Nikolai Vatutin

Nikolai Fyodorovich Vatutin, Commander of the First Ukrainian Front, January, 1944

Nikolai Fyodorovich Vatutin (Russian: Николай Федорович Ватутин) (December 16, 1901, Voronezh Province (now in Kursk Province), Russian Empire - April 14, 1944, Kiev, Soviet Union (now Ukraine) was a Soviet military commander of World War II. His story reflects the rebirth of the Red Army during WWII. A talented and inspired but unseasoned general, he was not battle ready by the time of German invasion and made mistakes. He learned from his mistakes and crushed the Wehrmacht in some of the most crucial battles of the war.

Before WWII

Born into a Russian peasant family, Vatutin was drafted in 1920 to the Red Army and fought against Ukrainian peasant partisans of Nestor Makhno. The next year, he became a member of the Communist party, served diligently in junior command positions, and starting in 1926, he spent the next decade alternating service with studies in the elite Frunze Military Academy and General Staff Academy. The 1937-1938 purge of Red Army commanders opened the road to prompt promotion for Vatutin. In 1938, he received a rank of Komdiv, and was appointed Chief of Staff of a key Kiev Special Military District. During all these years, Vatutin combined military service with intensive Party activities. Yet he was not a scheming careerist, but a true devotee.

In 1939, he planned operations for Soviet partition of Poland with Nazi Germany and served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army Southern Group. Under command of Georgy Zhukov in 1940, this group seized Bessarabia from Romania. As an award for these non combat campaigns, Stalin promoted Vatutin in 1940 to Lieutenant General and appointed him to a the critical position of the Chief of the Operational Directorate of the General Staff. Vatutin obviously was not up to his new appointment. While open to innovations and a hard worker, he lacked any combat experience and his knowledge of operational art and strategy were too abstract. Still, his peasant beginning, relative youth, and, most importantly, his party zeal made him one of Stalin's few favorites in the Soviet military. Vatutin, together with the rest of the Red Army high brass, failed to prepare the army for the German attack of June 22, 1941.

On June 30, 1941, he was appointed Chief of Staff of Northwestern Front (see: Soviet Fronts in WWII) and showed his better qualities. What he lacked in generalship, he compensated for by his leadership. He had strong will and was optimistic; his treatment of his subordinates was always positive, and they sincerely admired him. Always modest, Vatutin did not try to claim success for himself in the battles, but was happy to discern and promote others' talent. Another remarkable quality was his audacity. At that stage of war, most of the Soviet generals, shattered by the defeats, were shy to carry out offensive operations. Vatutin thrived on attack.

The Battles in the North

The Northwestern Front was defending approaches to Leningrad against German Army Group North spearheaded by armored corps lead by Erich von Manstein. Vatutin took command of the Soviet forces near Novgorod and rallied them for offense, trying 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, while the Red Army got additional time to strengthen the fortifications of the city. Thanks to Vatutin's actions, the Germans lost their best shot and never were able to capture Leningrad, one of the key strategic failures of the early war. Vatutin's immediate operational results were far less impressive. Vatutin overestimated the capacities of his troops, and his objectives were too ambitious while his coordination of his forces and control over unfolding of the battle were poor. He also did not take into consideration the difficult terrain which benefited German defenses and slowed his attack. Vatutin's losses of personnel were staggering, reaching in one army nearly 60%. The low quality of his subordinate commanders exacerbated Vatutin's own shortcomings. There was one striking exception: the brilliant actions of Ivan Chernyakhovsky, then an obscure young Colonel in command of 28th tank division. The men had much in common, most prominently their penchant for unorthodox approach to military art; they became close friends.

In January 1942, during the Soviet Winter offense following the Red Army victory in the Battle of Moscow, Vatutin trapped two German corps in Demyansk, and achieved the first large Soviet encirclement of German forces. The German corps was equal in size to the Soviet field army. During the battle, Vatutin employed some innovative tactics and actions, while Germans responded more conventionally. Vatutin was unable to destroy the pocket--mainly because of the weakness of the Soviet air-force. In April 1942 Vatutin finally breached the German defense, just as German relief force reached the pocket. Post-WWII American experts evaluate the result of this operation as a draw. The German command drew self-congratulatory and misleading lessons from their narrow escape, concluding that they could overcome Soviet encirclements with supplies from the air while mounting a relief operation. This thinking contributed to the Wehrmacht disaster in at Stalingrad.

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 German Army Group South embarked on its huge strategic offense, "Operation Blau." Initially, the German 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 Southwestern Front from the rear and encircle them. On July 1, 1942, Stalin sent Vatutin, as an all-powerful Stavka representative, to the critical Bryansk Front, which within a few days was renamed the Voronezh Front and placed under Vatutin's command.

