Chapter 4

The Southwestern Front’s Voroshilovgrad (Donbas) Offensive (Operation Gallop [Skachok ]) (29 January–18 February 1943)

Introduction

While Soviet forces were destroying the German Sixth Army, which they had encircled in the Stalingrad region in November 1942, in mid-January 1943, the Stavka ordered the Red Army to commence a new series of offensives operations, referred to collectively as the Voronezh-Khar’kov strategic offensive, which ultimately encompassed the entire southern wing of the Soviet-German front. In reality only an expansion of the series of counteroffensives the Red Army began conducting on 19 November 1942, this strategic offensive consisted of eight separate operations conducted simultaneously or consecutively by the Red Army’s Briansk, Voronezh, Southwestern, and Southern Fronts between mid-January and early March 1943. During these operations Soviet forces advanced roughly 350 kilometers westward from the Voronezh and Rostov regions along the Don River to a front extending from the Kursk region southward to the Sea of Azov. The offensive finally ended when General Erich von Manstein’s Army Group South conducted twin successful counterstrokes, the first, in the Donbas region in mid-February and, the second, in the Khar’kov and Belgorod regions in early March.

The Red Army’s Southwestern and Southern Fronts played an instrumental role in these operations, first by clearing Germans from the “great bend” in the Don River and the region east of Rostov during the Millerovo and Rostov operations in January, and then by advancing deep into the Donbas region in February (see Map 37 and 38). During this Donbas operation, the two fronts sought to destroy all German forces in the region and liberate all of the German-occupied territory east of the Dnepr River.

As recently as 20 years after the war’s end, the Soviet government forbade Soviet historians from writing detailed accounts about the Red Army’s military operations in the Donbas during early 1943, primarily because they failed. The government finally relented and permitted its historians to discuss these operations during the historical “thaw” [ottepel’ ] which occurred during the early 1960s when Nikita Khrushchev was Communist Party First Secretary and, later, during the period of “ glasnost, ” which occurred during the late 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev was Party First Secretary. Yet, despite the loosening of the historical fetters, these historians were permitted to investigate and expose only the Southwestern Front’s participation in the operations and von Manstein’s famous counterstrokes which ensued.