The Soviet offensive in the Jassy-Kishinev operation began on August 20, 1944. At the appointed hour, thousands of guns and mortars, hundreds of aircraft launched a crushing blow on the enemy. On the very first day, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front broke through the defense to the entire tactical depth.
The fascist German command, trying to stop the advance of Soviet troops, in the Yass region threw three infantry and one tank divisions into counterattacks. But this did not change the situation. In the zone of the 27th army of General S.G. Trofimenko, after overcoming the second zone of enemy defense, the 6th Panzer Army, commanded by General A.G. Kravchenko, was introduced into the breakthrough. Her appearance for the Nazis was a complete surprise. The tankers were able to quickly reach the third enemy line of defense, which ran along the Mare ridge. A huge number of infantry, tanks and guns, with powerful air support, rushed south in such a powerful stream that nothing could stop them.
By the end of the day, the 37th, 46th and 57th armies of the 3rd Ukrainian Front under the command of Generals M.M.Sharokhin, I.T.Shlemin and N.A. ...
The troops of the fronts moved forward to a depth of 10 to 16 km. During August 20, the enemy lost 9 divisions. The Romanian troops suffered especially heavy losses. According to General Friesner, commander of Army Group South Ukraine, the outcome of the battles was catastrophic for her on the very first day. In the "Dumitrescu" army group, both divisions of the 29th Romanian army corps completely disintegrated, and in the "Wöhler" group, five Romanian divisions were defeated (218). The results of the first day of the Soviet offensive caused confusion at Hitler's headquarters.
On the second day of the offensive, the shock group of the 2nd Ukrainian Front fought stubbornly for the third zone on the Mare ridge, and the 7th Guards Army under the command of General M.S. Shumilov and the mechanized cavalry group of General S.I. Frumos. On August 21, the fascist German command pulled units of 12 divisions, including 2 tank divisions (219), to the breakthrough area of the front's shock grouping. The most stubborn battles took place on the outskirts of Yassy, where enemy troops launched counterattacks three times. But the introduction of the 18th Panzer Corps into the breakthrough in the zone of the 52nd Army greatly facilitated the actions of the Soviet rifle units. By the end of August 21, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front had finally crushed the enemy's defenses. Having expanded the breakthrough to 65 km along the front and up to 40 km in depth, and having overcome all three defensive zones, they captured the cities of Yassy and Tirgu Frumos and entered the operational space.
The strike group of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, repelling strong counterattacks by enemy infantry and tanks, in two days of battles advanced to a depth of 30 km, expanded the breakthrough along the front to 95 km. A significant gap formed between the 6th German and 3rd Romanian armies.
The 5th Air Army of General SK Goryunov and the 17th Air Army of General V.L.Sudets successfully coped with their tasks. In two days, the pilots made about 6350 sorties (220). Aviation of the Black Sea Fleet struck at German ships and enemy bases in Constanta and Sulin. The combat operations log of Army Group South Ukraine on August 21, 1944 noted that the attacks of Soviet aviation, which had achieved absolute air supremacy in the area of operations of the Dumitrescu army group, suffered heavy losses of German and Romanian troops (221).
In the battles to break through the enemy's defenses, Soviet soldiers displayed massive heroism. A vivid illustration of it is the actions of corporals A. I. Gusev and K. I. Gurenko in the area of the Moldavian village of Ermoklia. The 60th Regiment of the 20th Guards Rifle Division, performing a combat mission, broke into the eastern outskirts of the village on the afternoon of August 21. The Nazis launched a counterattack. Four "tigers" were moving to the firing position of the machine gunner of the 1st battalion Gusev. Realizing that it was impossible to stop the tanks with machine gun fire, the soldier tied grenades to his chest and threw himself under one of them. The tank exploded and the others turned back. A similar feat was performed by a soldier of the 3rd battalion, Gurenko. Seizing the moment, with grenades pressed to his chest, he rushed under the front of the three tanks advancing on him. Inspired by the high feat of their comrades in arms, the soldiers of the regiment, with the support of artillery, repulsed the counterattack of the Nazis, destroying most of their tanks. AI Gusev and KI Gurenko were posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
To speed up the complete defeat of the enemy, the Supreme Command Headquarters on the evening of August 21 ordered the fronts to reach the Khushi area as soon as possible in order to complete the encirclement of the enemy group and open the way to the main economic and political centers of Romania (222). When this plan became clear to the fascist German command, it was forced to begin on August 22 the withdrawal of its forces from the Chisinau ledge beyond the Prut River. “But,” as Friesner notes, “it was already too late” (223). On the morning of August 22, the 4th Guards Army under the command of General I.V. Galanin went on the offensive along the river. Acting together with the 52nd Army of General K. A. Koroteev, by the end of the day it had advanced 25 km and captured two crossings across the Prut. Bypassing the enemy's centers of resistance, 18th Panzer Corps advanced towards Khushi. On the external front, the advancing troops captured Vaslui.
The 3rd Ukrainian Front also achieved major successes. The formations of the 7th Mechanized Corps reached the Gura-Galbeny area, and the 4th Guards Mechanized Corps, occupying Tarutino and Comrat, developed an offensive on Leovo. Thus, the 3rd Romanian army was finally isolated from the 6th German army.
By the end of August 22, the shock groupings of the fronts had intercepted the enemy's main withdrawal routes to the west. The sailors of the Danube military flotilla, together with the landing group of the 46th Army, crossed the 11-kilometer Dniester estuary, liberated the city of Akkerman and developed an offensive in the southwestern direction.
The success of the first three days of the offensive had a great influence on the further course of the operation. The enemy lost a significant part of his forces. During this time, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front defeated 11 Romanian and 4 German divisions, shot down 114 aircraft, advanced up to 60 km and widened the breakthrough to 120 km. The 3rd Ukrainian Front advanced up to 70 km, the width of its breakthrough reached 130 km (224).
The most important condition This major success was the close interaction of the ground forces and aviation. During August 22 alone, pilots of the 5th Air Army fought 19 battles, during which they shot down 40 enemy aircraft.
