As at Smolensk and earlier encirclement battles, the coup de grâce had to be administered by the infantry divisions. They did not relish the prospect of such killing unless it meant a shortening of the campaign. Günther von Scheven, a 33-year-old infantryman, instinctively appreciated what this would mean. ‘There is no rest,’ he wrote home. ‘Always the same marching through woodless areas and along endless roads, column after column. Horse, rider and guns like spectres in thick clouds of dust.’ Having marched over 2,000km, he was approaching the extremes of physical and psychological endurance. ‘The last few days of combat are taking a toll of my courage,’ he admitted. ‘One cannot encompass the destruction of so many lives.’ He had already experienced ‘the wild despairing break-out attacks the Russians attempted, surprising even for us, right up to our front with tanks, infantry and Cossacks’. The ‘experience of death is awful,’ he lamented, ‘like a new form of baptism’. Günther von Scheven had fought the earlier encirclement battles south of Uman. His conclusion was both cynical and laconic: ‘probably,’ he said, ‘we will have to annihilate everything before this war is going to end.’(29)
It was a depressing prospect.
The reduction of the Kiev pocket
As in the earlier encirclement battles, the Panzer ring faced inward, toward the pocket interior, and outward, establishing pickets to repel Soviet relief attempts. They awaited the arrival of the infantry divisions. Between 16 and 19 September the German Second and Seventeenth Armies – respectively from the north and south – closed in upon Yagolin, the inner encircling ring objective. Sixth German Army, meanwhile, carried out a concentric assault upon the city of Kiev, advancing broadly from the west. It was the third largest city in the Soviet Union and fell after bitter fighting on 20 September, a depressing blow to Russian morale. Some 35 German divisions began to compress the sides of the pocket. Before long the original triangle had shrunk to a smaller version about the size of an area between Munich, Stuttgart and Würzburg in Germany, or likewise Caen, Le Mans and Paris. At this point the manoeuvring was over. The methodical dismemberment and killing of five trapped Soviet armies began.
On 19 September 33-year-old Soviet Major Jurij Krymov wrote a letter to his wife Anka. Surrounded by sleeping soldiers, he pored over the letter in fading evening light, utilising the flickering flame of a lamp and throwing grotesque shadows onto the white clay walls of the shed where he sat. Opposite was his commissar. He had been four days without sleep.
‘How is it that we come to be inside a pocket? One could offer a long explanation, but I do not feel like it. Until now it’s not exactly clear. No one is going to argue about one point. All around, wherever you look there are German tanks, submachine guns or machine gun nests. Our unit has already been defending on all sides by the fourth day, within this circle of fire. At night the surrounding ring is clear to see, illuminated by fires that light up the horizon, which here and there give the sky a wonderful yellow hue.’
Krymov had not written to his wife for some time. There had been ‘no chance to send a letter’. Now appreciating the gravity of the present situation, he felt ‘a written letter might somehow get through to you, an unwritten one would clearly disappear without trace’. He glanced at the soldiers all around, sleeping with full equipment, rifles and machine guns cradled in their arms, only belts unbuckled for comfort, and laboriously attempted to write in the poor light. He described the battlefield night sky about him: ‘wonderful golden twigs,’ he wrote, created by flares ‘grew vertically into the darkness’.
‘These star-like embers of light crept – then abruptly somersaulted – over the vastness of the Steppe and were then extinguished, until another broke out, high up, in another position.’(1)
As the Germans drove into the pocket, sub-pockets were created, which in turn were smothered in hard fighting. Jewgenlij Dolmatowski, with a Russian press company, was isolated in just such an enclave. ‘We were surrounded, I believe, by soldiers called grenadiers,’ he said. Few asked for quarter which was not freely given. ‘It ended in hand-to-hand fighting,’ continued Dolmatowski, ‘during which I was thrown to the ground, and virtually held down by my hands and feet.’ He likened the desperate mêlée to ‘fighting like children’ but ‘actually, it was to the last’. They were totally outfought. ‘I have never had such a thrashing in my life,’ he admitted, ‘even as a child – never!’ Afterwards ‘we were then taken off to the prison camps’.(2)
Russian units marched and counter-marched through the confusion inside the pocket, constantly seeking a way out. Local inhabitants, aghast at the prospect of impending German occupation, looked on in despair. Major Krymov described the scene on evacuating a village as they retired deeper into the shrinking pocket.
‘Anxious, serious faces of collective farmers. Soft words from the women. Clipped phrases from the officers. Engine sounds. Horses neighing. “Heads up comrades, we’ll be back”… “Back soon”… “Come back”… “How are we going to defeat the Germans?”… “Now if we don’t come, others will, take care”… “A little fresh water for my field flask?” “Thank you”… “We’ll be back, if not us, then others just as good. And the German parasites will go down like flies”… “Take care friends!” “No, not farewell, simply goodbye.”’
As logistic units attempted to march towards the centre of the pocket, combat units reorganising and regrouping for a break-out marched the other way. Units became entangled. ‘The pocket has been constricted to an appalling degree,’ observed Krymov, ‘nobody can move now, in any direction.’ The decisive phase of the battle was anticipated within hours.
‘Without doubt the soldiers will break out of the pocket, but how, and at what price? This is the issue that preoccupies the various unit commanders.’(3)
Belated attempts to break out of the pocket during the night of 17/18 September were broken up by the Germans.
The Luftwaffe was meanwhile engaged in two vital tasks: tactical air-ground support for the advancing Panzers and interdicting the area of operations to block all Russian approaches to the pocket. Major Frank’s 3rd Panzer Division advance guard, for example, which achieved the decisive link-up at Lokhvitsa, was protected from a Soviet tank formation by Stuka dive-bombers which broke up an advance menacing one of its tenuously held bridgeheads.(4) For four weeks the Luftflotten systematically attacked all Soviet rail communications converging on the area of operations from the east and north-east. The northern part of the pocket was covered by Luftflotte 2’s IInd Fliegerkorps, while Vth Fliegerkorps from Luftflotte 4 attacked in the south. Strafing and bombing attacks were mounted against stations, bridges, defiles and locomotives and trains. Soviet reinforcements for Marshal Budenny’s armies were blocked and lines of retreat disrupted. Fearful punishment was meted out to Russian vehicle traffic jams unable to manoeuvre within the pocket.(5)
Bad weather hampered close formation attacks, which were substituted by isolated and group sorties. These kept railway lines in the battle area permanently cut. Repeated Bf110 strafing runs cut 20 to 30 trains marooned along one section of railway track to ribbons. Large formation-size Russian units did not appear on the roads until forced to concentrate in order to break out. As soon as they committed themselves, they were – in the words of the Luftflotten commander – ‘relentlessly attacked with devastating results’.(6) Gabriel Temkin, serving in a Russian labour battalion, remembered: