Pursuit to the Donbas, September–October 1941
Once Heeresgruppe Süd was across the Dnieper River, there was little that the Red Army could do to stop von Kleist’s panzers before the cold weather set in. Hitler ordered von Rundstedt to pursue the defeated Southwestern Front forces and occupy the Donbas region, which was 410km further east, as well as occupy the Crimea. In turn, von Rundstedt split up his army group, with 6.Armee to advance upon Kharkov, the 11.Armee to occupy the Crimea and Panzergruppe Kleist to head for the Donbas. The first two advances were supported by assault-gun battalions, but otherwise had no significant armoured support. Von Kleist’s panzer group was still capable of mobile operations and benefited from the fact that the Red Army had few operational tank units left in the Ukraine after the debacles at Uman and Kiev. However, von Kleist was obliged to transfer nearly half his panzer strength to Heeresgruppe Mitte, including Kempf’s XXXXVIII Armeekorps (mot.) with the 9.Panzer-Division, 16 and 25.Infanterie-Divisionen (mot.) and the 11.Panzer-Division. Kleist was left with just three panzer-divisions and the Waffen SS divisions LSSAH and Wiking to conquer the rest of the Ukraine.
Following Kirponos’ death, Marshal Timoshenko arrived to take over the four remaining armies of the Southwest Front and he found that there were negligible amounts of armour and artillery remaining. In the words of American historian David M. Glantz, ‘the Southwestern Front had to be recreated from scratch.’[90] The onset of rainy and muddy weather in early October slowed the German advance upon Kharkov, but Timoshenko could only hurl untrained rifle units into the path of the 6.Armee. Unteroffizier Heinrich Skodell, a gunner in 1./Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 197, noted that ‘that resistance was slowly giving way to flight. The Russian infantry has not been up to par for a long time. They are all older people, some of them have only been soldiers for eight days.’[91]
Timoshenko’s forces did buy time for the KhPZ factory to move by rail out of Kharkov, thereby saving one of the main T-34 tank-production lines, but they could not hold the city. Although desperately short of fuel and ammunition, Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 197 fought its way into Kharkov on 22 October and the city was in German hands within two days.
The Soviet Southern Front was also in disarray, with its 9th and 12th Armies having abandoned its front on the Dnieper south of Zaporozhe. General-leytenant Ivan V.Tyulenev had been wounded in late August and replaced as front commander by General-leytenant Dmitri I. Ryabyshev, former commander of the now-defunct 8th Mechanized Corps. Ryabyshev had just received three tank brigades as reinforcements and when he saw the German 11.Armee (now under Generaloberst Erich von Manstein) split its forces, with one corps proceeding to the Perekop narrows to attack the Crimea and two other corps heading east to Melitopol, he saw an opportunity to inflict a painful defeat on his pursuers. On 26 September, rifle and tank units of the 18th Army attacked two Romanian brigades attached to the 11.Armee and threw them back with heavy losses. Von Manstein quickly dispatched the LSSAH to stabilize the 11.Armee’s front and the Soviet counterattack was contained within a few days. Yet Ryabyshev remained focused on pounding the vulnerable Romanian units, while oblivious to his own right flank, as Timoshenko’s armies retreated. Heeresgruppe Süd was quick to notice that the boundary between Timoshenko’s and Ryabyshev’s fronts, which lay east of the German bridgehead at Dnepropetrovsk, was held by only two rifle divisions and one cavalry division.
Von Kleist assembled General der Infanterie Gustav von Wietersheim’s XIV Armeekorps (mot.) on line on the north side of the Dnieper, with the 14 and 16.Panzer-Divisionen on line, facing east. Mackensen’s III Armeekorps (mot.) was assembled behind von Wietersheim’s corps, to reinforce success. Although an infantryman, the fifty-seven-year-old von Wietersheim had been in command of his corps for over three years and had led it across Poland and France – he was the oldest, but one of the most experienced motorized corps commanders in Russia. On 30 September, von Wietersheim attacked with the Soviet rifle units in front of him with both panzer divisions. Within twenty-four hours, von Wietersheim’s panzers had torn a gaping hole in the boundary between the two fronts and pivoted to the southeast, rolling up the northern flank of Ryabyshev’s Southern Front. Meanwhile, Ryabyshev continued to try and break through the Romanians – achieving some success – but oblivious to the approaching threat from behind. Ryabyshev’s new tank brigades proved of little value in this action because they were so poorly equipped; the 15th Tank Brigade had thirty-three tanks but only three trucks, which meant that it had no support troops or logistic/maintenance capabilities.
Von Wietersheim’s panzers rolled up the 18th Army’s positions around Zaporozhe on 2 October and Hube’s 16.Panzer-Division plunged ahead to the southeast, overrunning the town of Orikhiv, within striking range of the Southern Front’s lines of communications. Ryabyshev finally awoke to the threat of envelopment and tried to order a retreat, but von Manstein’s 11.Armee pinned most of his forces with fixing attacks. A few units, such as the 130th Tank Brigade, were sent to try and check Hube’s panzers at Orikhiv, but Kleist soon brought up the 13 and 14.Panzer-Divisionen to support him, giving the Germans absolute numerical superiority in armour at the critical point. The mass of von Kleist’s armour began slicing across Ryabyshev’s communications, heading for Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov. The cohesion of the 9th and 12th Armies began to fall apart on 5 October as units began to retreat pell-mell eastward and gaps appeared in the front line. The LSSAH daringly pushed into one of these gaps and advanced eastward to seize Berdyansk on 6 October. By 7 October, von Wietersheim had both his panzer divisions blocking the Soviet escape route to the east, while Mackensen’s corps formed the north side of the kessel and von Manstein’s infantry pressed in from the west. The trap had closed around both the 9th and 12th Armies. A few Soviet units escaped – without much equipment – but when the Melitopol kessel was crushed on 11 October, the Red Army had lost another 106,000 troops and 210 tanks. Among the dead was the commander of the 18th Army. After this debacle, Ryabyshev was replaced by General-polkovnik Yakov T. Cherevichenko. This action, dubbed the Battle of the Sea of Azov by the Germans, was a classic demonstration of the Wehrmacht’s ability to conduct opportunistic mobile battles of encirclement with their panzer units slashing into the unprotected rear of larger Soviet formations. At this point, Red Army tankers had been reduced to a limited infantry support role and had no ability to conduct these kind of deep operations.
After the defeat of the Southern Front, von Kleist continued to push eastward against disorganized resistance and managed to cross the Mius River north of Taganrog with the LSSAH by mid-October and then seize the city by 17 October. Von Kleist split his forces, with von Wietersheim’s XIV Armeekorps (mot.) advancing northeastward toward Stalin, while Mackensen’s III Armeekorps (mot.) headed due east for Rostov. However, Heeresgruppe Süd was no longer able to adequately supply von Kleist’s panzers so far from a railhead and rainy weather virtually immobilized his two motorized corps. By 24 October, the LSSAH and 13.Panzer-Division were on the approaches to Rostov, but Soviet resistance was stiffening.
90
DavidM. Glantz,
91
Karlheinz Münch,