On August 23, the fronts fought in order to close the encirclement and continue their advance on the external front. On the same day, the 18th Panzer Corps went to the Khushi area, the 7th Mechanized Corps - to the crossings across the Prut in the Leusheny area, and the 4th Guards Mechanized Corps - to Leovo. “As a result of four days of the operation, - reported Marshal of the Soviet Union S. K. Timoshenko To the Supreme Commander-in-Chief JV Stalin at 11:30 pm on August 23, - the troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts today, on August 23, completed the operational encirclement of the enemy's Chisinau grouping ... "(225) On the 3rd Ukrainian Front 46- I, the army of General I. T. Shlemin, in cooperation with the Danube military flotilla, on 23 August completed the encirclement of the 3rd Romanian army, whose troops ceased resistance the next day. On August 24, General N.E.Berzarin's 5th Shock Army liberated the capital of the Moldavian SSR, Kishinev.
The Hitlerite command, seeing that the main forces of his group were defeated, and having received news of Romania's withdrawal from the war, ordered the encircled troops to withdraw to the Carpathians. However, this task was already impossible for them. On August 24, Soviet troops tightly closed the narrow corridor formed the day before, along which the enemy was trying to escape from the cauldron. 18 of 25 German divisions were surrounded. By this time, almost all Romanian divisions at the front were also defeated.
So, on the fifth day, as foreseen by the plan, the first stage of the strategic operation was completed, during which the main forces of Army Group South Ukraine were surrounded. The troops operating on the external front occupied the cities of Roman, Bacau, Byrlad and approached the city of Tecuci. A stripe of considerable depth was formed between the inner and outer fronts of the encirclement. This created favorable conditions to eliminate the encircled grouping and the rapid advance of Soviet troops deep into Romanian territory. These tasks were carried out by the troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts already under new conditions.
On August 23, an anti-fascist uprising began in Romania under the leadership of the Communist Party. It was urgent to come to his aid, to accelerate the pace of the offensive, so that the Hitlerite command did not have time to transfer additional forces to Romania to deal with the rebels. The attempts made by fascist Germany to keep the Romanian satellite in the aggressive bloc, the difficult internal political situation in Romania, as well as the intrigues of the imperialist reactionary forces demanded the most decisive actions from the Soviet command for the speedy liberation of this country. And it, leaving 34 divisions to destroy the encircled grouping, sent more than 50 divisions deep into Romania. In the development of the offensive on the external front, the main role was assigned to the 2nd Ukrainian Front. The main forces of both air armies were also sent here.
By the end of August 27, the grouping that was surrounded east of the Prut had ceased to exist. Soon, that part of the enemy's troops, which managed to cross to the western bank of the Prut, with the intention of breaking through to the Carpathian passes, was also destroyed. The enemy suffered a crushing defeat. The command of Army Group South Ukraine on 5 September stated that the encircled corps and divisions of the 6th Army should be considered completely lost and that this defeat constituted the greatest disaster ever experienced by the Army Group (226).
During the completion of the liquidation of the encircled enemy forces and subsequently, the pace of the Soviet offensive on the external front grew more and more. The troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front developed success in the direction of Northern Transylvania and in the Focsani direction, reaching the approaches to Ploiesti and Bucharest. The formations of the 46th Army of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, in cooperation with the Black Sea Fleet, launched an offensive in the coastal direction.
The fascist German command made attempts to detain the Soviet troops, to gain time to rebuild their front. In the directive of the OKB of August 26, General Frisner was tasked with creating and maintaining defenses along the line of the Eastern Carpathians, Fokshani, Galati (227), although the army group had neither the strength nor the means for this. 6 heavily battered divisions of the 8th army retreated to the Carpathians (228). On the Hungarian-Romanian border, there were 29 Hungarian battalions, which operated mainly in front of the right wing and the center of the 2nd Ukrainian Front. In front of its left wing and the 3rd Ukrainian Front, the remnants of the retreating formations from the front, as well as the rear units of Army Group South Ukraine and individual German garrisons defended themselves.
The enemy put up stubborn resistance on the approaches to the Eastern Carpathians. The remnants of German divisions and Hungarian battalions concentrated here fought, using the mountainous and wooded terrain favorable for defense. However, the 40th and 7th Guards armies advancing in this direction and the mechanized cavalry group of General Gorshkov, despite enormous difficulties, managed to push the enemy back and overcome the Eastern Carpathians.
The offensive of the left wing of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, which included the 27th, 53rd, and 6th Panzer Armies and the 18th Panzer Corps, was successfully developing. These troops, with the active support of aviation, crushed individual foci of enemy defense and quickly moved south. The 6th Panzer Army overcame the Focsani fortified line and liberated Focsani on 26 August. The next day, she approached the city of Buzau, the capture of which made it possible to develop a further offensive against Ploiesti and Bucharest. Here the tankers met with especially stubborn resistance. In the battles for this city, more than 1500 were destroyed and 1200 soldiers and officers were taken prisoner (229). With the loss of Buzau, the enemy's position deteriorated even more.
In these battles, the soldiers of the 1st tank battalion of the 21st Guards Tank Brigade especially distinguished themselves. For the crossing of the Siret River and the liberation of Fokshani, 13 soldiers and battalion commanders were awarded the high title of Hero of the Soviet Union by the Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet of March 24, 1945. Among them were members of one tank crew: guard lieutenant G.V. Burmak, guard foreman F.A.Kulikov and guard junior sergeants M.A.Makarov and G.G. Shevtsov. They captured a working bridge on the Siret River, cleared it and thereby created conditions for the entire tank brigade to cross the river.
By August 29, the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front liberated the cities of Tulcea, Galati, Braila, Constanta, Sulina and others. For the fastest capture of Constanta - the main naval base of Romania - sea and air assault forces were used. While advancing in a southern direction, Soviet troops crushed scattered enemy groups and prevented them from being transferred to Bucharest. Only in the area of the city of Kelerashi, on September 1 and 2, they captured up to 6 thousand Nazis, including 18 colonels and more than 100 other officers (230).
Soviet troops, moving into the interior of the country, established contacts and established cooperation with the Romanian formations, which turned their weapons against the Nazis. So, as part of the 50th Rifle Corps of the 40th Army, for more than a month, the 3rd Romanian border regiment fought against the German fascist troops. Together with the 7th Guards Army, the 103rd Romanian Mountain Rifle Division fought. At the end of August, in the Vaslui area, the 1st Romanian Volunteer Infantry Division named after Tudor Vladimirescu, formed on Soviet territory, was baptized by fire.
Thus, in the period from August 20 to August 29, Soviet troops successfully carried out the Jassy-Kishinev operation, in an extremely short time they surrounded and eliminated the largest enemy grouping. In its report on the results of the newspaper "Pravda" noted that this operation was one of the "largest and most outstanding in terms of its strategic and military-political significance of operations in the current war" (231).
