Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  They were under the command of General Hube. Inside the ring there were ten divisions, including a tank division, plus the Belgian SS Wallonia Brigade. Degrelle, the Belgian top Nazi, was among them but, along with several German generals, he escaped by plane.

  Pity; it would have been interesting to 'interview' him. The Belgian SS were all

  underworld thugs and adventurers of the worst kind.

  "We had very strong forces in our 'ring' and Hube's troops did not make much progress.

  As for the 'bag', our policy was to slice it into bits, and deal with each bit separately. In this way we wiped out village after village in which the Germans had entrenched

  themselves —it was bloody murder. I'm afraid some of our own villagers perished, too, in the process: that's one of the cruellest aspects of this kind of war.

  "Anyway, four or five days before the end, the Germans had only an area of about six miles by seven and a half, with Korsun and Shanderovka as its main points. By this time the whole German 'bag' was under shell-fire, but they still held out, because they were hoping for the miracle to happen—the miracle of Hube's breakthrough from outside. But all these German high hopes rapidly began to fade out. And then Korsun fell, and a tiny area round Shanderovka was all that was left.

  "I remember that last fateful night of the 17th of February. A terrible blizzard was blowing. Konev himself was travelling in a tank through the shell-battered 'corridor'. I rode on horseback from one point in the corridor to another, with a dispatch from the General; it was so dark that I could not see the horse's ears. I mention this darkness and this blizzard because they are an important factor in what happened...

  "It was during that night, or the evening before, that the encircled Germans, having abandoned all hope of ever being rescued by Hube, decided to make a last desperate

  effort to break out.

  "Shanderovka is a large Ukrainian village of about 500 houses, and here Stemmermann's troops—he was the last general left in the 'bag', the others having fled—decided to spend their last night and to have a good night's rest. Konev learned about those plans, and he was determined to prevent them at any price from having a rest, and effecting an

  organised escape—or any kind of escape—the next morning. 'I know this is a hell of a night, with this blizzard blowing, but we must get night bombers to deal with the

  situation,' he said. He was told that, in weather like this, it was practically impossible to do anything with bombers, especially with so small a target as Shanderovka. But Konev said: 'This is important, and I cannot accept these objections as final. I do not want to give any orders to the airmen, but get hold of a Komsomol air unit, and say I want

  volunteers for the job'. We got a unit composed mostly of Komsomols; all without

  exception volunteered. And this is how it was done. The U-2 played an immensely

  important part in this. Visibility was so bad that nothing but a slow low-flying plane like the U-2 could have achieved anything at first. The U-2s located Shanderovka in spite of the blizzard and the darkness. Not for a moment did the Germans expect them. They flew down the whole length of Shanderovka and dropped incendiaries. Many fires were

  started. The target was now clearly visible. Very soon afterwards—it was just after 2 a.m.

  —the bombers came over and the place was bombed and blasted for the next hour. Our

  artillery, which was only three miles away now, also concentrated its fire on

  Shanderovka. What made it particularly pleasant for us was our knowledge that the

  Germans had chased every inhabitant out of Shanderovka into the steppe. They had

  wanted the place all to themselves for their sound night's rest. All the bombing and shelling compelled the Germans to abandon their warm huts, and to clear out.

  "All that evening the Germans had been in a kind of hysterical condition. The few remaining cows in the village were slaughtered and eaten with a sort of cannibal frenzy.

  When a barrel of pickled cabbage was discovered in one hut, it led to wild scrambles.

  Altogether they had been very short of food ever since the encirclement; with the German army in constant retreat, they didn't have large stores anywhere near the front line. So these troops at Korsun had been living mostly by looting the local population; they had done so even before the encirclement.

  "They had also had a lot to drink that night, but the fires started by the U-2s, and then the bombing and the shelling sobered them up. Driven out of their warm huts they had to

  abandon Shanderovka. They flocked into the ravines near the village, and then took the desperate decision to break through early in the morning. They had almost no tanks left—

  they had all been lost and abandoned during the previous days' fighting, and what few tanks they still had now had no petrol. In the last few days the area where they were concentrated was so small that transport planes could no longer bring them anything.

