About 150 miles south of Leningrad is the town of Demyansk. In 1941, the German Army II Corps captured the town during the invasion of Soviet Russia. They were soon surrounded and had to be supplied by air, like a mini-Stalingrad, until a relief column opened a corridor to them in 1942. The corridor was only six miles wide at the Lovat River at the western edge of the pocket.
Even an armchair general could see that the 100,000 troops around Demyansk were in danger of encirclement and annihilation. The prudent course of action was to evacuate the pocket to save the troops because the war on the Eastern Front was inexorably turning in favor of the Soviets.
By early 1943, the Soviets were grinding down the Axis forces surrounding Leningrad and the German 6th Army in Stalingrad was starving and would soon surrender.
But retreat was verboten to Adolf Hitler. He dreamed of mounting a new offensive against Moscow and he wanted the Demyansk pocket as the jumping off point for the attack. He also didn’t care how many people died fulfilling his delusional dreams. So he ignored the dire situation reports from his generals and refused to allow a retreat from Demyansk.
The Soviets also recognized the significance of Demyansk. General Semyon Timoshenko was ordered to eradicate it. In November 1942, he attacked with 20 rifle divisions, 13 rifle brigades, and 400 tanks, including T-34’s. His forces comprised over 300,000 soldiers.
The Soviets focused on closing the 6-mile wide corridor, but attacked on all sides in hopes of creating multiple breaches in the defensive perimeter. The German defenders consisted of about 100,000 men in a handful of understrength divisions. They had no tanks; only Panzerjagers which were field artillery guns mounted on tank tracks.
Shockingly, the German defenses held against repeated Soviet attacks but the cost to both sides was horrific. Between November 1942 and January 1943, the Soviets lost over 10,000 killed with thousands more wounded or missing. The Germans lost 17,767 killed, wounded or missing. But Hitler still rejected the obvious option of withdrawal.
The defenders in Demyansk weren’t waiting for Hitler to figure out what was obvious to everyone else. In mid-January, Lieutenant-General Laux, acting commander of II Corps assembled a group of staff officers to plan the evacuation. They called their plan “operation rubbish clearing” to disguise its purpose.
First, they built a railroad so they could remove heavy equipment and temporary roads along which each unit would retreat. Then they set up supply depots and a series of defensive positions to which troops could withdraw to form a new perimeter for the pocket. Their plan was almost complete when the disaster at Stalingrad finally penetrated Der Fuhrer’s delusions. On January 31, 1943, Hitler consented to the evacuation of the Demyansk pocket.
By mid-February, 8000 tons of equipment, 5000 horse-drawn and 1500 motorized vehicles were withdrawn from the pocket. On February 17th, Laux received authorization to withdraw the troops. Beginning with the troops at the eastern edge of the pocket, units fell back along designated routes to one of the new defensive positions. As the troops withdrew, each new defensive line became the new perimeter, shrinking the pocket toward the corridor.
Ten days later on February 27th, the last of the troops crossed through the 6-mile corridor. They had taken every piece of serviceable equipment along with all their wounded out of the pocket in blizzard conditions while under constant Soviet attacks along the entire perimeter.
The Demyansk evacuation is a sideshow of the Eastern Front but it’s a fascinating study of how professional training can pull off a logistical miracle. Laux’s handpicked team were all products of the German Army’s General Staff system, one of the best ever officer training programs. Officers with General Staff training filled the West German Army and NATO headquarters until the 1970’s.
This account of the Demyansk Pocket was taken from Scorched Earth, by Paul Carell (1994 ed.)
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