What were the battles of Kharkov?
The battles of Kharkov were the fighting between the Soviet Union and Germany for Kharkov, today Kharkiv in Ukraine, from 1941 to 1943. German troops took the city in October 1941. In May 1942 a Soviet offensive to retake it ended in the encirclement of whole Soviet armies south of the city. The Red Army took Kharkov back on 16 February 1943, lost it to Erich von Manstein's counteroffensive in March, and took it for good on 23 August 1943, after the Battle of Kursk.5
Between October 1941 and August 1943 Kharkov changed hands four times, and the fighting for it gave the Red Army both one of its worst defeats and one of its great victories. This article follows all four battles in one story. The front they belonged to is described in our guide to the Eastern Front, and the battle that decided the last of them in the Battle of Kursk.6
Why Kharkov mattered
Kharkov was one of the great industrial cities of the Soviet Union, with about 833,000 inhabitants in 1939. It had been the capital of Soviet Ukraine until 1934, and its factories and its railway junction made it a prize for both armies.7
In the summer of 1941 Hitler made the industry of the region a war aim of its own. Supplements to his directives of that summer ordered the army to take the Donets Basin and the Kharkov industrial area. According to a postwar US Army study, in an argument with his generals over Moscow he said that the industrial region around Kharkov was more important to him than the Soviet capital.8
October 1941: the German capture
After the encirclement at Kiev, Army Group South turned east toward Kharkov and Rostov. As the German armies came closer, the Soviet authorities dismantled factories and institutions and sent them east, together with many of the inhabitants.9
24 October 1941. The German 6th Army of Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau took Kharkov in the last week of October. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine dates the capture to 24 October, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine to 25 October. The city stayed in the front zone under German military rule, though the Germans allowed a local city council, whose heads included Oleksii Kramarenko and Oleksandr Semenenko.10
The occupation was a catastrophe for the people who stayed. The occupiers murdered the Jews of Kharkov, many of them at Drobytsky Yar, and according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine thousands of inhabitants died of hunger, disease and cold. By the time of the final liberation in 1943 the population had fallen by about three quarters.11
May 1942: Timoshenko's offensive
In the spring of 1942 the Soviet forces in the southwest were commanded by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, with Nikita Khrushchev on his military council and Ivan Bagramyan as chief of staff. According to the US Army historian Earl Ziemke, Timoshenko proposed a great offensive across the whole south, and Stalin cut it down to one operation: the Southwest Front alone would retake Kharkov.12
The plan was a double blow. The main attack would come from the south, out of the Barvenkovo (Izyum) bulge west of the Donets, with the 6th Army of Lt. Gen. A. M. Gorodnyansky and a group under Maj. Gen. L. V. Bobkin. A second attack, led by the 28th Army, would come from the Volchansk area northeast of the city. The South Front was to guard the southern face of the bulge. How the bulge itself came to be is told in our story of the Barvenkovo-Lozovaya offensive.13
The German side was preparing an attack of its own. Army Group South under Field Marshal Fedor von Bock planned Operation Fridericus, two thrusts from the north and the south to cut off the bulge at Izyum.14
12 May 1942. The Soviet offensive opened first and broke through. In three days the southern group advanced 25 to 50 km and the northern group 18 to 25 km. Soviet histories give the Southwest Front about 1.5 times as many men and twice as many tanks in its sector, most of them light, while Ukrainian historians today judge the overall balance of forces roughly equal. But Timoshenko held back his tank corps, misled by reports of German armor near Zmiyev, and committed them only on 17 May, when the chance had passed.15
The Barvenkovo pocket
17 May 1942. That morning Ewald von Kleist's army group struck the Soviet 9th Army on the southern face of the bulge, where the Germans were far stronger. The Soviet encyclopedia counts 4.4 times as many German tanks in the South Front's sector, the Ukrainian one 6.5 times as many as the 9th Army had. The 9th Army fell back across the Donets, and the German armor drove north toward Izyum, behind the Soviet troops advancing on Kharkov.16
The Soviet command kept attacking toward Kharkov for two more days. Who was to blame for that delay was argued for decades. Earl Ziemke shows how, in the Soviet histories, the memoirs of the generals and Khrushchev's own speech of 1956, the responsibility shifts between Stalin, the General Staff and the theater command. Only in the second half of 19 May did Timoshenko order the offensive stopped.17
23 May 1942. Kleist's troops met Friedrich Paulus's German 6th Army south of Balakleya and closed the ring. The Soviet 6th and 57th Armies, the Bobkin group and remnants of the 9th Army were trapped west of the Donets. Their attempts to break out failed, and the fighting in the pocket ended on 28 May.18