  Even before, few of the transport planes reached them, and sometimes the cargoes of

  food and petrol and munitions were dropped on our lines.

  "So that morning they formed themselves into two marching columns of about 14,000

  each, and they marched in this way to Lysianka where the two ravines met. Lysianka was beyond our front-line, inside the 'corridor'. The German divisions on the other side were trying to batter their way eastward, but now the 'corridor' was so wide that they hadn't much chance.

  "They were a strange sight, these two German columns that tried to break out of the encirclement. Each of them was like an enormous mob. The spearhead and the flanks

  were formed by the SS men of the Wallonia Brigade and the Viking Division in their

  pearl-grey uniforms. They were in a relatively good state of physique. Then, inside the triangle marched the rabble of the ordinary German infantry, very much more down-at-heel. Right in the middle of this, a small select nucleus was formed by the officers. These also looked relatively well fed. So they moved westward along two parallel ravines. They had started out soon after 4 a.m., while it was still completely dark. We knew the

  direction from which they were coming. We had prepared five lines—two lines of

  infantry, then a line of artillery, and then two more lines where the tanks and cavalry lay in wait... We let them pass through the first three lines without firing a shot. The Germans, believing that they had dodged us and had now broken through all our

  defences, burst into frantic jubilant screaming, firing their pistols and tommy-guns into the air as they marched on. They had now emerged from the ravines and reached open

  country.

  "Then it happened. It was about six o'clock in the morning. Our tanks and our cavalry suddenly appeared and rushed straight into the thick of the two columns. What happened then is hard to describe. The Germans ran in all directions. And for the next four hours our tanks raced up and down the plain crushing them by the hundred. Our cavalry,

  competing with the tanks, chased them through the ravines where it was hard for tanks to pursue them.

  [This appears to be one of the few operations so late in the war in which cavalry played any substantial role. Certain cavalry units, such as the famous Cossack Corps under

  General Dovator (who was killed on December 19, 1941) had played a part in the Battle of Moscow and in the subsequent Russian counter-offensive, but their losses had been extremely heavy at the time. While propaganda greatly exaggerated the military

  importance of the Dovator Corps, General Malinovsky, whom I saw on the Don at the

  time of Stalingrad, referred to cavalry as "very beautiful and picturesque, but pretty ineffective in this kind of war—what can a horse do against a German tommy-gun?"]

  Most of the time the tanks were not using their guns lest they hit their own cavalry.

  Hundreds and hundreds of cavalry were hacking at them with their sabres, and massacred the Fritzes as no one had ever been massacred by cavalry bef
ore. There was no time to take prisoners. It was a kind of carnage that nothing could stop till it was all over. In a small area over 20,000 Germans were killed. I had been in Stalingrad; but never had I seen such concentrated slaughter as in the fields and ravines of that small bit of country.

  By 9 a.m. it was all over. 8,000 prisoners surrendered that day and during the next few days. Nearly all of them had run a long distance away from the main scene of the

  slaughter; they had been hiding in woods and ravines. "Three days later at Djurzhantsy we found the body of General Stemmermann. Soon afterwards General Konev had a

  good laugh when the German radio announced, with all sorts of details, how Hitler had personally handed him a high decoration. For General Stemmermann was dead, right

  enough. I saw his body as it lay there. Our people had laid him out on a rough wooden table in a barn. There he lay, complete with his orders and medals. He was a little old man, with grey hair; he must have been a Corpsstudent [Member of a German students'

  duelling association.] in his young days, judging from the big sabre scar on one cheek.

  For a moment we wondered whether it wasn't all a. fake; perhaps an ordinary soldier had been dressed up in a general's uniform. But all Stemmermann's papers were found on the body. They might have faked all the obvious papers, but they could scarcely have had the idea of forging a Black Forest gun licence, complete with the man's picture, and issued in 1939... We buried him decently. We can afford to bury a general decently. The rest were dumped in holes in the ground; if we started making individual graves—we don't do that even for our own people—we would have needed an army of grave-diggers at Korsun...

