On March 1st The German infantry of Fetter-Pico’s 54th Korps took Krasnoye 50 kilometers south of Rostov on the main road to Krasnodar. The 17th Panzer Division was waiting in the second wave to exploit any gains, a time honored German assault tactic. Hansen’s 11th Army was east of this town, and it threw the mountain divisions of its 44th Gibergs Korps against the line. Ott’s 52nd Infantry Korps took Belaya Glina that same day and continued to push for the vital road and rail junction city of Tikhoretsk.
This attack kept the Yegorluk River on its shoulder, which was the demarcation line the Germans had negotiated with the forces of Orenburg. Yet lines on a map are seldom secure, even when they ran along natural barriers like the winding course of a river. It was necessary to post the 3rd Motorized Division there, which had interrupted its conversion to 3rd Panzergrenadier Division to make this deployment.
On March 2, the Germans pushed back the Soviet 12th Army, which had only three rifle divisions and a number of ad hoc brigades. They then invested Port Katon, taking it by that evening as the Soviets reestablished their line 20 kilometers to the south. Yet it was 37th Army in the center that had taken the worst of the German attack. Three of its rifle divisions had been battered, the 146th reduced to 50% its normal establishment. The Army HQ was forced to withdraw south from Pavlovskaya to Beysug, and if those weakened rifle divisions gave way, it would compromise 12th Army’s positions on the coast.
It was therefore decided to abandon the long peninsula jutting west to the port of Yelsk and beyond in the interest of shortening the overall front by taking up new positions on the River Chelbas. That thin water obstacle ran from the heavy coastal lake and marshland region east to Tikhoretsk, and this withdrawal would shorten the defensive front by at least 40 kilometers.
The Chelbas River line held until the 5th of March, when the Germans were able to close up on it and begin hammering at it with their infantry divisions. 37th Army saw its 385th Rifle Division cut off and surrounded, and on its right, the 56th Army was involved in a tough fight for the city of Tikhoretsk, where the 80th Fortress Division was bravely holding off attacks by German mountain troops. 18th Panzer had crossed the Don at Rostov two days earlier, and now it entered the battle for the city, until the Germans had the place completely surrounded. It was captured by nightfall, and the Soviets could feel their defense was slowly being eroded away. They were the lost souls that Sergei Kirov had stubbornly left in place the previous year, but the sand was running thin in the hourglass of fate where Kirov’s Soviet Armies of the Kuban were concerned.
The withdrawals, however, had helped by compressing the front from an original 180 kilometers to about 120, so losses were offset and the actual concentration of units on the defensive front remained about the same. Yet one by one, the front line rifle divisions were wearing out. The 385th was killed in that small pocket where it was trapped. The 146th and 253rd were so disrupted, that they could not respond to Army level commands. 37th Army was, in fact, disintegrating, which left 12th Army on the coast, and 56th Army shouldering its withdrawal on the mighty Kuban River. As they continued to retreat, they would be abandoning the immobile fortress Divisions and gun forts along the major crossing points of that river—defenses that had kept Volkov’s troops at bay for years. The Germans pushed their 44th Korps down to the river north of those fortifications, and Volkov’s forces were on the south bank of the river, though they made no move to try and cross to attack. They were content to watch the Germans reduce the forts.
On the night of March 7th, Headquarters of the 1st Kazakh Army at Elista issued orders to move its artillery brigade forward to Khar Buluk so as to be in range of the front it had established with five rifle divisions east of Zimovinki. At the same time it sent its Turkomen Rifle Division from a reserve position along the Manych River to approach the Yegorluk River demarcation line near Novo Egoriyk where it soon encountered a German motorized battalion watching the river line.
Further southwest along that line, the Timur Rifle Division of 3rd Kazakh Army had advanced from Komunar to Mekleta near that same river, and it again met with another German motorized infantry battalion. Moving in the pre-dawn darkness, shots were fired on both sides until they finally realized that they were supposed ‘Allies’ and calmed down. There were two more incidents that night, where the Samar Rifle Division and the Amir Guards met with German Sturmgeschutz assault gun battalions that had been posted to watch the flank of 11th Army.
Why these orders had been given to probe forward towards the demarcation line remained a mystery, but the encounters did little to improve tensions along the border. German intelligence would discover that troops in Orenburg were marshaling at the rail yards, and Abwehr spies would soon learn the destination of those trains.
They were moving south, over the wide dark empty steppes of Kazakhstan to the Volgograd District. On the morning of the 8th of March, the 3rd Mech division of Orenburg regulars boarded trains in Astrakhan, along with a brigade of tanks. They took the new rail line that had been built through Elista, and moved all day and night on to Voroshilovsk, called Stavropol by the men from Orenburg. These troop movements were observed by German fighters up on recon operations over that sector, and subsequently reported to OKW.
The Soviet lines now extended from the Kuban near the town of Dinskaya up through the larger settlement of Timashevskaya and on towards the coast, there it thinned out considerably. Reserve ‘Divisions’ of the Caspian Militia were sent to help fill gaps, but they were mostly the size of a brigade, and not very reliable. The normal tactic of trading space for time could not apply here much longer, for the Soviet controlled area was being slowly compressed towards the Kuban. It was then decided that that substantial water barrier would do much more than those militias to keep the German storm tide at bay, and orders went out at noon that the line was to be withdrawn to the south bank of the Kuban.
There were only three bridges over that river, at Krasnodar, then 45 kilometers further west near Slavyansk, and at Temryuk near the Black Sea on the Taman Peninsula. 12th Army made for the latter bridge, the remnant of 37th Army for the centermost bridge, and 56th Army fell back into an arc of defense just north of Krasnodar. A thin screen of cavalry deployed as rear guards to cover the general withdrawal, which would take nearly two days to complete.
On the 9th, the German mountain troops of 44th Korps began storming the gum positions and forts from Kropotkin to Labinsk on the Kuban, well east of Krasnodar. “The Kuban” was effectively under German control, and now the battle of the Taman Peninsula would begin, the last stand of Soviet forces in the Caucasus.
All this time, there was no attempt whatsoever on the part of Orenburg forces to attack the Soviet positions, where the line stretched from the Kuban south to the port of Tuapse on the coast of the Black Sea. Instead, all those divisions received orders to remain in place, and continue to improve their defensive positions.
That night, an order was received from Manstein that read simply “Der Mensch.” It was directed to the headquarters of General Walter ‘Papa’ Hörnlein, commander of the elite Grossdeutschland Division. It was a prearranged signal that the division should begin moving to the rail depots near Kharkov, and it would soon be no mystery as to where the powerful unit was going. As if in answer, trains continued to roll from Astrakhan, bringing more mechanized units to Stavropol. From there, some would move south by road towards Maykop, while others remained near that strategic railhead, the tanks and vehicles moving to concealed positions in the heavy woodland to the west of the city.