By September 3, scattered groups of the Nazis were also liquidated. During the fighting from August 20 to September 3, Soviet troops destroyed 22 German divisions, including 18 divisions that were surrounded (232), and also defeated almost all Romanian divisions at the front. 208.6 thousand soldiers and officers were taken prisoner, including 25 generals, 490 tanks and assault guns, 1.5 thousand guns, 298 aircraft, 15 thousand vehicles were destroyed; Soviet troops captured more than 2 thousand guns, 340 tanks and assault guns, about 18 thousand vehicles, 40 aircraft and many other military equipment and weapons (233). The enemy suffered so much damage that it took him about a month to restore a solid front. At the same time, he was forced to transfer additional forces from other Balkan countries to the Romanian sector of the front.
The rout of the main forces of Army Group South Ukraine, covering the routes from the northeast to the Balkans, dramatically changed the entire military-political situation on the southern wing of the Soviet-German front. As a result of the operation, the Moldavian SSR and the Izmail region of the Ukrainian SSR were liberated, Romania was withdrawn from the fascist bloc, which declared war on Germany. The defeat of the enemy at Iasi and Chisinau created the decisive conditions for the success of the armed uprising of the Romanian people, which overthrew the hated fascist regime of Antonescu. The plans of the American-British imperialists, who were striving to occupy Romania and other Balkan countries, failed.
A deep breakthrough of the enemy's defense on a wide front opened up prospects for the Soviet troops for a rapid offensive deep into Romania, into the borders of Hungary and Bulgaria with the aim of delivering subsequent strikes against the enemy and rendering assistance to the Romanian, Bulgarian, Yugoslavian, Hungarian and Czechoslovak peoples in their liberation. It led to a significant improvement in the situation on the Black Sea. The Soviet Black Sea Fleet was able to base not only on its own, but also on the Romanian ports, which greatly facilitated its conduct of hostilities.
The Jassy-Kishinev operation, which went down in history as the Jassy-Kishinev Cannes, gave the clearest examples of the high level of Soviet military art. This manifested itself, firstly, in the correct choice of the directions of the main strikes on the most vulnerabilities in enemy defense, a decisive concentration of forces and assets in these areas and in the coverage of the main forces of the enemy. The massing of forces and means allowed the Soviet troops to deliver a powerful initial blow, quickly break through the enemy's defenses and, in a short time, encircle and eliminate one of the largest enemy groupings.
Secondly, during the Iassy-Kishinev operation, Soviet troops, along with the encirclement and liquidation of the main enemy forces in the Yassy and Chisinau region, carried out a powerful offensive on the external front, using for this most of their forces and means, which forced the enemy to continuously roll back into the depths of Romania and long time prevented him from stabilizing the front. Rapidly moving forward, the Soviet troops quickly pushed the front line away from the encircled group by 80 - 100 km and thereby deprived it of the opportunity to escape from the cauldron. The enemy units and formations that were breaking through to the west, not having time to get out of the ring of operational encirclement, fell into a new, tactical encirclement and ultimately turned out to be doomed to destruction.
Thirdly, in this operation, the Soviet command effectively used mobile tank and mechanized troops, which played a decisive role in encircling the enemy east of the Prut River and developing an offensive on the external front. At the same time, unlike many other operations of the Great Patriotic War, the tank army was introduced into the breakthrough not at the end of it, but after breaking the enemy's tactical defense zone. The operation also achieved a clear interaction of the ground forces with the Black Sea Fleet and aviation.
Fourth, already during the Jassy-Kishinev offensive operation, after the victory of the armed uprising of the Romanian people, Soviet troops began to interact with the troops of Romania, which went over to the side of the anti-Hitler coalition.
All this testifies to the fact that the attempts of bourgeois falsifiers of history to explain the defeat of the Nazi troops near Iasi and Chisinau by indecisive actions of Soviet troops and a high level of Soviet military art, but only by political circumstances (“the betrayal of the Romanian ally”) (234) do not stand up to criticism ...
One of the most successful operations of the Soviet command during the Great Patriotic War is the Jassy-Kishinev operation.
The prerequisites for its implementation appeared in the course of the successful offensive on the Right-Bank Ukraine by the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, which in April 1944 reached the line north of the cities of Yassy and Orhei.
At the same time, the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front captured several bridgeheads on the western bank of the Dniester south of Tiraspol. As a result, the troops of the fronts occupied an enveloping position in relation to the enemy.
The defeat of a large grouping of German fascist and Romanian troops covering the Balkan direction was supposed to induce Romania to withdraw from the war on the side of Germany.
In accordance with the intention of the rate The Supreme Command 2nd (commander - General of the Army R.Ya. Malinovsky) and 3rd (commander - General of the Army F.I. Yass and south of Bendery, encircle and destroy the main forces of Army Group "Southern Ukraine" in the regions of Yass and Chisinau and develop an offensive on Romanian territory.
The Soviet troops participating in the operation numbered 1,250,000 men, 16,000 guns and mortars, 1,870 tanks and self-propelled artillery mounts, 2,200 combat aircraft. The width of the breakthrough sections did not exceed 18 km, due to which high densities of the advancing troops were created - up to 240 guns and mortars and up to 56 tanks and self-propelled artillery installations on 1 km of the front. The front of the rifle division's offensive was less than 1km.
The strike group of the 3rd Ukrainian Front was supposed to be concentrated on the Kitskansky bridgehead, the width of which did not exceed 18 kilometers.
In preparation for the operation, measures were taken for operational camouflage. False groupings of troops were created in the Kishinev area. Smoke here camping kitchens, radio transmitters were working, there were models of various military equipment. In the troops concentrated on the direction of the main attack, exercises were conducted to break through the enemy defense.
Opposing the Soviet troops, Army Group South Ukraine under the command of Colonel General G. Friesner included 2 army groups: Wöhler (8th German and 4th Romanian armies and 17th German army corps) and Dumitrescu (6 German and 3rd Romanian armies). In general, these units numbered 900 thousand people, 7600 guns and mortars, over 400 tanks and assault guns.
They were supported by part of the forces of the 4th Air Fleet and the Romanian aviation - a total of 810 combat aircraft. The deeply echeloned enemy defense consisted of 3-4 defensive zones and used water barriers and hilly terrain. There were defensive lines along the Prut and Siret rivers. Cities and settlements had defensive lines. In the Chisinau direction, the most combat-ready German 6th Army occupied the defense, and on the flanks - mainly Romanian troops.
