Smolensk operation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Smolensk operation, codenamed Suvorov, began at 04:40 on the 7th of August 1943, when Soviet artillery opened a preliminary bombardment along the wooded approaches to the city. Two hours later, infantry went forward. On the first day of the main assault, Soviet troops gained just 4 kilometers. What they faced was a German defensive system five or six lines deep, extending 100 to 130 kilometers behind the front.

  General Andrei Yeremenko commanded the Kalinin Front. Vasily Sokolovsky commanded the Western Front. Their combined forces aimed to clear German troops from the Smolensk and Bryansk regions. The operation ran almost simultaneously with the Lower Dnieper Offensive in the south. Both were part of the same strategic plan to recover occupied Soviet territory, and each was designed to pull German reserves away from the other.

  Whether the Red Army could crack a line that had barely shifted in months was far from certain. The terrain ahead was a belt of swamps, forests, and elaborately fortified cities.

• 2. A Fortress of Mud and Wire

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  Six or seven firing points per kilometer: that was the density German engineers had achieved along the forward defense zone near Smolensk. The main defense line ran 5 kilometers deep and contained three separate trench systems linked by an extensive communication network. Where tank attacks were expected, the third trench line was replaced by a solid antitank moat. Its steep western side integrated artillery and machine gun positions to channel fire at any armored force that broke through.

  A second defense zone sat about 10 kilometers behind the outer line. Between the two, small garrisons of firing points were scattered to catch Soviet forces that slipped past the first defenses. Heavy guns were positioned behind the second zone. Three or four more defense lines ran deep behind all of this, placed wherever possible on the western banks of rivers, including the Dnieper and the Desna.

  The front had been stable for four to five months before the battle, and in some sectors up to 18 months. German engineers used every day of that stability. Roads were mined. Urban centers, including Yelnya, Dukhovshchina, and Spas-Demensk, were converted into fortified strongpoints, with firing positions installed in the tallest and most prominent buildings. The outer edge of the entire system was covered by three lines of barbed wire and continuous minefields.

  At the end of July 1943, a German Army Group Center staff briefing noted signs that a Soviet offensive was being prepared. The commanders took the warning seriously. Three divisions from the Oryol sector would be rushed to the front once the assault began. These were the 2nd Panzer Division, the 36th Infantry Division, and the 56th Infantry Division.

• 3. Mud, Forest, and Rasputitsa

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  The only major railroad axis available to Soviet supply officers was the Rzhev-Vyazma-Kirov line. Every other route through the region was undeveloped. Paved roads were rare. After rain, which fell often during the Russian summer, most unpaved roads became impassable mud. Russians called this condition rasputitsa. For mechanized troops and supply convoys, progress slowed to almost nothing during these periods.

  The Wehrmacht controlled a far more developed network, centered on Smolensk and Roslavl. Those two cities served as major logistical hubs, allowing rapid resupply and reinforcement for German units. The most important German railroad lines were the Smolensk-Bryansk axis and the Nevel-Orsha-Mogilev axis. Together these linked western German troops with concentrations around Oryol.

  Hills rising above 270 meters gave defenders a clear advantage for artillery observation, and the offensive zone was further complicated by ravines and large areas of swamp and forest. Many of the rivers running through the area were flanked by wide, swampy ground that mechanized troops struggled to cross. The Dnieper, the largest and strategically most significant of these rivers, had a western bank that was higher and steeper than the eastern. Bridges and ferries were scarce.

  Operation Concert, one of the largest railroad sabotage operations of World War II, sent Soviet partisans against German rail lines throughout the region. The swampy areas around the Desna and Ugra rivers would prove especially troublesome when Soviet forces moved on Yelnya. Wehrmacht engineers had mined those river approaches and placed heavy guns on the overlooking hills.

• 4. Why the Advance Froze

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  Marshal Nikolai Voronov, formerly a member of the Stavka, analyzed the August stalemate in his memoirs and identified eight primary causes. The first: Wehrmacht OKH command had known about the operation in advance and was prepared. The offensive itself had been postponed from the 3rd to the 7th of August, giving German troops additional days to raise their readiness.

  The Red Army had committed too few tanks, Voronov concluded, forcing commanders to rely on artillery and infantry for breakthroughs that required armor. Several rifle divisions, particularly reserve units, were insufficiently trained for assaulting multi-layered defenses. Voronov was blunt about unit behavior: some regiments chose to expose neighboring units to attack rather than advance themselves. Many commanders, he wrote, were too impressed by Wehrmacht counterattacks and failed to act properly, even when Soviet numbers were superior.

  As Konstantin Rokossovsky recalled those early days, "we literally had to tear ourselves through German lines, one by one." During the Dukhovshchina-Demidov Offensive near Dukhovshchina, Wehrmacht troops launched 24 regimental-sized counterattacks on the first day alone. Soviet forces there managed to advance only 6 to 7 kilometers over five days.

