Russia at war 1941-1945

between the Stalingrad and the Korsun situation was that the Germans trapped at Korsun did try to break out, with the result that the Russians had to fight on "two fronts", as it were, on either side of the circle they had made round the "Korsun" Germans.

On February 3rd the great news was announced that, after three days' heavy fighting the troops of the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, one striking south-east from Belaya Tserkov, the other, striking north-west from Kirovograd, had effected their junction near

Zvenigorodka, and had thus cut off the large German "Korsun" salient. The German divisions had been encircled, and the sixteen-day battle to liquidate them began. On February 9, Gorodishche, inside the Korsun "bag", was captured; on the 14th, Korsun itself was taken, and although that day the German forces, trying to break through the ring from outside, made some slight advance, on the 15th their further attempts to break through were already "successfully repelled". On the 18th, the Germans were wiped out in the whole Korsun "ring". The Russians claimed 55,000 German dead and 18,000

prisoners, 500 tanks, over 300 planes and much else.

It was in February and the beginning of March that all the four Ukrainian Fronts came into violent motion. After liquidating the Germans in the Korsun Salient, Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front swept all the way into northern Rumania within a few weeks; north of it, General Zhukov's 1st Ukrainian Front, meeting with much suffer resistance (it was

getting nearer Germany than any other) still advanced along a wide front as far as the Carpathians and almost as far as Lwow, capturing Rovno, Erich Koch's Ukrainian

"capital" in the process. To the south of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Malinov-sky's 3rd Ukrainian Front pushed on, in a spectacular sweep, to Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa,

which they captured at the beginning of April; and Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front, after finally dislodging the Germans in February from the Nikopol bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper, undertook its spectacular reconquest of the Crimea.

While Zhukov was crashing ahead in the northern Ukraine and Malinovsky along the

Black Sea coast, on March 5 Konev launched his great offensive against the German 8th Army under General Hube—the "Manstein" who had failed to rescue the Germans trapped at Korsun. After a week's heavy fighting in incredibly difficult conditions (an early thaw had set in) Konev captured the town of Uman, Hube's principal base; after which the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front drove on to the Bug and beyond, not to stop until they had invaded Rumania the last week in March. They had covered a distance of over 250 miles in less than a month.

It was soon after the liquidation of the Korsun "bag" and on the day after Konev's capture of Uman that I had the good fortune of being the only Western foreign correspondent

authorised to visit the 2nd Ukrainian Front, where I spent one of the most illuminating weeks of all my war years in the Soviet Union. My principal companion was Major

Kampov, an officer of General Konev's [He was to be promoted to the rank of Marshal

later in 1944.] staff, who was to remain a life-long friend, and who was to become

famous after the war as the novelist "Boris Polevoi".

On March 12 I was flown in an army plane from Moscow across the Dnieper and over

Cherkassy to a place called Rotmistrovka which had been, until February, in the northern part of the Korsun salient. On the following day I was to fly in a tiny U-2 plane to Uman, which had just been recaptured by Konev's troops.

It was at Rotmistrovka that I first met Major Kampov. He looked pale and physically—-

though not mentally—tired; his uniform was grubby, and the mud was splashed right up his army boots. For three years he had been at it; in the grim autumn of 1941 he had broken out of an encirclement in the Kalinin Province after losing most of his men; he had taken part under Konev in the heartbreaking Rzhev offensive in 1942; but now he

had eight months of continuous victories behind him. He was slim, dark, and had grey laughing eyes with a quietly humorous expression. Maxim Gorki, in his youth, must have looked a little like him (except that one of his eyes was half closed as a result of shell-shock).

"You couldn't have come at a better moment," he said, "do you know what happened today? Our troops have already crossed the Bug." This was great news. The Bug, on the way to Odessa and Rumania, was said to be one of the most heavily fortified German

lines. (In practice, as I later learned, it was nothing of the kind, since before reaching the Bug the Germans had lost all their heavy equipment).

The "Mud Offensive" was in full swing. It was one of the most extraordinary things that had happened; it was contrary to all rules of warfare. Barely three weeks after the

liquidation of the German troops trapped at Korsun, Konev had struck out at a time when the Germans had least expected it. So deep and impassable was the Ukrainian mud.