Dnieper, River. At Orsha, 450 km. (280 mi.) west of Moscow, the River Dnieper, already a broad stream, turns sharply southwards and, widening and deepening as it goes, flows towards the Black Sea. At Vitebsk, 80 km. (50 mi.) to the north on the other side of a low divide, the western River Dvina makes a similar turn towards the Baltic Sea. The Dnieper is the natural defence line closest to the Soviet western frontier and the only one west of Moscow; but as such, it posed strategic problems for the Soviet Union. It lies deep in Soviet territory, particularly in the south where a great eastward bend bisects the Ukraine. The west bank is significantly higher than the east—by a hundred metres or more in the Ukraine; and the Vitebsk–Orsha gap offers the best route of approach to Moscow.
In June 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR (see
BARBAROSSA), all the Soviet fortifications, such as the
Stalin Line, and
fronts (army groups), were positioned well to the west of the Dnieper. Owing to Stalin's, and so the army's, commitment to a forward strategy that would carry the war into any invader's territory, the river figured in the Soviet plans only as the line along which successive waves of reserves would assemble before moving westwards to join the battle as it progressed beyond the border. The German objective in BARBAROSSA was to demolish the Soviet main forces in front of the Dnieper and thus prevent their either attempting a stand behind the river or staging an orderly retreat beyond it.
On the direct route to Moscow, the
German–Soviet war did not develop at all as Stalin and his generals had expected. By the fifteenth day, 6 July, one German panzer group was closing in on Vitebsk and another was positioned to cross the Dnieper south of Orsha. In the meantime, in accordance with the original plan, five Soviet armies had arrived, and Marshal
Timoshenko had deployed them to hold the line of the upper Dvina and Dnieper rivers and the gap between them. But after regrouping and beating off counter-attacks, the panzer groups struck eastwards again on 10 July, one pushing into the gap along the left bank of the Dvina, the other driving across the Dnieper towards
Smolensk, which it took on 16 July. The capture of Vitebsk, Orsha, and Smolensk opened the road to Moscow and also brought the German armour into position to thrust southwards behind the Dnieper. In August, two panzer groups, one from the north and another that crossed the river below
Kiev, cleared the entire Dnieper line.
The Dnieper re-entered German and Soviet strategy in the spring of 1943. Hitler, knowing he could not manage another massive drive eastwards and facing a growing threat of a Second Front in western Europe, proposed to build an ‘East Wall’, a fortified line that could be held with relatively small forces until an Anglo-American invasion had been defeated. The Dnieper was to be the central bastion, but the German armies retreating to it in the late summer of 1943 found that no actual work had been done and the line was riddled with Soviet bridgeheads (see
engineers, 1).
Earl Ziemke