  By mid-August, the stalemate stretched across the entire Smolensk front. It had one strategic merit. It tied down as much as 40% of all Wehrmacht divisions on the Eastern Front in this sector. This reduced pressure on Soviet forces fighting in the south. Voronov's remedy was concrete. He demanded that the 4th Tank Army and the 8th Artillery Corps be transferred from the Bryansk Front to support the next assault.

• 5. The Turn at Yelnya

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  On the 28th of August 1943, four Soviet armies opened an assault on a 36-kilometer front near Yelnya. The attack followed a 90-minute artillery barrage, backed by ground attack aircraft. Together they struck Wehrmacht lines hard enough to allow a breakthrough across a 25-kilometer stretch. By the end of that first day, Soviet troops had advanced 6 to 8 kilometers.

  Soviet planners had described the Yelnya-Dorogobuzh Offensive as the "key" to Smolensk. The preparatory bombardment had sufficiently damaged the prepared positions to sustain the breakthrough. On the 29th of August, Red Army rifle divisions extended the salient to 30 kilometers wide and 12 to 15 kilometers deep.

  To exploit the gap, the 2nd Guards Tank Corps was thrown into the fight. In a single day, its troops drove 30 kilometers and reached the outskirts of Yelnya. Red Army commanders pressed the advantage without pause, attacking the city before German forces could regroup. Wehrmacht units abandoned Yelnya on the 30th of August, sustaining heavy casualties. A full-scale retreat from the surrounding area followed, and by the 3rd of September, Soviet forces had reached the eastern shore of the Dnieper.

  Near Bryansk, General Markian Popov commanded the Bryansk Front from June to October 1943. He noticed that several hills commanding the Dubrovka region had been captured with unusual ease. German soldiers there showed a total absence of battle readiness. Popov concluded the Wehrmacht had not anticipated an attack along that axis. He shifted the boundary between the First Belorussian Front and the Western Front southward. A single-pincer movement toward Dubrovka then forced German forces to withdraw.

  By the 6th of September, Soviet divisions across the front had fallen below 60% of their nominal strength. The offensive halted for a week of resupply and reinforcement before the final drive on Smolensk.

• 6. Into Smolensk

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  On the 14th of September, the final stage opened on two fronts at once. The Kalinin Front's attack created a salient 30 kilometers wide and between 3 and 13 kilometers deep by the end of the first day. The Western Front's assault, which began one day later, produced a salient 20 kilometers wide and 10 kilometers deep.

  Four days into this third stage, Soviet rifle divisions captured Dukhovshchina, which Soviet planners had identified as another "key" to Smolensk. The same day, Yartsevo, an important railroad hub near the city, fell to Soviet troops. General Kurt von Tippelskirch served as Chief of Staff of the German 4th Army during the operation. He later wrote that it had become clear the 9th Army's position "could no longer be held." His assessment captured the shift: a German salient that had projected far to the east was now exposed to envelopment from multiple directions.

  By the 19th of September, Soviet troops had opened a gap in Wehrmacht lines 250 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide. The following day, the Stavka ordered Western Front troops to reach Smolensk before the 27th of September, then push on toward Orsha and Mogilev. The Kalinin Front was ordered to take Vitebsk by the 10th of October.

  On the 25th of September, Soviet troops completed the liberation of Smolensk after an assault crossing of the northern Dnieper. Street fighting had lasted through the entire night. Roslavl was recaptured the same day. By the 30th of September, the Soviet offensive had exhausted itself outside Vitebsk, Orsha, and Mogilev, all three still in Wehrmacht hands. The operation officially concluded on the 2nd of October. Overall, Soviet lines had advanced between 100 and 180 kilometers during the 20 days of the final stage. A limited follow-on effort then captured Nevel after two more days of street fighting.

• 7. What the Operation Won

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  As many as 55 German divisions were committed to countering the Smolensk operation. Those were divisions that could not be moved south to block Soviet troops from crossing the Dnieper. Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky served as Chief of the General Staff in 1943. In his memoirs he described the overall plan as "enormous both in regard of its daring and of forces committed to it." The Smolensk operation was named as one of its constituent parts.

  Several Wehrmacht officers produced a joint assessment after the war. They concluded that the German front had been maintained "with such difficulty." Poor conditions among German troops, combined with a complete lack of reserves, meant it could not survive another major Soviet attack. The Smolensk operation had not broken the German army outright, but it had left nothing in reserve to absorb the next rupture.

  The Pripet marshes, vast and impassable, now lay between Army Group South and German forces to the north. Moving troops or supplies from one sector to the other had become far more difficult. German forces had also been driven permanently from the Smolensk land bridge, historically the most important approach for a western attack on Moscow. The strategic threat that had weighed on the Stavka since 1941 was gone.

  Smolensk Oblast had lost almost 80% of its urban living space to destruction. Rural housing was down by 50%. Numerous factories and most of the region's agriculture had been wiped out across two years of occupation. Soviet forces also encountered evidence of war crimes committed by SS Einsatzgruppen units that had operated throughout that period.

  The central Soviet-German front stabilized after the operation and stayed quiet until the summer of 1944. Operation Bagration then allowed the Red Army to clear Wehrmacht forces from almost all remaining Soviet territory, shifting the war into Poland and Germany.