Only small groups got out: about 22,000 men according to the Soviet and Ukrainian encyclopedias, about 27,000 according to a later Russian study cited by Iryna and Oleksandr Avtushenko. Lt. Gen. Fyodor Kostenko, deputy commander of the Southwest Front, did not come out of the pocket, and neither did the army commanders Gorodnyansky and K. P. Podlas or the group commander Bobkin.19
Krivosheev's statistical study counts 277,190 Soviet losses in the battle, 170,958 of them killed, missing or captured. German reports counted about 240,000 prisoners. The defeat badly weakened the Soviet southern wing just before the German summer offensive of 1942.20
February 1943: the Red Army returns
After the German defeat at Stalingrad, the Red Army pushed west across the whole southern front. In February 1943 the Voronezh Front of Filipp Golikov, with the 40th and 69th Armies and the 3rd Tank Army, closed on Kharkov.21
The offensive went fast. On 8 or 9 February the Germans lost Belgorod, northeast of Kharkov. In the Soviet scheme the attack on Kharkov was the last part of a larger offensive that had begun at Voronezh in January.22
Hitler ordered the city held, but the SS Panzer Corps of Paul Hausser defending it was in danger of being cut off. On 15 February Hausser pulled his troops out against his orders.23
16 February 1943. A day after Hausser's withdrawal, the last German troops were pushed out of the city, and on 16 February the Red Army took Kharkov.24
March 1943: Manstein's counterstroke
The Soviet armies had gone too far. Their supply lines were stretched, their divisions were worn down, and the Stavka still pushed them on toward the Dnieper.25
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, now commanding a reformed Army Group South, struck back from about 19 February. German panzer forces, among them the 4th Panzer Army and Hausser's SS Panzer Corps, smashed the leading Soviet armies and Mobile Group Popov, and in early March they turned north toward Kharkov.26
The Luftwaffe helped decide it. Both Ziemke and Menning note that this was the last time the German air force gave a German offensive in the East the kind of support it had given in the first years of the war. Menning puts the Soviet losses in the fighting of the second half of February at some 23,000 dead and 9,000 prisoners, with 615 tanks.27
The spring thaw was close. The German troops slogged through mud and standing water, and the roads would soon be impassable.28
The plan was to bypass the city, but Hausser sent two SS divisions straight into it. 11 to 14 March 1943. After three days of street fighting the city was in German hands again, and the Germans went on to retake Belgorod.29
Bruce Menning puts the cost of the street fighting for the SS at 11,500 casualties. Krivosheev's study counts 86,469 Soviet losses in the defensive battle of 4 to 25 March, 45,219 of them killed, missing or captured. The new front ran along the Donets, and north of Belgorod it formed the southern face of the Kursk salient.30
August 1943: the last battle
After the German offensive at Kursk failed in July, the Soviet command launched Operation Rumyantsev (Polkovodets Rumyantsev) against the German forces around Belgorod and Kharkov. The Voronezh Front of Gen. Nikolai Vatutin and the Steppe Front of Col. Gen. Ivan Konev attacked on 3 August and freed Belgorod on 5 August.31
The attack opened with a heavy artillery barrage on a narrow front. Once the German line was broken, the Soviet command sent its two tank armies, the 1st Tank Army of Mikhail Katukov and the 5th Guards Tank Army of Pavel Rotmistrov, through the gap.32
Manstein tried his maneuver again, with armored counterattacks around Bogodukhov and Akhtyrka, northwest of Kharkov. Heavy tank battles followed, but this time the Soviet armies held.33
Gen. Werner Kempf, whose army detachment defended the city, was relieved of command, and his force was renamed the 8th Army.34
23 August 1943. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Konev ordered a night assault on the city on 22 August. During the night the Germans pulled out, and on 23 August the troops of the Steppe Front held Kharkov. The city had changed hands for the fourth and last time.35
Krivosheev counts 255,566 Soviet losses in the whole operation, 71,611 of them killed, missing or captured. The operation was part of the Soviet counteroffensive after the Battle of Kursk, and it opened the way to the liberation of Left-Bank Ukraine.36
One name, several battles
Historians do not agree on how many battles of Kharkov there were. The German numbering calls the fighting of February and March 1943 the Third Battle of Kharkov and that of August 1943 the Fourth.37
According to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, the dominant view in Ukrainian and Russian writing also counts four battles, with May 1942 as the second. The Ukrainian historian Rostyslav Pyliavets counts seven, two Soviet defensive battles and five Soviet offensives, and in his count May 1942 is the fourth.38
Whatever the count, the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine ranks May 1942 among the least successful operations the Red Army fought in the whole war, and the Soviet encyclopedia called it a major failure.39