  And there was no time to waste. The general is very particular about corpses—they must be cleared away in two days in summer, in three days in winter... But dead generals aren't all that frequent, so we could give him a proper burial. Anyway, he was the only general there with any guts. All the rest of them had beat it by plane.

  "Had he committed suicide?" I asked.

  "No, a shell splinter got him in the back—but many of the SS-men did commit suicide, though hardly any of the others.

  "Altogether, the Germans lost over 70,000 of their best troops in their attempt to hold the Korsun salient, 55,000 dead and 18,000 prisoners."

  "What had they done with their wounded? Is it true that they killed them off?"

  "Yes. And that no doubt contributed to the hysteria that marked their last night at Shanderovka. The order to kill the wounded was strictly carried out. They not only shot hundreds of them—shot them as they usually shoot Russians and Jews, through the back of the head, but in many cases they set fire to the ambulance vans, with the dead inside.

  One of the oddest sights were the charred skeletons in those burned-out vans with wide bracelets of plaster-of-Paris round their arms or legs. For plaster-of-Paris doesn't burn...

  "The Korsun debacle prepared the ground for our present spring offensive. It was psychologically immensely important. To some extent the Germans had forgotten

  Stalingrad; at any rate, the effect of Stalingrad had partly worn off. It was important to remind them. It's going to heighten enormously their fear of encirclement in future."

  I find it hard to say whether Kampov's figures are any more correct than post-war

  Russian or German figures; and whether it is true, as appears from his account, that no Germans broke out at all; probably some did—particularly the generals. Or perhaps they left by air a few days before. But, unlike the dull "technical" tone of most of the post-war military literature, Kampov's account—even allowing for a little romancing, especially about the cavalry—seems to give a striking and truthful picture of both the hysterical and desperate mood of the hardened Nazi troops as they found themselves trapped, and of a real ruthlessness—"no time to take prisoners"—among the Russian troops at the end of a fortnight's extremely costly fighting against both sides of the "ring".

  Konev's Blitzkrieg through the Mud

  The Ukrainian mud in spring has to be seen to be believed. The whole country is

  swamped, and the roads are like rivers of mud, often two feet deep, with deep holes to add to the difficulty of driving any kind of vehicle, except a Russian T-34 tank. Most of the German tanks could not cope with it.

  General Hube's 8th Army, having failed to break through to the Korsun bag, and having suffered very heavy losses in the process, decided, in spite of it all, to hold its part of the line running from Kirovograd in the south to Vinnitsa in the north, namely the line south of the Korsun "bag", now in Russian hands, and some forty miles north of the town of Uman. The Germans assumed that while the Schlammperiode—-the deep-mud period—

  continued, there was nothing to fear, and, mobilising thousands of Ukrainian civilians, they were busy fortifying their new line north of Uman.

  It was on March 5, with the mud and "roadlessness" at their worst, that Konev started his fantastic "Blitzkrieg through the Mud". It started with a gigantic artillery barrage against the German lines; within six days, the Germans were driven forty miles back, and chased out of Uman. The mud was such that they abandoned hundreds of tanks and trucks and

  guns, and fled—mostly on foot— to Uman and beyond. At one railway station the

  Russians captured a newly-arrived train with 240 brand-new tanks. Usually, however, the Germans burned or blew up both lorries and tanks.

  Although Russian tanks were able to advance through the mud, the artillery lagged

  behind; and it was very often a case of Russian infantry, sometimes supported by tanks, but sometimes not, pursuing German infantry. Konev's Mud Offensive was "against all the rules", and the Germans had certainly not expected it. The Russian infantry and tanks rapidly advancing to the Bug and beyond—and, before long, towards Rumania—were

  being supplied with food, munitions and petrol by a large number of Russian planes.

  These also did some strafing of German troops, and would have done more but for the

  weather. The only vehicles, apart from T-34 tanks, that advanced fairly successfully through the mud were the Studebaker trucks, for which the Russian soldiers were full of praise.