On the morning of August 20, Soviet troops, supported by artillery and aviation of the 5th and 17th air armies, went on the offensive. The strike forces broke through the main line of the enemy's defense. By mid-day, the 27th Army of the 2nd Ukrainian Front broke through the 2nd line of defense. The 6th Panzer Army was introduced into the breakthrough, whose formations reached the third defensive zone by the end of the day, which ran along the Mare ridge. Troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front broke through the first line of defense and wedged into the second. The general advance of the troops by the end of the 1st day of the offensive was 6-16 km.
The next day, the enemy pulled up to 12 divisions, including 2 tank divisions, to the breakthrough area of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, and unsuccessfully tried to stop the advance of the Soviet troops. The Ukrainian front overcame the enemy defenses to a depth of 40 km and, after fierce battles, captured the city of Yassy.
The troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front also repulsed enemy counterattacks and completed the breakthrough of its defenses. The 7th and 4th Guards Mechanized Corps were brought into the battle, which advanced up to 30 km in depth and cut through the 6th German and 3rd Romanian armies.
On the night of August 22, the ships of the Danube military flotilla deployed a landing across the Dniester estuary in order to cover the right flank of the 3rd Romanian army. During the day, the landing group liberated Belgorod-Dnestrovsky and continued the offensive in the southwestern direction.
By the end of 23 August, the mobile troops of the fronts had reached the Hushi and Leovo areas, completing the encirclement of 18 of the 25 German divisions of Army Group Southern Ukraine. On the same day, the 46th army, in cooperation with the Danube military flotilla, pushed back to the Black Sea and surrounded the troops of the 3rd Romanian army, which ceased resistance on August 24. The Danube military flotilla, having landed troops at the mouth of the Danube, captured the ports of Vilkovo and Kiliya.
By the end of the day on August 24, Soviet troops advanced 130-140 km, and the formations of the 5th Shock Army liberated Chisinau. On August 27, the encircled enemy grouping east of the river was eliminated. Prut, and on August 29, the liquidation of the encircled enemy troops west of the Prut River was completed. The vanguard troops of the fronts reached the approaches to Ploiesti, Bucharest, and occupied Constanta. On this, the operation as a whole was completed.
As a result of the Iasi-Kishinev operation, Soviet troops defeated Army Group South Ukraine, defeated almost all Romanian divisions at the front, captured more than 200 thousand prisoners, over 2 thousand guns, 340 tanks and assault guns, about 18 thousand vehicles and other combat equipment, destroyed 490 tanks and assault guns, 1.5 thousand guns, about 300 aircraft, 15 thousand vehicles.
Moldavia and a significant part of the territory of Romania were liberated, the road to the Balkans was opened.
In August 1944, our troops inflicted seventh blow - in the region of Chisinau - Iasi , where 22 German divisions were surrounded and defeated, forced the Romanian army to surrender. As a result of this operation, Moldova was completely liberated, Romania and Bulgaria were withdrawn from the war.
70 years ago, Soviet armies liberated the Moldavian SSR, pulled Romania out of the war and made their way to the Balkans. The Jassy-Kishinev operation (20-29 August 1944) was the seventh Stalinist strike. "Jassy-Chisinau Cannes" is considered one of the most successful Soviet operations during the Great Patriotic War. The troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under the command of General Rodion Malinovsky and the 3rd Ukrainian Front of General Fyodor Tolbukhin were able to destroy the main forces of Army Group South Ukraine.
Background. The political situation in the Balkans.
The situation in the Balkans during the war was difficult. Yugoslavia and Greece were occupied by German troops, Albania by Italians. Romania and Bulgaria chose to become allies of the Third Reich. At the same time, their situation was different. Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu and his supporters were active allies of Germany and dreamed of realizing the plan for the construction of "Greater Romania" with the help of the Germans. Romanian nationalists, unable to return Southern Dobrudja and Northern Transylvania (they had to be ceded to Bulgaria and Hungary), wanted to compensate Romania's losses as much as possible at the expense of Soviet (Russian) territories.
In accordance with the German-Romanian agreement signed in Bender on August 30, 1941, Transnistria was formed. The Romanians received under their rule the territory between the Southern Bug and the Dniester. It included parts of the Vinnitsa, Odessa, Nikolaev regions of Ukraine and left-bank Moldova. In the future, the appetites of the Romanian radicals ran even more: they began to dream of joining the territories up to the Dnieper and even further to the “Great Romania”. Some politicians agreed on a “Romanian empire to the gates of Asia,” that is, to the Urals, demanding the creation of a “living space” for the Romanian nation.
However, these dreams were shattered by the might of the Red Army. The Romanian army suffered terrible losses during the Battle of Stalingrad, Odessa and Crimean operations in 1944 (Third Stalinist strike. Liberation of Odessa; Third Stalinist strike. Battle for Crimea). Romania, as a result of the Soviet offensive, lost control over Northern Bessarabia and Odessa. At the end of March 1944, the hostilities were transferred to the territory of Romania. In the summer there was a temporary calm at the front. Moscow offered Romania a truce on its own terms, but the Romanian government categorically refused peace with the Soviet Union, continuing the war on the side of the German Empire.
Antonescu was nervous, the situation was critical. He hinted to Hitler that the best way out would be to make peace with Britain and the United States, to concentrate all forces against the Soviet Union. However, the Fuehrer reassured him. Hitler promised that German troops would defend Romania as Germany itself. This is not surprising, given that the main oil reserves were located in Romania. The defeat of the German-Romanian troops in the Jassy-Chisinau operation led to the fall of the Antonescu regime. The Romanian king Mihai I, having united with the anti-fascist opposition, ordered the arrest of Antonescu and the pro-German generals, withdrew Romania from the Hitlerite coalition and declared war on the Third Reich. As a result, the Romanian army became an ally of the Red Army and fought on the side of the USSR in Hungary and Austria.
Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, but did not enter the war with the Soviet Union. The Prime Minister of Bulgaria and President of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Bogdan Filov was a great admirer of Hitler. In 1941 he annexed Bulgaria to the Berlin Pact and the Anti-Comintern Pact. With Berlin's support, Sofia returned Southern Dobrudja, lost during the Second Balkan War in 1913. In 1941 Bulgaria agreed to provide its territory to the Wehrmacht for the war against Greece and Yugoslavia. With the consent of Berlin and Rome, Bulgarian troops occupied territories in Macedonia and Northern Greece. As a result, “Great Bulgaria” was formed.
