The Battle of Korsun-Cherkassy: The Encirclement and Breakout of Army Group South, 1944

By Nikolaus von Vormann and Geoffrey Brooks

A primary source account of the WWII Battle of Korsun-Cherkassy written by a Nazi commander who survived the Soviet victory.
 
In 1943, the tide began to turn against Germany on the Eastern Front. Their summer offensive, Operation Citadel, was a failure. The Red Army’s Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive was pushing back on Germany’s Army Group South in a war of attrition. By October, Kiev was liberated, and the Soviets had reached the Dnieper River in Ukraine.
 
After sudden attacks by the 1st and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts, the Russians achieved a major encirclement of six German divisions, a total of 60,000 soldiers, in a pocket near the Dnieper River. A dramatic weeks-long battle ensued. After a failed attempt led by Erich von Manstein to break into the pocket from the outside, the trapped German forces focused their efforts on escape. Abandoning equipment and wounded soldiers, the survivors rejoined the surrounding panzer divisions.
 
Beginning with the German retreat to the Dnieper in 1943, Generalleutnant von Vormann chronicles the battle and describes the psychological effects of the brutal combat. As one of the few primary source materials that exists on the subject, this volume is of significant historical interest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casemate Publishers
• Release date: Mar 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781612006048

Book preview

CHAPTER I

The East Wall at the Dnieper

The battle of Stalingrad came to a head at the beginning of 1943. It showed the world that the German Army was not invincible. The destruction of this myth was more painful than the loss of an entire army.

‘This is the beginning of the end,’ we felt instinctively at the front, and our heads told us that it was so, but not our hearts.

The Russians capturing Berlin was unimaginable. The mind refused to entertain this outcome. The One-Thousand-Year War against Asia could not end that way. That could not be the purpose of world history, not the outcome of unparalleled achievements. The front did not admit defeat – but it began to doubt.

Around the turn of the year 1942/43, under gruelling stress, the great retreat began at the southern end of the Russian Front. From the Volga and Caucasus the armies flooded back across the Don and Donetz towards the west. The Russians were quicker. By mid-February their tanks around Dniepropetrovsk barred the way over the Dnieper to the Reich.

Once again it proved possible to avert threatened disaster. From the midst of the retreat, Field Marshal von Manstein assembled his exhausted divisions for a series of attacks. The troops trusted his leadership. Everything that the Soviets had gained during their pursuit by outflanking so boldly over the Mius and central Donetz to the west was wiped out, even Kharkov was recaptured. A cohesive front was re-established behind the Mius and the central sector of the Donetz. With an effort it held together until September. Then finally it broke, and the retreat continued to the Dnieper.

Behind the Dnieper (Map 1)

In war, nothing is predictable. People run it, and people are not machines. Particularly in critical situations they can develop ideas that the commander has to consider and take into account if they have arisen without any action on his part. If he does not do that, or is unable to do it because he no longer has the pulse of the men, setbacks are inevitable. The mass thinks and acts differently to the individual. Panic, mutinies, even the laying down of arms can be the consequence, a chain of events that cannot be predicted by an outsider. This is a home truth from time immemorial – yet always forgotten. Mass psychoses and their consequences are known from every military campaign in history.

A mass psychosis of that nature occurred in the summer of 1943 on the southern front in the Soviet Union. The man in the front line dreamed of being safe behind the Dnieper. In all the heavy fighting of the previous months the only sensible thought he could hold onto was to get to the other side of the river and finally get some peace. This fixed idea, this dream, had enabled him to withstand the most horrific emotional burdens.

Never in the world history of war have troops spent almost a whole year fighting and retreating over hundreds of kilometres without the force eventually collapsing. The German Army of 1943 accomplished this unique achievement. The divisions from the southern front were probably groggy and exhausted but not broken.

They were capable of fighting and ready to fight; in their minds, this was the plan of the military leadership. They were obsessed by the concept of the strong East Wall behind the Dnieper with trenches behind barbed-wire entanglements, concrete bunkers, surveyed artillery emplacements and so on. There was no doubt in their minds that all this must be being built meanwhile and with all technological means available.

I was commanding 23rd Panzer Division and believed in it myself. I also wanted to sleep at night free from the fear that I would be awoken by Soviet tanks. The division had set out from Kharkov eastwards in the summer of 1942 and had fought in the Caucasus, outside Stalingrad, at the Manytsh river, at the Don, the Mius and the Donetz. On 25 September 1943, it was the last German panzer unit to pass through the burning factory district of Dniepropetrovsk and cross to the western bank of the