Second Battle of Kharkov

The Build-Up: A Salient and Operation Fridericus

The winter counter-offensive had pushed the Germans back from Moscow by late February 1942, but it ended in mutual exhaustion and left the Red Army's reserves depleted. Stalin, convinced the Germans were finished and would collapse by the summer, ordered local offensives along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kharkov was one of them: plans were aired at Timoshenko's Kupiansk conference on 20 March 1942, and a final Stavka directive followed on 17 April. The staging ground was the Barvenkovo salient, won in the fighting around Izium in January–March, which threatened both Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk and had cut the Dnepropetrovsk–Stalino rail line supplying the German First Panzer Army. Timoshenko, commander-in-chief of the Southwestern Direction, directed the operation with Military Commissar Khrushchev; Baghramian served as chief of staff of the direction's operational group. An ambitious three-front plan was rejected twice by the Stavka for want of trained reserves and narrowed to a smaller thrust at Kharkov.

The Germans were aiming at the same salient. On 30 April 1942 Paulus's Sixth Army received orders for Operation Fridericus, a counterstroke to crush the Soviet armies inside the Izium bridgehead, with a start date of 18 May, six days after the Soviet attack.

12 May: Both Shock Groups Advance

At 6:30 a.m. on 12 May 1942 an hour-long artillery preparation opened the Soviet offensive, and at 7:30 the ground attack began as a dual pincer from the Volchansk–Saltov bridgehead in the north and the Barvenkovo salient in the south. In the north the 28th Army created a breach 65 km deep in the Volchansk area and pushed towards Belgorod; in the south the 6th, 57th and 9th Armies broke the German defences along both banks of the Seversky Donets and reached Chuhuiv and Merefa. Fighting was ferocious at points, as at the village of Nepokrytoe, held by the headquarters of the German 294th Infantry Division, which the 226th Rifle Division stormed. By 16 May both groups had advanced 20–35 km, reaching the lines that had been scheduled for the third day of the operation.

Yet the gains fell far short of the plan. The advance in the south was slower than intended, mobile formations that should have exploited the breakthrough were still in the forward belt, and divisions bled in heavy rain and mud without adequate tank or air support. Soviet reconnaissance before the battle was poor and missed the movement of German reserves. Stalin underestimated the Sixth Army and failed to grasp that the main German summer effort would fall on the southwest.

17 May: Kleist's Counterstroke

On 14 May Hitler ordered Kleist's First Panzer Army to seize the initiative, and on 17 May the German III Panzer Corps and XLIV Army Corps struck the southern shoulder of the Barvenkovo bridgehead from the Aleksandrovka area. Aided by Fliegerkorps IV, Kleist advanced up to ten kilometres on the first day, crushing Soviet positions and destroying troop and supply columns. Timoshenko reported the move to Moscow and asked for reinforcements; Vasilevsky's proposal for a general withdrawal was rejected by Stalin.

On 18 May the Stavka again urged that the offensive be halted and the 9th Army pulled out of the salient. Timoshenko and Khrushchev reported that the threat from the Wehrmacht's Kramatorsk group was exaggerated, and Stalin again refused the withdrawal. Not until Paulus began a general attack from the Merefa area on 19 May did Stalin authorise Zhukov to stop the offensive and fend off the German flanking forces. It was too late: by 22 May three Soviet field armies were cut off from the rest of the front, and by the end of 24 May the Soviet forces opposite Kharkov had been surrounded.

'The Barvenkovo Mousetrap'

From 25 May the encircled forces made desperate attempts to break out, attacking in dense waves with tanks and guns; German Major General Hubert Lanz, commanding the 1st Mountain Division, described the assaults in his report as gruesome. The Luftwaffe, now enjoying complete air superiority, dropped cluster munitions on exposed infantry. By 26 May the survivors were penned into roughly fifteen square kilometres, and along the narrow Krutoyarka–Fedorovka road more than 200,000 troops with hundreds of tanks and thousands of trucks came under constant artillery fire and air attack. Timoshenko ordered an official halt to offensive manoeuvres on 28 May, while break-out attempts inside the pocket continued until 30–31 May.

Fewer than one man in ten escaped the 'Barvenkovo mousetrap'. Among the Soviet commanders killed in the fighting of 26–27 May were Lieutenant General A. M. Gorodnyansky of the 6th Army, Lieutenant General K. P. Podlas of the 57th Army, Lieutenant General F. Ya. Kostenko, deputy commander of the Southwestern Front, and Major General L. V. Bobkin.

Casualty Figures and Their Discrepancies

The sources disagree, and no single figure should be presented as settled. Glantz, citing Krivosheev, gives 277,190 Soviet casualties overall; Hayward gives 75,000 killed and 239,000 taken prisoner. The Russian-language article states Soviet losses of 270,000 men, of them 171,000 irrecoverable, and notes that the German claim of 352,355 prisoners, published in the source carrying the document, appears strongly exaggerated. The German and Allied side lost an estimated 20,000 dead, wounded and missing.

Consequences

The defeat drastically weakened Soviet defences along the Southern and Southwestern Fronts. It allowed the German command to develop the strategic summer offensive already planned on two axes, the Volga and the Caucasus, as Case Blue. On the diplomatic plane, against the background of the disasters at Kharkov and in the Crimea, Stalin dropped his demand for recognition of the Soviet borders of 22 June 1941, while the Soviet press attacked the Allies for delaying a second front.

Political responsibility and personnel measures followed a narrower course than the scale of the disaster might suggest, and accounts differ. The Russian-language article states that no repressive measures were taken against the leadership of the Southwestern Direction, the fronts or the armies: Baghramian was removed from his posts as chief of staff of the Southwestern Direction and of the Southwestern Front by Stalin's direct instruction and reappointed at a lower level as chief of staff of the 28th Army, while Stalin's document otherwise confined itself to comparing the disaster to the defeats of Rennenkampf and Samsonov in East Prussia. The one commander who suffered more was the front's armoured forces commander, Lieutenant General V. S. Tamruchi, who was removed from command, sent to the academy, arrested a year later and spent seven years in confinement, where he died in 1950. Overall, the defeat ended the string of Red Army successes won in the winter counteroffensive of 1941–1942 and became a reference point in later criticism of Stalin's conduct of the war.