The remnants of the XI and XXXXII Corps would be absent from the German order of battle for some months. Hence, the immediate consequences of the battle were more favorable to the Red Army than is suggested by the raw casualty data. The same phenomenon could to some extent be seen in the armor branch. As we have seen, the German Panzer units had very few operational tanks by the end of the battle, but a considerably greater number of tanks in workshops awaiting repairs. For a few weeks the men in the German tank repair units would have to work hard, but without spare parts it would have been impossible to improve the supply of available tanks.
The 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts resumed offensive operations in March, culminating in another encirclement, this time encompassing the entire 1st Panzer Army. Eventually the Germans broke out, but again considerable amounts of equipment had to be abandoned. Hans-Valentin Hube, who had led the 1st Panzer Army since 29 October 1943, was promoted to colonel-general and awarded the Knights Cross with oak leaves, swords and brilliants on 20 April, as a recognition of how he led his army in two difficult operations. Ironically, he was killed in an aircraft crash near Obersalzberg the following day.
For much of the time, Vatutin had been Hube’s opponent, and he too suffered a violent fate. On 29 February he was travelling by car to the 60th and 13th Armies on the north wing of his front. Ukrainian partisans, opposing restored Soviet rule, had arranged an ambush and Vatutin was seriously wounded in the firefight that ensued. The efforts of the doctors were eventually in vain, as Nikolai Fedorovich Vatutin succumbed to his wounds on 15 April, less than a week before Hube’s aircraft crash.
Most of the other high-ranking commanders involved in the Korsun battle survived the war, for example Konev, Zhukov, Rotmistrov, Kravchenko, Galanin, as well as Wöhler, von Vormann, Breith and von Manstein. Even a commander like Franz Bäke, who led from the front to a very great extent, had the luck to survive the war.
Many other soldiers who survived the Korsun battle did not live to see the end of the war. The Soviet armies continued fighting many hard battles until the fall of Berlin. Probably close to an additional nine million Red Army soldiers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner before the end of the war, ample testimony to the fact that the remainder of the war was not an easy march to the west. The battle at Korsun was just one battle in what must have seemed an almost endless series of battles. For many Westerners it is easy to forget the magnitude of the battles fought in Eastern Europe, but with combined Soviet and German casualties numbering between five and ten million each year, even the horrible battles on the Western Front during World War I pale in comparison.778
Most of the German divisions fighting outside the pocket remained on the Eastern Front, but the survivors of the surrounded divisions were sent to various training facilities, to reform or become part of other formations. The 57th Division was sent to Debica in Poland to reform. It spent about three months there, before being sent to the German 4th Army in Byelorussia, only to be surrounded again when the great Soviet summer offensive was unleashed. After that disaster, the 57th Division was disbanded. The 72nd Division was sent to Hrubieszov in Poland to reform, but in April it was sent to the Kowel area and was subsequently engaged in costly battles until the end of the war. The 88th Division reformed at Deba in Poland, before being involved in battles near Baranov in the summer of 1944. It remained near Baranov until the Soviet winter offensive along the Vistula, when the 88th Division was destroyed.
The 389th Division spent two months in Hungary, before in May transferring to Latvia. A few months later it found itself bottled up at Courland. In February 1945 it was shipped to West Prussia, where it was once again cut off and largely captured by the Red Army. The Korps-Abteilung B was dissolved after the Korsun battle and most of its survivors were used to reconstitute the 57th and 88th Divisions, and thus shared their fates. In contrast, the Waffen-SS units, Wiking and Wallonien, were maintained until the end of the war. Wallonien was even expanded to a division, the 28th SS-Division, which fought in Pomerania and Brandenburg in 1945, while the SS-Wiking Division ended the war in Austria.
Even though the Germans tried to keep soldiers of a formation together, they did not always succeed, and as the war progressed it became more and more difficult. The fate of Anton Meiser illustrates this. Like many of his comrades he fell victim to the Volhynian fever, which in his case coincided with appendicitis, and he was moved to a hospital at Prague. As he spent eight weeks at hospital he did not follow the reconstituted 389th Division when it moved to the northern sector of the Eastern Front. Rather he was sent to a training unit near Stettin in Germany, and eventually he was transferred to an artillery unit on the Western Front, where he was taken prisoner by the Americans at the end of the war.
Meiser spent some 15 months as a prisoner of war before he was released in September 1946. This was a much shorter period of imprisonment than that endured by most German soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Red Army. Many were not allowed to return until 10 years after the end of the war, and of course there were many who did not return at all. Prisoners of war have often been treated badly, and the war on the Eastern Front was no exception. The mortality rates of the German soldiers taken prisoner at Korsun, however, seems to have been notably lower than among those captured at Stalingrad.
In the context of World War II, the battle at Korsun was a minor one, but with an unusually high degree of drama. The Soviet commanders took advantage of their considerable numerical superiority on the Eastern Front and decided to attack an exposed German position, which Hitler stubbornly decided to hold, despite many objections. The initial phase of the Soviet operation proceeded fairly well. As usual with military plans, the Soviet attack did not work out exactly as intended, but the initial aim was achieved. But the elimination of the cauldron did not proceed as planned, nor could the expected German relief attempts be repelled in the desired way. Nevertheless, the Soviet position, relative to the Germans, was stronger after the battle than before, so Korsun may be viewed as a Soviet victory, even though it was bought at a considerably higher price than it ought to have been.
Notes on the Text
1
For more information on the battle at Kursk, see N. Zetterling and A. Frankson, Kursk 1943, A Statistical Analysis (Frank Cass, London 2000).
2
Soviet casualties in the Orel fighting (12 July–18 August) amounted to 429,890, and 2,586 tanks and assault guns were written off. See G. F. Krivosheev, Grif Sekretnosti Sniat (Voenizdat, Moscow 1993), pp. 189 and 370. The two German armies that fought in the Orel salient, 9th Army and 2nd Panzer Army, suffered 89,688 cent) would get smaller the longer the time period studied. This is indeed the case. Both documents give replacements and convalescents also for the period 1 July 1943–31 May 1944. The RH 2/1343 shows 1,205,030 replacements and convalescents, while NARA T78, R414, F6383154 shows 542,000 convalescents and 685,000 replacements, which gives a difference of less than 2%. casualties between 11 July and 20 August. See Zetterling and Frankson, Kursk 1943, p. 200. It has not been possible to establish German tank losses, but all tank and assault gun formations in the Orel salient lost 371 tanks and assault guns irrevocably during July 1943 (see Pz.Offz. b. Chef Genst.d.H. Bb. Nr. 562/43 g.Kdos, 14.8.1943, BA-MA RH 10/48). Since this also included losses during the German offensive operation, and considering the generally less intensive fighting in August, it seems reasonable to assume that German losses did not exceed 400.