After the attack on the USSR, Berlin repeatedly demanded that Sofia send Bulgarian troops to the Eastern Front. But the king Boris III took into account the traditional sympathies of the Bulgarian people towards the Russians. Therefore, Bulgaria declared war on Britain and the United States, but the USSR did not declare war. True, this neutrality was not complete. The Third Reich got the opportunity to develop deposits and extract minerals in Bulgaria. Sofia presented its territory for the basing of German troops, contained them, made it possible to use the entire infrastructure - airfields, railways, ports, etc.
After a radical change in the war, the situation escalated. After Stalingrad and Kursk Bulge Adolf Hitler was looking for sources of replenishment of manpower, he wanted to use Eastern Front the Bulgarian army. And Tsar Boris realized that the star of the Third Reich was rolling down, and tried to break off the alliance with Germany. He began to express ideas that Sofia could act as a mediator between Berlin and the Allies in peace negotiations. In August 1943, the tsar flew to the Fuehrer in East Prussia... The essence of their conversation is unknown. On August 28, 1943, a few days after his return to Sofia, Tsar Boris III suddenly died. According to the official version - from a heart attack. Historians argue about the true reason to this day. Some believe that the Nazis poisoned the Bulgarian tsar, trying to prevent separate negotiations between Bulgaria and the allies. Others say that Boris became agitated after a difficult conversation with the Fuehrer. The heart, weakened by alcohol, could not stand it. Still others are of the opinion that he was poisoned by his own confidants, supporters of an alliance with Germany. They feared a change in political course, loss of power and arrest.
The throne was taken by the 6-year-old Tsar Simeon. On his behalf, the Regency Council ruled, which consisted of Boris's brother Prince Kirill, Prime Minister Filov and General Nikola Mikhov. All of them were supporters of an alliance with Germany. The Regency Council and the new Prime Minister Dobri Bozhilov pursued a policy loyal to Germany. But a full-fledged alliance with Germany did not work out. The Bulgarian army was not thrown into battle with the Soviet army. The temporary workers feared that the army would go over to the side of the Fatherland Front (a coalition of anti-fascist forces) and turn weapons against them. In the meantime, the opposition has grown significantly. Rumors about the assassination of the tsar, dissatisfaction with the policy of the regents and the defeat of Germany on the Eastern Front sharply increased the number of disaffected.
On May 18, 1944, the Soviet government demanded that Sofia stop providing assistance to the German army. The internal crisis and deterioration on the Eastern Front forced the Bozhilov government to resign. The new government was headed by the representative of the agrarians, Ivan Bagryanov. The new government simultaneously tried not to run into a war with Germany, to pacify the USSR and the internal opposition, and to start negotiations with the United States and Great Britain.
On August 12, 1944, Moscow again demanded that Sofia stop providing assistance to Germany. On August 26, when the defeat of the German troops in the Jassy-Kishinev operation became obvious, Bagryanov announced the neutrality of Bulgaria and demanded the withdrawal of German troops from the country. At the same time, the Bulgarian government did not take any measures to neutralize the German garrisons in Bulgaria and did not interfere with the movement of the Wehrmacht. Therefore, the German troops retreating from Romania calmly passed through the Bulgarian territory to Yugoslavia.
Units of the 49th Guards Rifle Division of the 5th Shock Army of the 3rd Ukrainian Front on the march during the Yassy-Kishinev operation
The situation at the front.
The end of the Lvov-Sandomierz operation (the Sixth Stalinist strike. The Lvov-Sandomierz operation) almost coincided in time with the beginning of a new offensive by the Soviet armies in the southwestern strategic direction. On July 31, 1944, at the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, a military conference was held on the preparation of a new offensive of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts. The front commanders Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky and Fyodor Ivanovich Tolbukhin took part in the meeting. Also present was the representative of the Headquarters in the south-west direction Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko.
According to the memoirs of S. M. Shtemenko, the "highlight" of the plan of the Yassy-Kishinev operation was the idea of powerful flank attacks with the aim of encircling and destroying the powerful Kishinev grouping of the enemy. The fact was that the German command was expecting the main attack of the enemy in the Chisinau direction and concentrated on it the main forces of the Wehrmacht and the most combat-ready German divisions. Moreover, the troops were located compactly in the tactical zone. That is, the German command hoped to extinguish the Soviet strongest first strike at shallow depths. Apparently, the Germans planned that if things went badly, they would be able to retreat to the positions that they were preparing in the depths of the defense. At the same time, the main German operational reserves were located in the Chisinau direction to parry the attacks of the Soviet armies. True, they were small and consisted of two infantry and one tank divisions. The weaker Romanian armies defended themselves on the flanks of the Chisinau grouping. The Romanians were much inferior to the Germans in fighting qualities. The Romanian troops were much worse armed, trained and equipped. According to Soviet intelligence, the morale of the Romanian soldiers was low. Many soldiers and even whole units were tired of defeats, high losses and were opposed to the Germans.
Therefore, at the meeting, the Headquarters came to the conclusion that the best option would be flank strikes with the aim of encircling and destroying in a short time the main forces of Army Group South Ukraine in the Chisinau region. The first task was to achieve surprise in the beginning of the offensive and high rates of advance of the Red Army. It was necessary to take the crossings across the Prut River before the enemy could take advantage of them. To do this, it was necessary to advance at a speed of at least 25 km at knocks. In order to ensure a quick breakthrough of the defense of the German-Romanian troops, it was decided to weaken all secondary sectors of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts and thereby create a huge advantage in the areas of the breakthrough. In addition, the breakthrough areas themselves were greatly reduced (on the 2nd Ukrainian front - 16 km, on the 3rd Ukrainian front - 18 km), sharply increasing the density of artillery fire. The high density of artillery guaranteed a quick breakthrough of the enemy's defenses, and the development of success in depth to the crossings on the Prut River. Tank, mechanized and cavalry formations were proposed to be used by the fronts after breaking through the enemy's defenses for the development of an offensive in the operational depth and the fastest capture of crossings on the river. Prut, for forcing the river. Siret. Stalin noted the great political significance of this operation. She was supposed to influence the policy of Romania and lead to her withdrawal from the Hitlerite coalition.
