russian naval base in the western part of the Black Sea was able to maintain communications by sea with both the Crimea and the

Caucasus. The Black Sea Navy and Marines played an important part in the defence of

Odessa where extremely heavy fighting was raging at the end of August and losses in

effectives reached as much as forty per cent overall, and in the case of the marines, as much as seventy to eighty per cent. In order to hold Odessa as long as possible, for this tied up considerable enemy forces, reinforcements were sent by sea, including a number of those invaluable katyusha mortars, whose mass production had only just begun.

It is remarkable, in view of the German air superiority, that the Russians should have been able to maintain, as they claim, regular sea communications from Odessa

throughout the siege of the city. They even claim that they managed to evacuate by sea to the Caucasus 350,000 civilians, that is about half of the population, and some 200,000

tons of industrial equipment.