Battle of The Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket - Propaganda and Historiography

Propaganda and Historiography

Both hailed the events at Korsun as a victory. Marshal Konev claimed to have inflicted 130,000 German casualties, an assertion the German official history has dismissed as being in the "realm of fantasy". Soviet historian Sergey Smirnov described the victory at Korsun as a "Stalingrad on the Dnieper". Marshal Zhukov was less pleased in his memoirs, noting that on February 18, 1944, official honors were given in Moscow to the 2nd Ukrainian Front—but not the 1st Ukrainian Front. ". . . an unforgivable error of the part of the supreme commander" was Zhukov's unhappy verdict.

On the part of the Germans, the counter-attack was depicted as a glorious success in which one group of brave German soldiers freed their equally heroic comrades who had been trapped in the pocket. General von Vormann, who commanded the relief attempt of the XXXXVII Panzer Corps, bitterly noted that "The troops who took part were astonished and unbelieving when they were told they had won a great victory at Cherkassy in the Ukraine in 1944." The German high command, however, was relieved that so many troops were able to escape. Even Adolf Hitler, who was known to launch into furious tirades over any reversal on the Eastern front, only complained briefly about the amount of equipment that had to be left behind.

One of the initial historiographical works on the fighting at Korsun was a 1952 U.S. Army publication, DA Pamphlet 20–234, Operations of Encircled Forces: German Experiences in Russia. This work was written in the context of NATO's Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, and authors were highlighting historical experience of the Wehrmacht that may have proven useful to NATO forces had a war between the Soviet Union and NATO broken out. Like most of the English-language works on the Eastern Front of this era, it was written from the German point of view.

John Erickson's 1983 The Road to Berlin and David Glantz's 1995 When Titans Clashed covered events on the entire Eastern Front from a Soviet perspective, but also devoted several pages to the fighting in the Korsun Pocket. Erickson did not question Soviet claims regarding German casualties, and Glantz questioned the veracity of German claims regarding the total of escapees from the pocket. Glantz has also translated the Soviet General Staff Study on the Korsun Operation into English as The Battle for the Ukraine: the Red Army's Korsun'-Shevchenkovkii Operation, 1944.

More recently, the 2002 work by U.S. Army historian Douglas Nash, Hell's Gate: The Battle of the Cherkassy Pocket, January–February 1944, took issue with Soviet claims that Korsun was another Stalingrad. Similarly, the Swedish historians Niklas Zetterling and Anders Frankson disputed the assertions of the Soviet General Staff Study of the Korsun Operation in their 2008 work, The Korsun Pocket. The Encirclement and Breakout of a German Army in the East, 1944, using statements to describe the staff study such as "anything but accurate" and "completely unreliable." Yet, both Nash and Zetterling/Frankson conclude that Korsun was a Soviet victory even as all three authors took issue with Soviet characterizations of the battle.

In 2007, Volume 8 of the German official history of the war was published, and part of the work authored by Karl-Heinz Frieser addressed the events at Korsun. This work also doubts Soviet claims regarding the German casualties while discussing the situation of the German forces in detail. Yet, while this work has no Soviet sources regarding the losses of Soviet AFVs and guns at Korsun, it presents tallies for these Soviet losses based upon German wartime claims without any discussion of the tendency of units in combat to overestimate their "kill counts".