The situation was facilitated by the fact that the methodology of the Soviet Headquarters - "Stalinist blows", which were consistently delivered first in one direction, and then in another, fully justified itself. The Belarusian (Operation Bagration) and Lvov-Sandomierz operations were nearing completion (they ended on August 29), the Soviet offensive in these areas stalled. The German command hastily patched the "holes", restored the collapsed front line, hastily transferring troops from Germany, Western Europe, and the "quiet sectors" of the Eastern Front. Including from the end of June to 13 August, 12 divisions were withdrawn from Moldova. Meanwhile, the Soviet armies rested, replenished with manpower and equipment. The 2nd Ukrainian Front of Marshal Malinovsky and the 3rd Ukrainian Marshal Tolbukhin prepared for a new offensive.
It cannot be said that the preparation of the Soviet armies for a new offensive remained a complete secret for the Germans. German and Romanian intelligence found some regrouping of Soviet troops, ammunition deliveries and other formidable signs of an approaching enemy offensive. However, the Soviet command was still able to deceive the Germans. For this, disinformation was launched about the impending local operation, which will be aimed at leveling the front and capturing Chisinau. On the Chisinau direction, the call signs of "fresh units" began to flash on the air. Demonstratively conducted reconnaissance, including in battle. The German command believed. The available reserves were pulled into the Chisinau direction.
In addition, the behavior of the Romanian elite caused great concern in the command of Army Group South Ukraine. The entourage of King Mihai I of Romania was actively looking for ways of rapprochement with the powers of the Anti-Hitler coalition. By August, a conspiracy against Antonescu, led by the king, was ripe. In the event of a major Soviet offensive, the conspirators planned to either convince the dictator to conclude a truce with the Soviet Union or to arrest him. Already on August 3, the commander of Army Group South Ukraine, Johannes Friesner, having received information that the dictator Antonescu could be overthrown at any moment, sent a letter to Hitler. He offered to subjugate all the troops and military institutions in Romania. He also said that if fermentation is noticed in the Romanian troops at the front, it is necessary to immediately begin the withdrawal of the army group to the line on the Prut River, and further to the line of Galati, Focsani, the spurs of the Eastern Carpathians.
However, Hitler and Keitel did not give such permission. They did not give Frisner the right of commander-in-chief. True, Ribbentrop suggested that a tank division be sent to Bucharest to calm the Romanian leadership. But there were no free tank divisions on the Eastern Front. Then it was proposed to send the 4th SS police division from Yugoslavia to the Romanian capital, but Jodl opposed this idea. He believed that the SS troops were necessary to fight the Serbian partisans and it was not worth weakening the German troops in this area. In general, Friesner's idea of withdrawing troops to the Prut River could alleviate the position of Army Group Southern Ukraine, although it would not prevent Romania from leaving the Hitlerite coalition.
Troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front are conducting an offensive near Yassy
The plan of the Soviet command. Soviet forces.
The Soviet command decided to deliver the main blows on the flanks of the German grouping, in two sectors of the front that are far apart from each other. The operation was attended by the forces of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts, the Black Sea Fleet under the command of Admiral FS Oktyabrsky and the Danube military flotilla of Rear Admiral S.G. Gorshkov. The 2nd Ukrainian Front was supposed to strike northwest of Yassy, the 3rd Ukrainian Front - south of Bendery (Suvorovskaya Gora).
The troops of the fronts were supposed to break through the enemy's defenses and develop an offensive along the lines converging to the Khushi-Vaslui-Falchiu area in order to encircle and then destroy the main forces of the enemy's Chisinau grouping. Then the Soviet troops had to quickly develop an offensive deep into Romanian territory in the general direction of Focsani, Izmail, prevent the enemy from leaving behind the Prut and Danube, and provide the right wing of the strike group from the Carpathians. The Black Sea Fleet was supposed to support the coastal flank of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, disrupt sea communications, defeat the enemy's naval forces and, with the help of aviation, attack the naval bases in Sulina and Constanta.
The shock group of the 2nd Ukrainian Front consisted of 3 combined arms (7th Guards, 27th and 52nd armies) and one tank army (6th Tank Army). In addition, the front had a number of mobile units - the 18th separate tank corps and the mechanized cavalry group (it included the 5th Guards Cavalry Corps and the 23rd Tank Corps). The 40th, 4th Guards armies and 5th Air Army were also under the command of Malinovsky.
The shock grouping of the 3rd Ukrainian Front consisted of three combined-arms armies - the 5th shock, 57th and 37th armies. In addition, the front included the 46th Army, the 7th Mechanized, and the 4th Guards Mechanized Corps. From the air, the troops of the front were supported by the 17th Air Army.
In total, Soviet troops numbered more than 920 thousand soldiers and commanders, 1.4 thousand tanks and self-propelled guns, 16.7 thousand guns and mortars, more than 1.7 thousand aircraft (according to other sources, more than 1.2 million people, more than 1.8 thousand tanks and self-propelled guns, 16 thousand guns and mortars, 2.2 thousand aircraft). The aviation of the Black Sea Fleet consisted of about 700 aircraft. The Black Sea Fleet (including the Danube Flotilla) consisted of 1 battleship, 4 cruisers, 6 destroyers, 30 submarines and 440 other ships and vessels.
Germany.
In front of the Red Army, the front was defended by Army Group South Ukraine. It included two army groups: on the Yass direction - the "Wöhler" group (it included the 8th German and 4th Romanian armies and the 17th German army corps) and on the Chisinau direction - "Dumitrescu" (6th German and 3rd Romanian Army). From the air, Army Group South Ukraine was supported by the 4th Air Fleet. In total, the army group consisted of 25 German (including 3 tank and 1 motorized), 22 Romanian divisions and 5 Romanian infantry brigades. German-Romanian troops numbered 643 thousand soldiers and officers in combat units (about 900 thousand people in total), more than 400 tanks and self-propelled guns, 7.6 thousand guns and mortars, more than 800 combat aircraft.
Commander of Army Group South Ukraine Johannes Friesner
The environment of the Chisinau group.
On August 19, 1944, the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts conducted reconnaissance in force. On the morning of August 20, artillery preparation began, Soviet aviation delivered powerful blows to defense centers, headquarters, accumulations of enemy equipment. At 7:40 am, Soviet troops, supported by artillery fire, went on the offensive. The offensive by infantry and close support tanks was also supported by attacks by ground attack aircraft, which struck enemy firing positions and strongholds.
According to the testimony of the prisoners, the artillery and air strikes had significant success. In the areas of the breakthrough, the first line of the German defense was almost completely destroyed. Control at the battalion - regiment - division level was lost. Some German divisions lost up to half of their personnel on the very first day of the fighting. This success was due to the high concentration of fire resources in the areas of the breakthrough: up to 240 guns and mortars and up to 56 tanks and self-propelled guns per 1 km of the front.
