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

In July 1943 the German offensive against the Kursk salient was stalling. On 13 July Hitler told his army group commanders he was calling it off. The Allied landing in Sicily three days earlier was his greatest worry, but, according to Earl Ziemke's history for the US Army, Soviet build-ups opposite the German First Panzer and Sixth Armies in the south had also made him fear for the Donets Basin.²

The Donbas mattered to both sides. Ziemke points out that between Stalino and the Mius lay the better half of the Donets coal fields, and that coal, metals and grain were among the shortages the Soviet economy felt most. The German front in the south ran along the Donets and then south down the Mius river to the Gulf of Taganrog, held by two armies stretched over more than 250 miles.³

The attack on the Mius

On the morning of 17 July the Southwest and South Fronts opened their offensive. The South Front under Colonel General Fyodor Tolbukhin, with the 51st, 5th Shock, 28th, 44th and 2nd Guards Armies and the 8th Air Army, attacked the German Sixth Army, which held the fortified Mius line with up to 11 divisions. The main blow came in the center from the Rovenki area, with supporting attacks on both wings.⁴

The Germans had been watching feverish activity across the lines for nearly a week. Ziemke writes that within the first day two points of main effort emerged, one near Izyum against the First Panzer Army and one north of Golodayevka on the Mius, and that the German command concluded with some astonishment that the Soviets meant to recapture the whole Donets Basin, not merely to draw reserves away from Kursk.⁵

On the main axis the South Front could only wedge 5 to 6 km into the German defenses, taking a small bridgehead on the Mius around Stepanovka and Marinovka. The supporting attacks made no headway.⁶

The Germans had not been caught entirely unready. On 14 July, in what their own army command thought at the time an excess of caution, Hitler had ordered the XXIV Panzer Corps moved back behind the First Panzer Army as a reserve. Even so, Ziemke writes, the Soviets quickly scored sizable breakthroughs and fought stubbornly to widen them, and for two weeks the battle seesawed violently and at times dangerously, though it never came close to a decisive penetration.⁷

The panzers come south

To stop a breakthrough on the Mius, the German command brought two panzer corps into the South Front's sector, in the words of the Soviet encyclopedia of the war. Ziemke shows where they came from. 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 to the First Panzer and Sixth Armies had been dealt with. By 26 July the SS Adolf Hitler Division had orders to entrain at Stalino, in the Donbas, for Italy.⁸

On 30 July the Germans struck back hard on the South Front's main axis and broke into the Soviet positions. By 2 August, under what the Soviet encyclopedia calls superior enemy forces, the South Front had fallen back to its starting line.⁹

Failure or success?

Ziemke calls these small battles, quickly lost in the rush of greater events, but enormously costly for both sides. Between 17 July and 6 August, he writes, the German Sixth Army alone captured 17,000 Soviet soldiers and suffered 23,855 casualties of its own.¹⁰

Soviet reference works count the operation a success in its main aim. The Military Encyclopedic Dictionary and the encyclopedia of the war both say that the South Front pinned a large German group in the Donbas, kept it from sending any division to Kursk and forced the Germans to bring several panzer divisions from the Kharkov and Orel areas, which eased the counteroffensive of the Voronezh and Steppe Fronts. Both add that the lessons were used in the next attempt.¹¹

That next attempt came quickly. On 13 and 18 August, Ziemke writes, the Southwest and South Fronts struck again south of Izyum and east of Golodayevka, exactly where they had failed in July. This time the German line gave way: by 29 August Soviet troops reached the coast west of Taganrog, and by early September the Germans were retreating from the Donets Basin toward the Dnieper.¹²