The First Battle of Kiev or Kiev operation, known as the Battle of Kiev on the German side (German: Schlacht bei Kiew), was a major battle that resulted in an encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev during World War II, the capital and most populous city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This encirclement is the largest in the history of warfare by number of troops. The battle lasted from 7 July to 26 September 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Although it is known as the "Battle of Kiev", the city played only a peripheral role in the overall battle; for the Soviets, a strategic defensive operation. The battle took place over a large area in eastern Ukraine, with Kiev being the focal point of Soviet defenses and of the German encirclement.
Much of the Southwestern Front of the Red Army, commanded by Mikhail Kirponos, was encircled, but small groups of Red Army troops managed to escape the pocket in the days after the German panzers attacked east of the city, including the forces of Marshal Semyon Budyonny, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. Kirponos was trapped behind German lines and was killed while trying to break out.
The battle was an unprecedented defeat for the Red Army, and was more damaging than the Battle of Białystok–Minsk of June–July 1941. The encirclement trapped 452,700 Soviet soldiers, 2,642 guns and mortars, and 64 tanks of which only 15,000 soldiers escaped from the encirclement by 2 October. The Southwestern Front suffered 700,544 casualties, including 616,304 killed, captured, or missing during the battle. The 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st, and 38th armies, consisting of 43 divisions, were almost annihilated and the 40th Army suffered many losses. Like the Western Front before it, the Southwestern Front had to be recreated almost from scratch.
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich, described the Battle of Kiev as "the biggest battle in the history of the world", and Joseph Goebbels, the German minister of propaganda, called it "the greatest battle of annihilation of all time". The historian Evan Mawdsley described the battle as the Ostheer's "greatest triumph of the war in the East and the Red Army’s greatest single disaster", and the historian Michael Jones dubbed the battle to be "the Wehrmacht’s greatest victory of the war".
The First Battle of Kiev or Kiev operation, known as the Battle of Kiev on the German side (German: Schlacht bei Kiew), was a major battle that resulted in an encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev during World War II, the capital and most populous city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This encirclement is the largest in the history of warfare by number of troops. The battle lasted from 7 July to 26 September 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Although it is known as the "Battle of Kiev", the city played only a peripheral role in the overall battle; for the Soviets, a strategic defensive operation. The battle took place over a large area in eastern Ukraine, with Kiev being the focal point of Soviet defenses and of the German encirclement.
Much of the Southwestern Front of the Red Army, commanded by Mikhail Kirponos, was encircled, but small groups of Red Army troops managed to escape the pocket in the days after the German panzers attacked east of the city, including the forces of Marshal Semyon Budyonny, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. Kirponos was trapped behind German lines and was killed while trying to break out.
The battle was an unprecedented defeat for the Red Army, and was more damaging than the Battle of Białystok–Minsk of June–July 1941. The encirclement trapped 452,700 Soviet soldiers, 2,642 guns and mortars, and 64 tanks of which only 15,000 soldiers escaped from the encirclement by 2 October. The Southwestern Front suffered 700,544 casualties, including 616,304 killed, captured, or missing during the battle. The 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st, and 38th armies, consisting of 43 divisions, were almost annihilated and the 40th Army suffered many losses. Like the Western Front before it, the Southwestern Front had to be recreated almost from scratch.
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich, described the Battle of Kiev as "the biggest battle in the history of the world", and Joseph Goebbels, the German minister of propaganda, called it "the greatest battle of annihilation of all time". The historian Evan Mawdsley described the battle as the Ostheer's "greatest triumph of the war in the East and the Red Army’s greatest single disaster", and the historian Michael Jones dubbed the battle to be "the Wehrmacht’s greatest victory of the war".
Prelude
Plans and preparations
According to Barbarossa's operational plan, the Wehrmacht's Army Group South, under the command of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, was supposed to dominate the strategic area of Ukraine. This force planned to reach the Dnieper river in an enveloping movement by breaking the Soviet border defense and penetrating 650 kilometers deep into Soviet territory, and encircling the main forces of the Red Army in Ukraine west of the river.
Soviet High Command knew that the main focus of German forces in their invasion would be north of the Pripyat marshes, but Soviet leader Joseph Stalin insisted that the Soviet emphasis should be on the south. The Soviet Southwestern Front under the command of General Mikhail Kirponos in Ukraine was the most powerful front in the western border region of the Soviet Union, possessing a total of four field armies, with the support of three mechanized corps in the front line, one mechanized corps in reserve and two mechanized corps in strategic reserve position.
