Nikolai Vatutin
Nikolai Fyodorovich Vatutin was a Soviet military commander during World War II who was responsible for many Red Army operations in the Ukrainian SSR as the commander of the Southwestern Front, and of the Voronezh Front during the Battle of Kursk. During the Soviet offensive to retake right-bank Ukraine, Vatutin led the 1st Ukrainian Front, which was responsible for the Red Army's offensives to the west and the southwest of Kiev and the eventual liberation of the city.
He was ambushed and killed in February 1944 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
Early life
Vatutin was born in Chepukhino village in the Valuysky Uyezd, Voronezh Governorate, into a peasant family of Russian ethnicity.Pre-war military service
Commissioned in 1920 to the Red Army, he fought against the peasant partisans of the anarchist Nestor Makhno. The following year, he became a member of the Russian Communist Party and served diligently in junior command positions. From 1926, he spent the next decade alternating service with studies in the elite Frunze Military Academy and the General Staff Academy. The 1937–1938 purge of Red Army commanders opened the road to his promotion. In 1938, he received the rank of Komdiv, and he was appointed Chief of Staff of the important Kiev Special Military District. Throughout that period, Vatutin combined military service with intensive party activities.In 1939, Vatutin planned operations for the Soviet invasion of Poland in conjunction with the German invasion. He served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army Southern Group. In 1940, under the command of Georgy Zhukov, that group seized Bessarabia from Romania. As a reward for the non-combat campaigns, Joseph Stalin promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general and appointed him to the critical post of Chief of the Operational Directorate of the General Staff. Vatutin was, however, not up to his new appointment. While innovative and hard-working, he lacked any combat experience, and his knowledge of operational art and strategy was too abstract. Still, his peasant roots, relative youthful age and party zeal made him one of Stalin's few favorites in the Soviet military. Vatutin, together with the rest of the Red Army high command, failed to prepare the army for the German attack of 22 June 1941.
On 30 June 1941, he was appointed Chief of Staff of the North-Western Front, which enabled him to exercise his better qualities. In that role, Vatutin did not try to claim success for himself in battles, but he made a point of identifying and promoting talented subordinates. He was notable for his audacity. Most of the Soviet generals, shattered by defeats, were then reluctant to carry out offensive operations, but Vatutin thrived on attack.
The Battles in North
The Northwestern Front was defending Leningrad from the approaches by the German Army Group North, spearheaded by the armored corps led by Erich von Manstein. Vatutin took command of the Soviet forces near Novgorod, rallied them for offense, and attempted to encircle a large German force. He surprised Manstein, put him on the defensive, and forced the entire German Army Group North to regroup its troops to halt the Soviet offensive. The Wehrmacht lost the precious summer season needed for an effective attack on Leningrad, and the Red Army got additional time to strengthen the fortifications of the city. The Germans thus failed in their best shot to capture Leningrad, one of the key German strategic failures during the early phase of war. Vatutin's immediate operational results were far less impressive. He overestimated the capacities of his troops and created overly ambitious objectives, and his coordination of his forces and control over the unfolding of the battle were poor. Additionally, he did not take into account the difficult terrain, which benefited the German defenses and slowed his attack. Vatutin's casualty figures were staggering and in one army reached nearly 60%. The ineptitude of his subordinate commanders exacerbated Vatutin's own shortcomings. One striking exception to that pattern of deficiency was the brilliance of Ivan Chernyakhovsky, an obscure young colonel in command of the 28th Tank Division. Both men had much in common, most prominently their penchant for unorthodox approaches to military art, and soon became close friends.In January 1942, during the Soviet winter offensive after the Red Army victory at the Battle of Moscow, Vatutin's forces trapped two German corps in Demyansk and achieved the first large Soviet encirclement of German forces. The German and the Soviet Armies were equal in size. During the battle, Vatutin employed innovative tactics and actions, but the Germans responded more conventionally. The Red Army was unable to destroy the German defenses, mainly because of the weakness of the Soviet Air Force.
In April 1942, Vatutin finally breached the German lines just as a German relief force arrived. However, post-war American experts have evaluated the result of that operation as a draw. The German command drew self-congratulatory and misleading lessons from their narrow escape by concluding that they could overcome Soviet encirclements with supplies from the air while mounting a relief operation. That thinking contributed to the Wehrmacht's disaster at the Battle of Stalingrad since the Soviet Air Force proved much more capable of disrupting the Luftwaffe's resupply efforts.
