Russia at war 1941-1945

Ukraine. At the end of September and the beginning of October they had performed one of their most astonishing feats in the war: under cover of night, many thousands of men had forced the mighty barrier of the Dnieper at many points. They had done it s'khodu, that is, "on the march". No sooner had they reached the Dnieper than thousands rowed or paddled across in small craft, on improvised rafts, on a few barrels strung together, or even by clinging on to planks or garden benches. The Germans, who had boasted of their impregnable Ostwall on the right bank of the Dnieper, were taken completely by surprise.

Their allegedly powerful fortifications along the whole length of the Dnieper had, in fact, not been built, and what fortifications there were had certainly not been manned in time.

If any serious resistance came from the Germans anywhere, it was dealt with by the

Russian artillery on the east bank of the river. In one place as many as sixty tanks, with all openings puttied up, actually advanced under water and forded the river. Enough

Russians crossed the river to form a number of bridgeheads on the other side: Vatutin's troops established several in the neighbourhood of Kiev, and, further south, Konev's set up no fewer than eighteen; and though, in the next few days, seven were lost with very heavy casualties, the remaining eleven merged into one. As soon as the big bridgeheads had been firmly established, the Russians laid pontoons across the river, and German air attacks on these were usually successfully repelled thanks to the powerful concentration of Russian fighters. The Russians also used two brigades of paratroopers to set up the bridgeheads. At the Kremlin banquet during the Foreign Ministers' Conference in

Moscow in October 1943, General Giffard Martel, head of the British Military Mission, said that no army in the world could have performed the feat of crossing the Dnieper as the Red Army had done.

On the face of it, it looked like a reckless improvisation, but in reality the whole operation—barrels, garden benches and all—had been carefully planned in advance, and high decorations had been promised to those who particularly distinguished themselves in forcing the Dnieper: over 2,000 were, indeed, decorated afterwards. The Germans'

"Maginot Line" on the Dnieper proved very largely a piece of bluff, and once the pontoons and ferries were completed, vast quantities of heavy Russian equipment were taken across the river, and, on November 6 the Russians liberated Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. Despite various ups and downs (such as Vatutin's temporary loss of Zhitomir, west of Kiev, later in November) the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts had, by January,

captured substantial territories on the right bank of the Dnieper, Vatutin's 1st Ukrainian Front [ The former Voronezh Front.] having advanced along a wide front some 125 miles west of the river, and Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front some ninety miles. Still farther south there were Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front and Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front. These four Fronts were to liberate nearly the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine between January and the beginning of May 1944.

Obviously over-rating their own strength, and under-rating the drive and skill of the Red Army, the Germans were still determined —or at least Hitler was—as late as January

1944 to clear the Russians out of the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine—to begin with. With that end in view, they clung like grim death to their Korsun-Shevchenkovo salient on the Dnieper, about fifty miles south of Kiev, and stretching some thirty miles along the west bank of the river. North of this relatively narrow salient were Vatutin's troops [On March 1,1944, General Vatutin was fatally wounded by a band of Ukrainian nationalists and

Marshal Zhukov took over the command of the 1st Ukrainian Front on the following

day.];

south of it Konev's troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front (formerly "Steppe Front"). Hitler's plan was to attack the Russians from this salient both north and south of it, and so to recover the whole of Right-Bank Ukraine for Germany—a plan as unrealistic as so many other Hitler plans during the later stages of the war.

The Russian command thought differently. Here, it seemed to them, was a golden

opportunity of inflicting a "second Stalingrad" on the Germans—though admittedly, on a smaller scale.

The similarities between the two operations were, indeed, striking enough. It was a case of encircling the German forces by the Russian northern (Vatutin) and southern (Konev) pincers joining somewhere west of the "bag", and of preventing the Germans outside it from breaking through to their encircled comrades. In this case, the rôle of Manstein was played by the German 8th Army under General Hube; the most important difference