World Battlefronts: Mother Freed

To Stalin’s listeners (see above) it was good to know that Kiev was free again.

For to the Russians Kiev was the “mother of cities,” Russia’s ancient capital, a venerated center of history and lore, a beloved and lovely spot. From Kiev, Slav buccaneers sailed on their raids to ancient Byzantium, down the Dnieper and across the turbulent Black Sea. A thousand years ago, Kiev’s ruler, Prince Vladimir, was baptized in the sluggish Dnieper, made Kiev the heart of Russia’s Greek Orthodox faith. When Berlin was still a muddy village, Kiev’s famed Petchersky Monastery was green with age.

Arrogant Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, who captured Kiev in 1941, was not its first alien invader. For eleven centuries, men of the sword—Variags and Khazars, Tatars, Lithuanians and Poles —ravished the beautiful city. The proud conquerors became dust; Kiev, with its seven rolling hills, its glistening church domes, its banks towering above the Dnieper, survived. It sprawled on the border between the rich, black-soiled south and the forested north, and their wealth was the plasma which always revived it.

This week Kiev lay black and tortured again, awaiting transfusion. In its wrecked buildings, Red Army sappers patiently searched for hidden mines. In its streets, the civilian survivors toiled overtime, in a race with the approaching winter.

To recapture Kiev, the Russian Supreme Command had picked two of its ablest field commanders: Generals Konstantin Rokossovsky and Nikolai Vatutin. Their armies arrived before Kiev in September, weary after the summer’s cruel fighting. For many weeks, they stood in an arc before the city, regained strength, indifferently pounded the enemy defenses.

Reassured, the Wehrmacht pulled some troops out of Kiev, rushed them south to help hold Krivoi Rog. Only then did peasant-faced, tank-wise Vatutin (by now, for unannounced reasons, in full command) give the order to attack. His veteran troopers stood on the heights before Kiev and wept with anger and sorrow at the sight of flames eating through the city. Then, with fury in their hearts, they swept down upon the foe.

Tank spearheads drove through the city, and continued in pursuit. Behind them came the bulk of Vatutin’s army, estimated at 300,000. German garrisons of some 150,000 men withdrew before the trap was sprung. In Moscow, the Red Army’s newspaper Red Star said proudly: “History has not known such a swift operation.”