It should be noted that by August 1944 the Germans and Romanians had prepared a deep defensive system with well-developed engineering structures on the territory of the Moldavian SSR and Romania. The tactical defense zone consisted of two zones, and its depth reached 8-19 kilometers. Behind it, at a distance of 15-20 kilometers from leading edge along the Mare ridge passed the third line of defense (the "Trayan" line). On the western banks of the Prut and Siret rivers, two defensive lines were created. Many cities, including Chisinau and Iasi, were prepared for a perimeter defense and turned into real fortified areas.
However, the German defense could not stop the offensive rush of the Soviet armies. The strike group of the 2nd Ukrainian Front broke through the enemy's main line of defense. The 27th Army under the command of Sergei Trofimenko by the middle of the day also broke through the enemy's second line of defense. The Soviet command brought the 6th Panzer Army under the command of Andrei Kravchenko into the breakthrough. After that, as the commander of Army Group South Ukraine, General Friesner, admitted, "incredible chaos began in the ranks of the German-Romanian troops." The German command tried to halt the advance of the Soviet troops and turn the tide of the battle, operational reserves were thrown into the battle - three infantry and tank divisions. However, the German counterattacks could not change the situation, there were not enough forces for a full-fledged counterstrike, besides, the Soviet troops were already well able to respond to such enemy actions. Malinovsky's troops went to Yassy and started a battle for the city.
Thus, on the very first day of the offensive, our troops broke through the enemy's defenses, brought the second echelon into battle and successfully developed the offensive. Six enemy divisions were defeated. The Soviet armies reached the third enemy line of defense, which ran along the wooded Mare ridge.
The troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front also successfully advanced, wedging into the enemy's defenses at the junction of the 6th German and 3rd Romanian armies. By the end of the first day of the offensive, the formations of the 3rd Ukrainian Front broke through the enemy's main line of defense and began to break through the second line. This created favorable opportunities for the isolation of parts of the 3rd Romanian army with the aim of its subsequent destruction.
On August 21, Soviet troops fought heavy battles on the Mara ridge. It was not possible to break through the German defenses of the 6th Panzer Army on the move. The formations of the 7th Guards Army and the mechanized cavalry group fought stubborn battles for Tirgu Frumos, where the Germans created a powerful fortified area. By the end of the day, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front had overcome all three enemy defensive zones, two powerful enemy fortifications were taken - Yassy and Tyrgu-Frumos. Soviet troops expanded the breakthrough to 65 km along the front and up to 40 km in depth.
In the offensive zone of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, the Germans launched a counterattack. The German command, trying to thwart the Soviet offensive, on the morning of August 21 pulled up reserves and, relying on the second line of defense, launched a counterattack. Particular hopes were pinned on the 13th Panzer Division. However, the troops of the 37th Army repelled enemy counterattacks. In general, during August 20 and 21, the troops of the strike group of the 3rd Ukrainian Front broke through the enemy's tactical defenses, repelled his counter-attacks, defeating the 13th Panzer Division, and increased the penetration depth to 40-50 km. The front command introduced mobile formations into the breakthrough - the 4th Guards Mechanized Corps in the zone of the 46th Army and the 7th Mechanized Corps in the zone of the 37th Army.
Tanks of the 7th MK are fighting in the Yassy-Kishinev operation. Moldova August 1944
On August 21, Headquarters, fearing that the offensive would slow down and the enemy would use the favorable terrain conditions, would be able to pull together all the available forces, detaining Soviet troops for a long time, issued a directive in which it slightly adjusted the tasks of the fronts. So that the Soviet troops would not be late in reaching the Prut River and did not miss the opportunity to encircle the Chisinau grouping, the commanders of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts were reminded that their main task at the first stage of the offensive was to quickly create an encirclement ring in the Khushi region.
In the future, it was necessary to narrow the encirclement ring in order to destroy or capture enemy troops. The Stavka directive was necessary, since with a quick breakthrough of the German defense, the command of the 2nd Ukrainian Front was tempted to continue the offensive along the Roman - Focsani line, and the 3rd Ukrainian Front - Tarutino - Galati. The headquarters believed that the main forces and means of the fronts should be used to encircle and eliminate the Chisinau grouping. The destruction of this group has already opened the way to the main economic and political centers of Romania. And so it happened.
On the night of 21 August and the entire next day, 6th Panzer Army and 18th Panzer Corps pursued the enemy. Malinovsky's troops deepened 60 km into the enemy's defenses and expanded the breakthrough to 120 km. The armies of the 3rd Ukrainian Front were rapidly advancing towards the Prut. The front's mobile formations deepened 80 km into the depth of the enemy's defenses.
By the end of the second day of the operation, Tolbukhin's troops isolated the 6th German army from the 3rd Romanian army. The main forces of the 6th German army fell into a circle of encirclement in the area of the village of Leusheny. On the left wing of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, units of the 46th Army, with the support of the Danube Flotilla, successfully crossed the Dniester estuary. On the night of August 22, Soviet soldiers liberated Ackerman and continued their offensive to the southwest.
Soviet bombing of the Romanian port of Constanta
Soviet boats of the Black Sea Fleet of the MO-4 type enter the port of Varna
Aviation was active: in two days of fighting, Soviet pilots made 6350 sorties. Aviation of the Black Sea Fleet dealt strong blows against the German naval bases in Sulina and Constanta. It should be noted that the entire operation of the Soviet aviation completely dominated the air. This made it possible to inflict powerful air strikes on the enemy troops, his rear, reliably cover the advancing Soviet armies from the air and fend off the actions of the German Air Force. In total, during the operation, Soviet pilots shot down 172 German aircraft.
The command of Army Group South Ukraine, having analyzed the situation following the results of the first day of fighting, decided to withdraw troops to the rear line along the Prut River. Friesner ordered a retreat without even receiving Hitler's consent. The troops were retreating chaotically anyway. On August 22, the high command also agreed to withdraw the troops. But it was too late. By this time, Soviet troops intercepted the main withdrawal routes of the Chisinau grouping, it was doomed. In addition, the German command did not have strong mobile reserves, with the help of which it was possible to organize strong deblocking strikes. In such a situation, it was necessary to withdraw the troops even before the start of the Soviet offensive.
