Battle of the Dnieper

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of the Dnieper began on the 26th of August 1943, when Red Army divisions started moving along a 1,400 kilometer front. That front stretched from Smolensk to the Sea of Azov. At one point almost four million troops were engaged, ranking it among the largest operations of the Second World War. Over the next four months, five Soviet fronts fought to recover the eastern bank of the Dnieper from German forces. They then forced crossings onto the western side. Kiev would fall in a separate battle that followed. 2,438 Red Army soldiers would eventually receive the title Hero of the Soviet Union for what happened on those riverbanks. What made a single river crossing worth that scale of sacrifice? And why did Soviet commanders choose the costlier of two ways to fight it?

• 2. A River As Fortress

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  The Dnieper ranks as the third largest river in Europe, trailing only the Volga and the Danube. In its lower reaches its width can stretch to three kilometers, and dams built along its course made some stretches wider still. The western bank, the side the Red Army still had to take, rose higher and steeper than the eastern shore it already controlled. On the 11th of August 1943, Adolf Hitler ordered a defensive line built along the length of the river. The Germans called the project the Ostwall, or Eastern Wall. There was no time to fortify the entire river evenly. German defenses instead concentrated near Kremenchuk, Zaporizhia and Nikopol, the sectors most likely to see a Soviet crossing. On the 7th of September 1943, SS and Wehrmacht units received orders to strip everything of value from the land they were abandoning. This scorched earth policy aimed to leave the advancing Red Army nothing usable. Soviet commanders now faced a choice about how to break a line built in barely a month, across a river three kilometers wide in places.

• 3. Two Paths To The River

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  Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Deputy Chief of Staff Aleksei Antonov argued for patience. Their plan called for regrouping the army and finding a weak point in the German line. From there, a breakthrough could encircle the defenders in the rear, the way German Panzers had bypassed the Maginot Line in 1940. Both men had watched the losses pile up after the Battle of Kursk and wanted to avoid repeating them. Stalin backed a different plan: force the river now, on a broad front, without waiting to regroup. He worried that any delay would let German forces devastate the region before the Red Army could reach it. Stavka, the Soviet high command, chose Stalin's option. Rather than a deep encirclement, the plan leaned on partisan activity to disrupt German supply lines and prevent the removal of Soviet industrial equipment. The assault went forward on a 300 kilometer front, almost simultaneously. Soldiers used every vessel available, from small fishing boats to rafts improvised from barrels and trees. German scorched earth tactics had already destroyed most of the boats and raw materials in the area. Without heavy equipment, any bridgehead the Red Army secured on the far bank would not hold for long.

• 4. Retreat To The Wall

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  Erich von Manstein, commanding Army Group South, asked Berlin for as many as 12 new divisions three weeks into the offensive. He hoped to hold the open steppe, where Soviet numerical strength gave the Red Army every advantage. German reserves were too thin to answer the request. On the 15th of September 1943, Adolf Hitler ordered Army Group South to fall back to the Dnieper defense line. Poltava became one of the bitterest fights of the retreat. The city was heavily fortified and its garrison well prepared, and several inconclusive days of fighting slowed the Soviet advance. Marshal Ivan Konev chose to bypass Poltava rather than force it, pushing his forces toward the Dnieper instead. After two more days of violent urban warfare, the Poltava garrison was overcome. By the end of September 1943, Soviet troops had reached the lower stretch of the river. It was the fortified line Hitler had ordered built barely a month earlier.

• 5. The Airborne Gamble

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  On the night of the 21st and the 22nd of September 1943, the Central Front's 3rd Tank Army reached the Dnieper. It had raced ahead of the retreating Germans to secure a bridgehead before their defenses could stabilize there. Soviet infantry crossed the next day by swimming and using makeshift rafts. They faced only 120 German flak academy NCO candidates from Cherkassy and the battered reconnaissance battalion of the 19th Panzer Division. Those units were the only German forces within 60 kilometers of the Dnieper loop. Heavy German air attacks and a lack of bridging equipment kept Soviet heavy weapons from crossing to widen the bridgehead.

  To reinforce it quickly, Stavka ordered an airborne assault. On the 21st of September, the Voronezh Front's 1st, 3rd and 5th Guards Airborne Brigades received their orders. By the 23rd of September they were to seize a perimeter 15 to 20 kilometers wide and 30 kilometers deep. The target lay on the Dnieper loop, between Kaniv and Rzhishchev. The plan collapsed almost immediately. Troops arrived at the airfields so slowly that the drop was delayed a day and the 1st Brigade dropped from the operation entirely. Company commanders received their final orders just 15 minutes before their soldiers assembled on the 24th of September, without spades, anti-tank mines or ponchos for the cold. Aircraft shortages forced planners to abandon their loading plan. The two brigades would need three separate lifts to deliver everyone, and much of their radio equipment and supplies never made it aboard.