During the battle, Vatutin met Cherniakhovsky—-now the newly appointed commander of the 18th Tank Corps of the 60th Army--again. The German massive attack was on the verge of breaching the Soviet front line when Cherniakhovsky's corps arrived by train. Cherniakhovsky unloaded one of his brigades and, without waiting for the rest of his troops, led this brigade against the numerically superior German forces and threw them back. After this action, Vatutin asked Stalin to give command of the 60th army to Cherniakhovsky. At first, Stalin opposed the request. Cherniakhovsky was Jewish, which made Stalin paranoid; Stalin also had professional reservations about appointing such a young General to lead a field army. This opposition did not deter Vatutin, and he 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. Following this debacle, the Germans abandoned their initial plan, and in one fateful misjudgment, shifted their efforts toward Stalingrad. On October 22, 1942, Vatutin received command of the newly formed Southwestern Front and played an important role in planning the Soviet counteroffensive and following encirclement of the 6th German Army in the Battle of Stalingrad. To secure the Soviet ring around Stalingrad in December 1942, Vatutin encircled and destroyed the 130,000-strong Italian VII Army in operation Little Saturn, contributing to the defeat of Manstein's Operation Wintergewitter ("Winter Storm"), the relief effort for the 6th Army.

Kharkov and Kursk

In January 1943, Vatutin relentlessly drove Germans from the Eastern Ukraine. His offense enabled the Voronezh Front under General Filipp Golikov to capture Kharkov, but he overextended his depleted troops and did not pay enough attention to the changing intelligence situation. In February 1943, Manstein mustered a large force, surprised and defeated Vatutin south of Kharkov, encircled Golikov's advance troops in Kharkov, and recaptured the city. Stavka removed Golikov from his command, but did not see Vatutin's debacle as significant, and Stalin rewarded Vatutin for audacity with the rank of Army General.

On March 28, 1943, Vatutin took command over Voronezh Front, preparing for the momentous Battle of Kursk. Starting with this battle, Vatutin achieved marked superiority in generalship over Manstein because of his innovative approaches to operational and tactical techniques. In the battle of Kursk, he rejected conventional echeloning of armies; his innovative deployment allowed him not only to skilfully conduct defense against the technically superior Germans but also to quickly switch from defense to offense. Following the Soviet victory at Kursk, Vatutin surprised Manstein who believed that the Red Army was too weak to go on the offense, and captured Belgorod.

Victories in Ukraine

His next target was Kiev. On October 20, the Voronezh Front was renamed the 1st Ukrainian Front. Vatutin undertook a secret regrouping under an imaginative and deceptive plan. His forces surprised Manstein, attacking the Germans from an unexpected direction, and on November 6, 1943, he liberated Kiev. Vatutin relentlessly exploited his victory in Kiev, and pushed deep into the German defenses. When Vatutin overextended his armies, Manstein thought that he could repeat his February success at Kharkov. His strategy lacked any originality, and Vatutin easily defeated his attempt of encirclement and inflicted a terrible toll on Wehrmacht. Manstein, in frustration, unleashed several offensives against Vatutin's forces, trying to turn his flanks, but failing. On December 19, 1943, Manstein thought he achieved a great success, encircling and destroying what he believed were four Soviet corps along the Korosten-Kiev rail line. His jubilation was short lived because, in fact, he attacked Vatutin's deception force. While Manstein was fighting Vatutin's decoys, Vatutin assembled a powerful striking force on another section of the front and, on Christmas 1943, launched a massive assault on the Germans and drove them further westward.

His offense created the Korsun bulge with a large number of German troops. In January, Vatutin and 2nd Ukrainian Front of Army General Ivan Konev carried out an encirclement of the Korsun salient in Korsun-Shevchenko operation. Once again, Vatutin outclassed Manstein. Although Vatutin started the operation two days after Konev and his striking formation, the 6th tank army, was newly formed and incomplete, he achieved surprise by committing the it to the battle from the first echelon. This allowed the 6th tank army to penetrate deep German defenses and, on February 3, it linked with the advancing armor of Konev's front and trapped, in a pocket, 56,000 Germans troops. By February 17, Vatutin and Konev eliminated the Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket.

On February 28, 1944, Vatutin, conducting a complex regrouping for a new operation, was ambushed by Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) insurgents far behind front lines. He died of his wounds in hospital six weeks later. His influence on the Red Army strategic planning, operational, and technical techniques continued after his death. Following the post-Cold War decline in Germanocentric analyses of the Great Patriotic War Eastern Front, Vatutin has won recognition among Western military experts as one of WWII's most creative commanders.

(Note: some sources give the date of the attack as February 29 and the date of Vatutin's death as April 15.)

Popular Culture

Vatutin is supposedly related to a KGB officer in Tom Clancy's novel The Cardinal of the Kremlin.

The battle of the Korsun Salient is the basis for the award-winning computer wargame Korsun Pocket.

References

David Galntz, "Vatutin" in Harold Shukman, ed., Stalin's Generals (NY, 1993, pp. 287-298).
David Glantz, Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed. How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, KS, 1995).
David Glantz, Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (Lawrence, KS, 1999).
David Glantz, The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944 (Lawrence, KS, 2002).