  Very striking, as I was to discover in the next few days, was the high morale of the Russians and the poor morale of the Germans, who had been unnerved by the Korsun

  disaster, by the suddenness of Konev's March 5 offensive and by the loss of practically all then-heavy equipment.

  With the permission of General Konev, the Major and I flew in two tiny U-2 planes from Rotmistrovka to Uman the next day. Flying in a U-2 is what, in childhood, one imagined flying to be like. Stuffy, closed passenger planes are nothing like it. Sitting in the open seat behind the pilot I somehow felt that I was really flying for the first time. At no more than sixty miles an hour we flew over the housetops of Rotmistrovka; children in gardens and people on the roads waved, and we waved back. We flew mostly at twenty or thirty yards above the ground. At first the cold wind hurt my eyes, but when the pilot passed me a pair of goggles it was perfect. Like a bird, the plane dived down valleys and ravines, then darted up over hills and woods, and circled over towns and villages which were of special interest. The snow had disappeared, and there was spring in the air. The earth was dark-brown and almost black, and the trees were still bare, but one already imagined the harvest rising from the rich wet earth. We circled all over the "Korsun salient". Some villages were intact, but very few people were to be seen, and hardly any cattle. But other villages, especially Shanderovka, where the Germans had spent their last night, were nothing but a heap of rubble, though many cherry and apple trees were still standing among the ruins. From Shander-ovka, through the hilly country to the west, there ran two roads, like two glossy brown ribbons, along which, on that February 17, the Germans had gone to their death.

  Then we circled over a plain: hundreds of German helmets still lay about, but all bodies had been buried; and soon the grass would grow over the many thousand Ger
mans who

  had been slaughtered here.

  Next came several lines of trenches—these had been German trenches till March 5.

  Having crossed these shattered German lines, we flew for many miles over roads that

  presented the strangest spectacle. They were cluttered up with thousands of burned-out lorries, and hundreds of tanks and guns which the Germans had abandoned in their

  panicky retreat through the mud. And this strange, static procession of burned-out

  vehicles stretched all the way to Uman.

  After about two hours in the U-2 we landed on Uman airfield. Here were several wrecked German planes, and, at the far end of the field, the enormous steel skeleton of a burned-out German transport plane, a Junkers 323.

  The Major talked about his boss, General Konev. "Konev", he said, "is an old soldier. He fought in Siberia during the Civil War. There he organised partisan bands, then brigades, finally divisions; he was political commissar of one of the partisan divisions and

  commanded an armoured train which fought against the Japs. Later, armed with a rifle, he took part in the storming of Kronstadt during the Rebellion there in '21. Both in Siberia, and in Kronstadt, he had Fadeyev, the writer, with him; they have remained old friends ever since.

  "They call him 'the general who never retreated'. That is, of course, untrue; we all retreated in '41, but Konev less than most, and he was one of the first to counter-attack—

  at Yelnia in August '41, and it was also he who advanced further than anyone else in the winter counter-offensive of '41-42.

  "You've never met him? He is 48, almost bald and grey-haired. He is broad-shouldered, and can be very stern. But usually there is a gay twinkle in his eyes. Usually he wears glasses and is a great reader. He carries a library with him; he likes to read Livy, and also our classics, whom he loves to quote in conversation—something from Gogol, or

  Pushkin, or War and Peace. He lives in a simple peasant hut, and when he travels along the front he wears a cloak so as not to embarrass the soldiers by his presence. He is very austere in his habits; doesn't drink, and objects to others getting drunk. He is very exacting both to himself and others. Of his peace-time hobbies the one he misses most is partridge shooting; he is a great shot. What else can I say about him? He has a smattering of English and can read it fairly easily. He admires Stalin both as a leader and as a writer, and is a strong Party man. I have seen him reading a Stalin Order, and have heard him say: 'That's really first-class. That's the way to write. Everything fits. There is thought behind every word.'" A typical 1944 comment on Konev—and Stalin!