The Pripyat marshes separated the southern part of the operational area of the German forces from the northern part, and eliminated the possibility of receiving help from other German units until after the Kiev area had been secured. The operational area in Ukraine had a greater depth and width than those of the Wehrmacht's other two army groups, and as Kiev was 600 km away from the border, it was considered a farther objective. These issues complicated the manoeuvres of the southern Wehrmacht group.
June and July
After the start of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Army Group South attacked Ukraine. The Red Army forces in this area put up a strong defense and despite a shortage of fuel and ammunition, they were ordered by the high command to carry out immediate counter-attacks. The 13th and 14th Panzer Divisions overcame this defense, and captured Lutsk on 26 June. Panzer Group 1 was the armored spearhead of Army Group South, and was thought to be in an ideal position to advance towards Kiev via Rivne. Meanwhile, Kirponos was trying to mount a concentrated counterattack. Commencement of his counter-attack on 26 June led to an armored battle of unprecedented scale between more than 2,000 tanks on a 70-kilometer front line. The inexperience of the Red Army officers in controlling the mass of armored forces contributed to the failure of this counter-attack, and resulted in destruction of many Soviet reserves in the region. German forces also sustained heavy casualties however, and Army Group South thus lagged behind the rest of the advancing German forces.
On 30 June, Lvov was captured by the German 17th Army. On the same day, the ineffectiveness of earlier counter-attacks caused Stavka to order Kirponos to withdraw his forces to new defensive positions by 9 July, in the fortified areas of Korosten, Novgorod-Volynski and Letychiv near the 1939 Soviet-Polish border, known as the Stalin Line. Despite the delay in the advance of the German III Motorized Corps from the Kirponos counterattack, by the arrival of the 11th Panzer Division at Berdichev on 7 July, the Stalin line was also broken and a gap was created between the Soviet 5th and 6th Armies south of Novgorod-Volynski.
With Kiev under threat and the risk of the Southwestern Front splitting in half between the Soviet 5th Army in Kiev and 6th Army south of Berdychiv, Stavka ordered a new series of counter-attacks on the same day to destroy the enemy spearhead, stop the advance of the Germans towards Kiev and maintain communication between these two armies. However, before these counterattacks began between 11 and 14 July, the capture of Zhitomir by German forces on 8 July created a weakness in Soviet defenses, and the German III Motorized Corps managed to break through the line and open the road to Kiev on 10 July. On the same day, the 13th Panzer Division of the III Motorized Corps created a defensive gap known as the "Zhitomir Corridor" that reached the Irpen River, just 15 kilometers west of Kiev. Red Army counterattacks again caused such significant damage to the mobile forces of the Soviet Southwestern Front that only 7 BT and 25 T-26 tanks of the 9th Mechanized Corps, 4 KV-1, 7 T-34 and 22 T-26 tanks of the 19th Mechanized Corps and 2 BT and 28 T-26 tanks of the 22nd Mechanized Corps remained out of their initial strength.
Some parts of the German forces lagged 100 km behind, which caused the decision of whether to attack Kiev immediately to be left to the higher levels of the German command. Nikita Khrushchev, the political commissar of the Southwestern Front, was then in charge of the Kiev garrison, which included three rifle divisions, an airborne brigade, a tank regiment, some NKVD motorized forces, students of the 1st Artillery College of Kiev, two anti-tank battalions, and about 29,000 militiamen.
Debates over the attack on Kiev
On 9 July, Army Group South command and the German Army High Command (OKH) re-emphasized the encirclement and destruction of the Soviet forces west of the Dnieper as the main objective of the operation. Seeing as the Soviet South-West Front was close to collapsing, capturing Kiev was considered to be a secondary goal. At this time Hitler did not want to assault Kiev, and prioritised the capture of a bridgehead on the Dnieper, subject to the destruction of large formations of Soviet forces west of the river. However, German Army senior commanders were still interested in capturing Kiev. Repeated attacks by the forces of the Soviet 5th Army from the Pripyat region kept the German 6th Army occupied and unable to be used for this purpose. Rundstedt was confident that Kiev would be captured by the III Motorized Corps in its rapid advance, but Hitler, after consulting with Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the German army, felt that such a move would "unnecessarily sacrifice" panzer forces. Finally, at 1am on 10 July, Generaloberst Franz Halder, chief of the German army general staff, called the headquarters of the Army Group South and prohibited the use of panzer forces in the direction of Kiev, except for reconnaissance and security purposes. By approving this order, Hitler made the III Motorized Corps responsible only for protection against attacks from the direction of Kiev, and he ordered them to avoid assaulting the city. He further pointed out that if the encirclement of the Soviet forces up to the southern Bug River was not achieved, the whole of the 1st Armored Group would advance towards Kiev and the Dnieper River in the southeast.
