Gerd Von Rundstedt - Conquering Ukraine

Conquering Ukraine

The attack began on 22 June. Despite ample warning from intelligence sources and defectors, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Command were caught by surprise, and the Germans rapidly broke through the frontier defences, helped by their total command of the air. But the Soviet commander in northern Ukraine, Colonel-General Mikhail Kirponos, was one of the better Soviet generals, and he commanded the Red Army's largest and best-equipped force: nearly a million men and 4,800 tanks. The Germans soon encountered stubborn resistance. Rundstedt testified at Nuremberg: "The resistance at the frontier was not too great, but it grew continually as we advanced into the interior of the country. Very strong tank forces, tanks of a better type, far superior to ours, appeared." The Soviet tank armies were in fact stronger than the German panzer divisions, and in the T-34 they possessed a superior tank: Kleist called it "the finest tank in the world." Rundstedt said after the war: "I realised soon after the attack that everything that had been written about Russia was wrong." But at this stage of the war the Red Army tankisti lacked the tactical skill and experience of the German panzer commanders, and after ten days of bitter fighting Kleist's armour broke through, reaching Zhitomir, only 130 km from Kiev, on 12 July. By 30 July the Red Army in Ukraine was in full retreat. Rundstedt and his commanders were confident that they could seize Kiev "off the march," that is, without a prolonged siege.

Despite these successes, the campaign did not go according to plan. The front door was "kicked in", but the Red Army was not destroyed, and the Soviet state did not collapse. Once this became apparent, at the end of July, Hitler and his commanders had to decide how to proceed. All the Army leaders, including Rundstedt, argued for the main thrust to be in the centre, aimed at capturing Moscow, which was not only the Soviet capital but also a major industrial and transport centre. In this they were following their training in the Prussian military tradition of Carl von Clausewitz, who had argued that the focus of the offensive must be the enemy's "centre of gravity" (Schwerpunkt). But Hitler saw the war more in geopolitical than strictly strategic terms. He wanted to seize Leningrad to close off Soviet access to the Baltic, and Ukraine and the Caucasus to secure their food resources and oil. After a month of wrangling, Hitler ordered Army Group Centre to pause at Smolensk, while the panzer divisions were shipped to the north and the south. After the war, the influential military writer Basil Liddell-Hart argued that this decision cost the Germans their only chance of victory in the east in 1941.

Although Rundstedt opposed this diversion of forces, he was its beneficiary as attention was shifted to the southern front. He also benefited from disastrous decisions made by the Soviets. On 10 July Stalin appointed his old crony Marshal Semyon Budyonny commander in the Ukraine, with orders to stop the German advance at all costs. Budyonny ordered Kirponos to push his forces forwards to Kiev and Uman, despite the danger of encirclement, rather than withdraw and make a stand on the Dnieper. Rundstedt therefore decided to break off the advance towards Kiev, and to direct Kleist's armour south-eastwards, towards Krivoy Rog. By 30 July the Germans were at Kirovograd, 130 km east of Uman, cutting off the Soviet line of retreat (which had in any case been forbidden by Stalin). Meanwhile, Schobert's 11th Army was advancing north-eastwards from Bessarabia. On 2 August the two armies met, trapping over 100,000 Soviet troops, virtually all of whom were killed or captured. Southern Ukraine was thus left virtually defenceless, and by 25 August, when they entered Dniepropetrovsk, the Germans had occupied everything west of the Dnieper (except Odessa, which held out until October). Nevertheless, this had all taken longer than expected, and the Red Army was showing no signs of collapse. Rundseted wrote to his wife on 12 August: "How much longer? I have no great hope that it will be soon. The distances in Russia devour us."

Neither the success at Uman nor what fallowed at Kiev would have happened had Rundstedt not backed his subordinates and resisted Hitler's interference in the conduct of the campaign. As during the French campaign, Hitler was panicked by his own success. By early July he was full of anxiety that the German armour was advancing too quickly, without infantry support, and that it was exposed to Soviet counter-attacks. On 10 July Brauchitsch arrived at Rundstedt's headquarters at Brody, with instructions from Hitler that Kleist was turn south towards Vinnitsa and link up with Schobert's army there, rather than continue south-east to Kirovograd. This would still have trapped many Soviet divisions, but it would have allowed the mass of Soviet forces at Uman and Kiev to escape. Rundstedt defended Kleist's ability to execute the larger encirclement, and persuaded Brauchitsch that he was right. Brauchitsch then contacted Halder, who succeeded in persuading Hitler to support Rundstedt. This was a sign that Rundstedt still had Hitler's respect, as were Hitler's two visits to Rundstedt's armies during this period.

After Uman Budyonny's forces massed around Kiev - over 700,000 men - were left dangerously exposed, with Kleist's 1st Panzer Army regrouping to the south-east and General Heinz Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army (part of Army Group Centre) smashing General Yeromenko's Briansk Front and advancing south from Gomel in White Russia, on a line well east of Kiev. The danger of encirclement was obvious, but Stalin stubbornly refused to consider withdrawal, despite warnings from both Budyonny and Kirponos that catastrophe was imminent. Budyonny has been freely blamed by postwar writers for the disaster at Kiev, but it is clear that while he was out of his depth as a front commander, he warned Stalin of the danger, and was dismissed for his pains. On 12 September Kleist crossed the Dnieper at Cherkasy heading north-east, and on 16 September his tanks linked up with Guderian's at Lokhvitsa, nearly 200 km east of Kiev. Although many Soviet troops were able to escape eastwards in small groups, around 600,000 men - four whole armies comprising 43 divisions, nearly one-third of the Soviet Army's strength at the start of the war - were killed or captured, and the great majority of those captured died in captivity. Kiev fell on 19 September. Kirponos was killed in action on 20 September, shortly before resistance ceased.

Rundstedt had thus presided over one of the greatest victories in the history of warfare. But this catastrophe for the Red Army resulted far more from the inflexibility of Stalin than it did from the talents of Rundstedt as a commander or the skill of the German Army. David Stahel, a recent historian of the Kiev campaign, wrote: "Germany had been handed a triumph far in excess of what its exhausted armoured forces could have achieved without Stalin's obduracy and incompetence." In fact both the German Army and the Red Army were driven more by the dictates of their respective political masters rather than by the decisions of the military professionals. Stahel sums the situation up with his chapter heading: "Subordinating the generals: the dictators dictate." Kirponos could have withdrawn most of his army across the Dnieper in time had Stalin allowed him to do so, and Rundstedt himself acknowledged this. Had this happened, Rundstedt's forces would have been in no state to give chase: they were exhausted after two months of ceaseless combat. Despite their successes, they had sustained high levels of casualties and even higher levels of loss of equipment, both of which were impossible to replace. By September the German Army in the Soviet Union had suffered nearly 500,000 casualties. In a statement to the Army on 15 August, Rundstedt acknowledged: "It is only natural that such great effort would result in fatigue, the combat strength of the troops has weakened and in many places there is a desire for rest." But, said Runstedt: "We must keep pressure on the enemy for he has many more reserves than we." This was a remarkable admission so early in the Russian campaign, and it showed that Rundstedt was already well aware of how unrealistic the German belief in a quick victory had been.