Smolensk operation, 1943: the Red Army breaks open the road west

Smolensk had been fought over for a thousand years before 1943. In the summer of 1941 the city had been the scene of one of the bitterest battles of the German invasion; two years later the Red Army came back for it. The operation that retook it was slow, costly and overshadowed by the great battles in the Ukraine, but it pushed the Germans out of the last stretch of Russian soil on the road to Minsk.²

Background: the gateway on the Dnieper

Smolensk stands on both banks of the upper Dnieper, on the old route from Moscow to Warsaw and western Europe. Its position at the portages between the Dnieper and the Western Dvina made it a fortress city from the earliest times. For the German army in 1943 it was the eastern gateway to the land bridge between the two rivers, the shortest way into Belarus.³

That position had drawn armies before. Lithuania, Poland and Russia fought over the city for centuries. In July 1941 the German advance on Moscow ran into a long and bloody battle around Smolensk, which the Germans won but which cost them time they could not spare before winter. They had held the city ever since.⁴

After the German offensive at Kursk failed in July 1943, the Red Army attacked almost everywhere on the central and southern fronts, keeping the Germans off balance and never letting them settle on a stable line. One of these offensives was aimed at Smolensk. The Stavka, the Soviet high command, gave it the code name Suvorov, after the great eighteenth-century Russian commander.⁵

The plan, in the account of the Russian Historical Encyclopedia, was for Colonel General Vasily Sokolovsky's West Front to strike the main blow toward Spas-Demensk, Yelnya and Roslavl and then wheel on Smolensk, while the left wing of Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko's Kalinin Front advanced on Dukhovshchina from the north. The goal set out in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was to break the left wing of Army Group Center, take the line Smolensk to Roslavl and push on toward Vitebsk, Orsha and Mogilev.⁶

Armies and commanders

On the Soviet side Marshal of Artillery Nikolai Voronov coordinated the two fronts for the Stavka. Facing them was Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander of Army Group Center, with the 3rd Panzer and 4th Armies on the Smolensk axis.⁷

The two sides' strength is told in very different terms. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives the two fronts 1,253,000 men, some 20,640 guns and mortars, 1,430 tanks and self-propelled guns and over 1,000 combat aircraft. Against them, it says, stood more than 40 divisions, up to 850,000 men, dug into four or five defensive belts up to 130 km deep in wooded, swampy ground. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia also counts about 40 Wehrmacht divisions in the Smolensk region.⁸

The German records tell a thinner story. Earl Ziemke, the US Army historian who worked from them, gives the German Fourth Army 11 divisions and 7 battle groups at the end of August, and describes an army group that had been sending its divisions south all summer to prop up Army Group South. Army Group Center was strong on paper and short of men in the line. The Russian Historical Encyclopedia sees it the other way round, saying the German command brought in 16 divisions from other sectors to restore the front around Smolensk, without success.⁹

The battle in phases

A hard start in August

The West Front attacked on 7 August after a heavy bombardment. It went badly. The German defenses proved far stronger than the Soviets had expected: the defenders counterattacked without pause, used the forests and marshes well, and the attackers gained little ground. The Kalinin Front's left wing joined in from the north, with no more success. Around 20 August the Stavka halted the attack to regroup and told Voronov to give up the thrust on Roslavl in favor of an attack through Yelnya toward Smolensk.¹⁰

Through Yelnya

The second blow came on 28 August. Two armies of the West Front, the 10th Guards and the 21st, attacked at the boundary between the German Ninth and Fourth Armies and in two days drove a wedge about 20 miles deep to Yelnya, which fell on 30 August; Dorogobuzh followed on 1 September. The German armies had to bend their flanks back to keep in touch, and the road to Smolensk began to open.¹¹

Behind the German lines Soviet partisans of the Smolensk and Kalinin regions attacked roads and railways, and both Soviet encyclopedias credit them with real help to the fronts. In early September the offensive paused again while the attackers brought up supplies.¹²

The fall of Smolensk

In mid-September Hitler agreed to a general withdrawal of Army Group Center to the Panther position, the line the Germans were building east of the upper Dnieper, but he wanted it done slowly, phase by phase. The delay suited the Red Army. Yartsevo fell on 16 September and Dukhovshchina on the 19th, by the Soviet encyclopedia's dates, and between 20 and 23 September the Kalinin Front broke through north of Smolensk and took Demidov, while the West Front pressed in from the southeast.¹³

On 25 September Soviet troops entered Smolensk and Roslavl. The city they found had been wrecked by two years of war; the Germans had blown up much of what remained as they left.¹⁴

Turning point

The offensive turned when the Soviets stopped attacking where the Germans expected them. The first attempt, aimed at Roslavl, ground to a halt in the forests; the second, shifted to Yelnya and the seam between two German armies, broke through in two days. From then on Army Group Center could not hold a line east of Smolensk, especially while it was being stripped of divisions for the fighting in the Ukraine.¹⁵

The Soviet side had its own limits. Ziemke judges that the Stavka's superiority, though large, was not enough to drive into Belarus and the Ukraine at full strength at the same time, and that on 4 September it chose the Ukraine for its main effort. Smolensk was taken all the same, but by a secondary offensive, and the German front in the center bent rather than broke.¹⁶

Aftermath

By 2 October the last units of Army Group Center had moved into the Panther position, along the Sozh and Pronya rivers east of the Dnieper. The Soviet fronts had crossed into Belarus and dug in west of Velizh and Rudnya and along the Pronya, within reach of Vitebsk, Orsha and Mogilev.¹⁷

Soviet and Russian accounts give the advance as up to 225 km (the Great Soviet Encyclopedia) or 250 km on a front up to 400 km wide (the Russian Historical Encyclopedia). The first counts 5 infantry, 1 panzer and 1 motorized German divisions destroyed and 15 more defeated; the second, 7 destroyed and 14 badly beaten. Both stress that the offensive pinned German forces that might otherwise have gone south, where the main Soviet effort was crossing the Dnieper.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

In Soviet memory Smolensk 1943 was one link in the chain of liberations of that autumn: the whole Smolensk region was freed and the front moved into Belarus. There it stuck. The Soviet fronts dug in for a long defense facing the Panther position.¹⁹

For Poland the recapture of the Smolensk region had a grim sequel. On 13 April 1943 the Germans had announced the discovery of mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, prisoners the NKVD had shot in the spring of 1940. When the Polish government in London asked the International Red Cross to investigate, Moscow broke off relations with it on 25 April 1943. A technical commission of the Polish Red Cross, sent to the graves that spring, also pointed to Soviet guilt. Once the area was back in Soviet hands, the Soviets ran their own investigation, and in January 1944 a commission under Nikolai Burdenko published a report blaming the Germans. The Institute of National Remembrance calls that report the foundation of the Katyn lie, which Soviet leaders maintained for decades.²⁰ › Soviet invasion of Poland, 1939