Donbas offensive, July 1943: the Mius and Izyum attacks that pulled the panzers south

For two weeks in the heat of July 1943, while the world watched Kursk and Sicily, two Soviet fronts threw themselves against a river line in the coal country of eastern Ukraine. They gained a few miles, lost them again and left the Germans still standing on the Mius. Yet within six weeks the same armies, attacking at the same places, broke the line and took the whole Donets Basin.²

Background: the coal country and the Mius line

The Donbas was the Soviet Union's great coal and steel region. Its industrial history began with the ironworks of the Welsh industrialist John Hughes, around which grew the town of Yuzovka, later Stalino and today Donetsk, and by World War I the basin had become the chief iron and steel region of the Russian Empire. The US Army historian Earl Ziemke judges that the Soviet high command would have given the southern flank first priority in 1943 for economic reasons alone, because coal, metals and grain were the shortages the Soviet economy felt most.³

The Mius had been a front line before. German troops first reached the river in October 1941, and Army Group South built positions along it that winter. After the disaster at Stalingrad the Germans fell back to those old positions in February 1943, and a Soviet drive beyond the Donets toward the Dnieper was thrown back in late February and early March.⁴ › The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942

On 5 July 1943 the Germans opened their offensive against the Kursk salient, and five days later the Allies landed on Sicily. The German attack at Kursk stalled against deep Soviet defenses, and from 12 July the Red Army went over to the counteroffensive, first toward Orel. The Soviet plan for the south was to keep the Germans there from sending a single division to the decisive battle in the Kursk bulge.⁵ › The Battle of Kursk, 1943

Armies and commanders

The Soviet attack fell to two fronts. The South Front of Colonel General Fyodor Tolbukhin faced the Mius with several armies and an air army. To the north, the Southwest Front of Rodion Malinovsky stood on the Donets around Izyum.⁶

Facing them was Erich von Manstein's Army Group South: the First Panzer Army on the Donets and the Sixth Army on the Mius. The Mius line, which the Soviets called the Mius-front, was fortified in depth, with further defensive lines along the rivers behind it.⁷

The battle in phases

The plan. The South Front was to make its main blow in the center of its sector and supporting attacks on both wings. Its aim, in the Soviet reference works, was to pin the German forces in the Donbas and, if things went well, to destroy them together with the Southwest Front. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine describes the Southwest Front's part: a thrust from Izyum toward Barvenkovo and then south, to meet the South Front and encircle the whole German group in the basin.⁸ › Barvenkovo-Lozovaya offensive, 1942

The opening, 17 July. On the morning of 17 July both fronts attacked, one blow falling near Izyum on the Donets and the other on the Mius. The Germans, who had expected at most a diversion to draw reserves away from Kursk, soon understood that the Soviets were trying to retake the whole Donets Basin, Ziemke writes; the Ukrainian encyclopedia describes the same encircling aim from the Soviet side.⁹

The bridgehead. The German defense was stubborn. On the main axis the South Front wedged only 5 to 6 kilometers into it and took a small bridgehead across the Mius, according to both Russian encyclopedias, and the supporting attacks on the wings made no headway. The strong German defense also kept the Southwest Front from carrying out its plan, the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine says. Ziemke describes two weeks in which the battle seesawed violently and at times dangerously, though the Soviets never came close to a decisive penetration.¹⁰

Turning point: the panzers come south

The answer to the bridgehead came from the Kursk front. In the words of the Soviet encyclopedia of the war, the German command brought two panzer corps into the South Front's sector to stop a breakthrough on the Mius, and both Russian encyclopedias say the Germans had to pull several panzer divisions away from the Kharkov and Orel areas. Ziemke traces one of them: on 17 July, the day the offensive began, Hitler ordered the II SS Panzer Corps out of the line at Kursk, meaning to send it to Italy once the threats in the south had been dealt with.¹¹

On 30 July the Germans struck hard on the South Front's main axis and broke into the Soviet positions. By 2 August, under the pressure of what the Soviet reference works call superior forces, the South Front had fallen back to its starting line. Ziemke likewise writes that by the end of the month the offensive had lost its momentum and the Germans quickly restored their front. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine dates the end of the operation to 27 July, the two Russian encyclopedias to 2 August.¹²

Aftermath: failure or success?

On the ground the July offensive failed, and Ziemke calls these small battles, quickly lost in the rush of greater events, but enormously costly for both sides. The Soviet reference works nevertheless count the operation a success in its main aim: the South Front pinned a large German group in the Donbas, kept the Germans from sending any division from there to Kursk and drew panzer divisions south, which eased the counteroffensive of the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts. That counteroffensive took Orel on 5 August and Kharkov on 23 August.¹³

The second attempt came quickly. The Southwest Front attacked again on 13 August and the South Front on 18 August, and Ziemke notes that they struck at exactly the places where they had failed in July. This time the Mius line broke. Soviet troops reached the coast west of Taganrog on 29 August, in Ziemke's account, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia dates the liberation of Taganrog to 30 August. The US War Department's atlas of the war, published in 1945, notes for the second half of August that the Soviets had thrust to the Sea of Azov.¹⁴

The German First Panzer and Sixth Armies fell back. Stalino was freed on 8 September, and by 22 September the Soviet fronts stood on the Molochnaya river, the last line before the Crimea. The Soviet and the Ukrainian encyclopedias both date the Donbas operation from 13 August to 22 September and agree that it freed the Donets Basin, though the Ukrainian one adds that it failed to stop much of the German Sixth Army from getting away.¹⁵

The basin the Red Army recovered was badly damaged. Britannica notes the heavy damage World War II did to mines, plants and towns, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine describes the destruction of Stalino, which had been under German occupation since 1941.¹⁶

Legacy and memory

The Russian Military Encyclopedic Dictionary notes that the experience of the July attack was used in planning the August offensive, and the second breakthrough came on the same sectors where the first had stalled. The summer of 1943 settled the war in the east: Britannica calls Kursk the decisive end of the German offensive capability on the Eastern Front, and the War Department atlas wrote in 1945 that within a month the Germans there had been thrown from the offensive to the defensive.¹⁷

The Mius front was remembered above all on the hill of Saur-Mohyla, where a tall obelisk and the figure of a soldier commemorated the capture of the height in 1943. In the fighting of summer 2014 the memorial was badly damaged and the obelisk fell under artillery fire, as both Ukrainian and Russian media recorded. The ground of the 1943 battles lies today in the war zone of eastern Ukraine.¹⁸