Meanwhile, Rundstedt believed that with the retreat of many units of the Red Army to the east, it was no longer practical to encircle them up to the southern Bug River, and together with Halder, he wanted to encircle them around Bila Tserkva, west of the Dnieper River. Hitler expressed his consent to this, provided that the northern flank of Panzer Group 1 would be protected. Brauchitsch took advantage of the ambiguity of this order, and concluded that the capture of Kiev would secure the Panzer Group's northern flank, but left the final decision to the commander of the Army Group South. Meanwhile, Rundstedt and Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of the German 6th Army, who had previously supported the assault on Kiev, now doubted it. Finally, Generaloberst Ewald von Kleist, commander of Panzer Group 1, was advised that if his offensive in coordination with the 6th Army provided a suitable opportunity to capture this city without the risk of being pushed back, then he was free to do so. Finally, the reconnaissance forces of the Wehrmacht determined on 13 July that the fortifications and concentration of the Soviet forces in Kiev left no chance for a surprise attack.
Change in German strategy
In early July, after the end of the battle of Smolensk, German Army Group Center planned to attack Moscow from three axes, commencing in the beginning of September. The Soviet 5th Army held its previous positions in the Pripyat Marshes until mid-July, and this caused the creation of an additional front line of more than 250 kilometers in the open southern and northern flanks of the German army groups Center and South. In the face of this situation and following the strong resistance of the Soviet forces around Smolensk, German army High Command changed its strategy for the continuation of the operation from mid-July. Hitler's directive No. 33 on 19 July, while criticizing the performance of the northern flank of the Army Group South against the Soviet 5th Army, mandated the German forces to "prevent escape of large amounts of enemy forces by crossing the Dnieper River deep into the Russian territories and destroy them". On this basis, the left wing of the Army Group South, in cooperation with the right wing of the Army Group Center, moved to destroy the Soviet 5th Army. Army Group Center continued its advance towards Moscow only with its infantry. Joint command was not established for the parts of both army groups that were to cooperate in the new operation.
Initial Soviet strategy
On 23 July, Stavka formed the Central Front under the command of General Fyodor Kuznetsov, consisting of the severely weakened 13th and 21st Armies, to protect the Sozh River and Gomel region on the southern flank of the German Army Group Center.
General Georgy Zhukov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army, upon receiving information from the front line, concluded that the movement of the Army Group Center to the east had stopped and that the biggest strategic threat to the Soviet forces was to the Central Front, where the movement of German mechanized forces to the south could cause the Soviet Southwestern Front to become in danger of being encircled. Zhukov told Stalin on 29 July that the success of any German advance toward Leningrad and Moscow seemed unlikely, but that the Gomel region was the Red Army's key strategic weakness. Therefore, Zhukov recommended that three armies, including one army from the strategic reserve and two armies from the Western and Southwestern Fronts, and larger amounts of artillery, be assigned to the Central Front. He also recommended that Lieutenant General Nikolai Vatutin be appointed as its commander. Stalin stated that the transfer of those forces would weaken the defenses of Moscow. In response, Zhukov stated that it was possible to transfer nine fully equipped divisions from the Far East within two weeks to strengthen these defenses, but Stalin expressed concern that the Far East would then be vulnerable to Japanese attack. Zhukov suggested that the Soviet Southwestern Front be pulled back behind the Dnieper River. When Stalin asked about the fate of Kiev in this case, Zhukov stated that it could be abandoned. Stalin became upset and rebuked Zhukov in a harsh tone and called his words "worthless". He stated his intention was to preserve Kiev at all costs, like Leningrad. Zhukov told Stalin that if he thought the Chief of the General Staff was talking "nonsense", he should be dismissed and sent to the front line. Stalin agreed to this request and appointed Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov to replace Zhukov as the chief of the Red Army General Staff, and for Zhukov to command the Soviet reserve front.