  Half the paratroopers had never jumped from an aircraft, only from training towers, and many still did not understand their objectives when they took off. Poor weather had grounded Soviet aerial reconnaissance for days. As a result, the assault force had no idea the Germans had reinforced the drop zone with the 19th Panzer Division. Anti-aircraft fire and flares met the transport planes instead of the expected quiet. The lead aircraft dropped paratroopers over Dubari at 1930 hours straight into fire from the 73rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Pilots scattered, some climbing away before releasing their loads, and 13 aircraft returned to base without dropping anyone at all. A drop meant to cover 10 by 14 kilometers of largely open ground went wildly astray. Paratroopers instead scattered across 30 by 90 kilometers, landing in the middle of two German corps.

  German soldiers used the paratroopers' own white parachutes as beacons to hunt down scattered groups and seize their supplies. Of 4,575 men dropped, about seventy percent of the number planned, only around 2,300 managed to form themselves into 43 improvised groups. The Germans recorded 901 paratroopers captured or killed within the first 24 hours alone. Near Grushevo, three kilometers from Dubari, a single German company wiped out roughly 150 paratroopers in one night. German commanders later called the operation a sound idea ruined by planners without expert knowledge, though they praised individual paratroopers' tenacity. Stavka judged it an outright failure and never attempted another corps-sized airborne drop. Brigade commander Sidorchuk gathered survivors into a mixed force of paratroopers and partisans in the forests to the south. He eventually linked up with the 2nd Ukrainian Front near Cherkassy on the 15th of November. More than sixty percent of his men never returned.

• 6. Holding The Far Bank

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  The first bridgehead on the Dnieper's western shore went up on the 22nd of September 1943. It sat where the river meets the Pripyat, in the northern part of the front. More followed in quick succession: near Dniprodzerzhynsk on the 24th of September, near Dnipropetrovsk on the 25th, and near Kremenchuk on the 28th. By the end of the month the Red Army held 23 separate bridgeheads, some stretching 10 kilometers wide and one to two kilometers deep. Every crossing was a fight in itself. Soldiers used whatever would float, under heavy German fire and heavy losses. Once across, they dug themselves into the clay ravines that lined the western bank.

  German troops counterattacked almost every bridgehead soon after, trying to wipe them out before Soviet heavy equipment could follow. At the Borodaevsk lodgement, an episode Marshal Konev later described in his memoirs, German armor and aircraft attacked. They struck both the bridgehead and the reinforcements still crossing the river. Konev protested the disorganized state of Soviet air cover. He set up patrols to keep German bombers away and pushed more artillery forward to answer the tank attacks. Once Soviet aviation tightened up and hundreds of guns and Katyusha rocket launchers opened fire, the position held. Fighting of this kind was ordinary on every lodgement along the river. Every one of them survived, but at a terrible cost. By the start of October, most Soviet divisions were down to just 25 to 50 percent of their full strength.

• 7. The Lower Dnieper Offensive

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  By mid-October 1943, Soviet forces on the lower Dnieper bridgeheads were strong enough to launch a major attack. Their goal was to finally secure the river's western shore in the south. The main thrust struck the Kremenchuk-Dnipropetrovsk line, while a separate diversion pulled German attention away from both the Lower Dnieper and Kiev. By the time the offensive ended, the Red Army controlled a stretch of the western bank 300 kilometers wide and, in places, 80 kilometers deep. In the south, this cut the Crimea off from the rest of the German forces. Any hope Germany had of stopping the Red Army on the Dnieper's east bank was gone.

• 8. Aftermath

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  The Battle of the Dnieper ended as another defeat for the Wehrmacht, forcing German forces to pull back and restabilize their front further west. Although the western bank of the river remained largely in German hands for now, both sides understood it would not hold much longer. The fighting had also shown the strength of the Soviet partisan movement. Through September and October 1943, an operation called the Rail War struck at German supply lines, causing serious logistical problems behind the front. Between the 28th of November and the 1st of December 1943, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Stalin met at the Tehran Conference. The gains from the Dnieper campaign, alongside other Soviet offensives that year, gave Stalin a strong hand in those negotiations with his Allies. From a bridgehead secured west of Kiev during the battle, the Red Army launched the Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive on the 24th of December 1943. That campaign carried Soviet forces all the way to Galicia in Poland, the Carpathian Mountains and Romania. Army Group South itself was split into two parts, one north and one south of the Carpathians.