Voronezh and Stalingrad
From early May to July 1942, Vatutin served briefly as deputy of the Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army until the German Army Group South embarked on its huge strategic offense, Operation Blau. Initially, the Germans' assault focused on Voronezh. They wanted to breach the Soviet front line at the Battle of Voronezh and then to attack the Soviet Southern Front and the Southwestern Front from the rear. On 1 July 1942, Stalin sent Vatutin as an all-powerful Stavka representative to the critical Bryansk Front; within a few days, it was renamed as Voronezh Front and placed under Vatutin's command.During the battle, Vatutin again met Chernyakhovsky, who had just been appointed commander of the 18th Tank Corps of the 60th Army. The German attack was on the verge of breaching the Soviet front line when Cherniakhovsky's corps arrived by train. He unloaded one of his brigades and, without waiting for the rest of his troops, led that brigade against the German forces, and threw them back. After that action, Vatutin asked Stalin to give command of the 60th army to Cherniakhovsky. Initially, Stalin opposed the request, mostly because he had reservations about appointing such a young general to lead a field army. However, Vatutin finally convinced Stalin to promote Cherniakhovsky, who would rapidly rise to become one of the major Red Army field commanders.
Although the Germans captured the city, their attempt to breach Vatutin's front line failed. The Germans abandoned their initial plan and shifted their efforts toward Stalingrad. On 22 October 1942, Vatutin received command of the newly-formed Southwestern Front and played an important role in planning the Soviet counter-offensive and the encirclement of the German 6th Army in the Battle of Stalingrad. In December 1942, to secure the Soviet ring around Stalingrad, Vatutin's forces encircled and destroyed two thirds of the 130,000-strong Italian 8th Army in operation Little Saturn. That contributed to the defeat of Manstein's Operation Wintergewitter, the relief effort for the 6th Army.
Kharkov and Kursk
In January 1943, Vatutin's Southwest Front drove the Germans from Eastern Ukraine. His actions enabled the Voronezh Front under General Filipp Golikov to capture Kharkov, but he had overextended his depleted troops and not paid sufficient attention to the changing strategic situation. In February 1943, Manstein, using the forces extricated from the Caucasus, took advantage of Vatutin's lapse in situational awareness and managed to surprise and to defeat Vatutin south of Kharkov, which led to the encirclement of Golikov's advance troops in Kharkov and the recapture of the city at the Third Battle of Kharkov. The Stavka removed Golikov from his command but did not see Vatutin's debacle as significant. Vatutin's audacity made Stalin award him the rank of Army General.On 28 March 1943, Vatutin took command of the Voronezh Front, which was preparing for the momentous Battle of Kursk. At Kursk, he rejected conventional echeloning of armies, and his innovative deployment allowed him to not only conduct a skillful defence against the technically superior Germans, but also gave him the opportunity to quickly switch from defense to offense. Following the Soviet victory at Kursk, Belgorod was recaptured.
Recapture of Kiev and Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket
After the Soviet victory at Kursk, Vatutin now aspired to retake Kiev. He regrouped his forces and surprised Manstein by sweeping tank forces through swampland and scattering the Germans from the unexpected direction. On 6 November 1943, Kiev was retaken. Vatutin relentlessly exploited his victory in Kiev, pushed deep into the German defenses, and destroyed the German defensive line. However, Vatutin overextended his armies, and Manstein used his reserve forces in the XLVIII Panzerkorps to counterattack. At the Battle of Radomyshl and the Battle of the Meleni Pocket, Manstein unleashed successful counter-attacks, which took terrain back and inflicted heavy losses on the Red Army's forces.Regaining the initiative in winter weather, Vatutin's front and the 2nd Ukrainian Front of Army General Ivan Konev carried out in January the sudden encirclement of the Korsun salient at the Dnieper River during the Korsun–Shevchenkovsky Offensive. Although Vatutin started the operation two days after Konev and his striking formation, and the 6th Tank Army had been only recently formed, Vatutin achieved the element of surprise by committing his tanks to the battle from the first echelon and once again attacking from unexpected terrain. That allowed the 6th Tank Army to penetrate deep into German defenses, and on 3 February, it linked with the advancing armor of Konev's front and trapped 56,000 German troops. By 17 February, Vatutin and Konev's forces had eliminated the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket, but many of the encircled troops had managed to escape.