On August 23, Soviet troops fought in order to tightly close the encirclement ring and continued to move westward. The 18th Panzer Corps entered the Khushi area. The 7th mechanized corps went to the crossings over the Prut in the Leushen area, and the 4th Guards Mechanized Corps - to Leovo. Parts of the Soviet 46th Army pushed back the troops of the 3rd Romanian Army to the Black Sea, to the Tatarbunar region. On August 24, the Romanian troops ceased resistance. On the same day, the ships of the Danube military flotilla landed troops in the Zhebriyany-Vilkovo area. Also on August 24, units of the 5th Shock Army liberated Chisinau.
As a result, on August 24, the first stage of the strategic offensive operation was completed. The enemy's defensive lines fell, the Yassko-Kishinev grouping was surrounded. The "cauldron" got 18 divisions out of 25 available in Army Group South Ukraine. There was a huge gap in the German defense that there was nothing to cover. A coup d'etat took place in Romania, the Romanians began to lay down their arms or turn them against the Germans. By August 26, the entire territory of the Moldavian SSR was liberated from the Nazis.
German self-propelled artillery installation Hummel, destroyed as a result of the bombing of a German column with high-explosive bombs
Coup d'état in Romania. Destruction of the Chisinau grouping.
The calculation of Joseph Stalin that the main consequence of the successful offensive of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts would be "sobering up" of the Romanian leadership was fully justified. On the night of August 22, a secret meeting was held in the royal palace of Mihai. It was attended by opposition figures, including the communists. It was decided to arrest Prime Minister Antonescu and other pro-German leaders. On August 23, returning from the front after a meeting with the command of Army Group South Ukraine, Antonescu was arrested.
Before his arrest, he was going to carry out additional mobilization in the country and create a new line of defense together with the Germans. At the same time, many members of his cabinet were arrested. King Mihai delivered a speech on the radio in which he announced that Romania was withdrawing from the war on the side of Germany and accepting the terms of the armistice. The new government demanded the withdrawal of German troops from Romania. It should be noted that Stalin highly appreciated the courage of Mihai; after the end of the war, the king was awarded the Order of Victory.
German diplomats and the military mission were taken by surprise. The German command refused to comply with the demand for the withdrawal of troops. Hitler was furious and demanded to punish the traitors. The German Air Force attacked the Romanian capital. However, the attempts of German troops to occupy strategic facilities in Romania and the offensive on the capital failed. There were no forces for such an operation. In addition, the Romanians actively resisted. The government of Constantin Sanatescu declared war on Germany and asked for help from the Soviet Union.
The front finally collapsed. Wherever the Romanians defended, the defensive order collapsed. Soviet troops could safely move on. Chaos began. All centralized leadership of the German troops collapsed, the rear was cut off. Separate scattered battle groups of German formations were forced to break through to the west on their own. German ships, submarines, transports and boats filled with German soldiers sailed from the Romanian ports to the Bulgarian Varna and Burgas. Another wave of fleeing German soldiers, mainly from the rear, poured across the Danube.
At the same time, the German military-political leadership did not give up hope of keeping at least part of Romania under their control. Already on August 24, Berlin announced the creation of a pro-German leadership headed by the fascist organization "Iron Guard" Horia Sim. Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest of the Romanian king. The Wehrmacht occupied the strategic oil-producing region of Ploiesti. During August 24-29, 1944, there were stubborn battles between German and Romanian troops. During these clashes, the Romanians were able to capture more than 50 thousand Germans, including 14 generals.
The Soviet command provided assistance to Romania: 50 divisions, supported by the main forces of the two air armies, were sent to help the Romanian troops, which resisted the Germans. The rest of the troops were left to eliminate the Chisinau grouping. The surrounded German troops put up stubborn resistance.
They rushed to the breakthrough in large masses of infantry, supported by armored vehicles and artillery. We were looking for weak points in the encirclement ring. However, in the course of a number of separate heated battles, the German troops were defeated. By the end of August 27, the entire German group was destroyed. By August 28, the part of the German group that was able to break through to the western bank of the Prut and tried to break through to the Carpathian passes was also liquidated.
Meanwhile, the Soviet offensive continued. The 2nd Ukrainian Front was advancing towards Northern Transylvania and in the Fokshan direction. On August 27, Soviet troops occupied Focsani and reached the approaches to Ploiesti and Bucharest. Parts of the 46th Army of the 3rd Ukrainian Front developed an offensive along both banks of the Danube, cutting off the path of retreat of the defeated German troops to Bucharest. The Black Sea Fleet and the Danube military flotilla assisted the offensive of the ground forces, landed tactical landings, and smashed the enemy with the help of aviation. On August 27, Galati was occupied. On August 28, Soviet troops captured the cities of Braila and Sulin. On August 29, the Black Sea Fleet landing party occupied the port of Constanta. On the same day, the advance detachment of the 46th Army went to Bucharest. On August 31, Soviet troops entered Bucharest. This was the end of the Jassy-Chisinau operation.
Bucharest residents welcome Soviet soldiers... The inscription on a large banner can be translated as "Long live the great Stalin - the brilliant leader of the Red Army"
Results.
The Jassy-Kishinev operation ended with the complete victory of the Red Army. Germany suffered a major military-strategic, political and economic defeat. The troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts, with the support of the Black Sea Fleet and the Danube Flotilla, defeated the main forces of the German Army Group South Ukraine.
German-Romanian troops lost about 135 thousand people killed, wounded and missing. More than 208 thousand people were taken prisoner. As trophies were captured 2 thousand guns, 340 tanks and assault guns, almost 18 thousand vehicles and other equipment, weapons. Soviet troops lost more than 67 thousand people, of which more than 13 thousand people were killed, missing, died from diseases, etc.
Soviet troops liberated the Izmail region of the Ukrainian SSR and the Modav SSR from the Nazis. Romania was withdrawn from the war. In the favorable conditions created by the successes of the Soviet fronts, the Romanian progressive forces revolted and overthrew the pro-German dictatorship of Antonescu. She went over to the side of the anti-Hitler coalition and entered the war with Germany. Although much of Romania was still in the hands of German troops and pro-German Romanian forces, and fighting for the country continued until the end of October 1944, it was a great success for Moscow. Romania will put up 535 thousand soldiers and officers against Germany and its allies.
The way to the Balkans was opened for the Soviet troops. An opportunity arose to enter Hungary, to provide assistance to the allied Yugoslav partisans. Favorable conditions arose for the deployment of the struggle in Czechoslovakia, Albania and Greece. Bulgaria refused an alliance with Germany. On August 26, 1944, the Bulgarian government declared neutrality and demanded the withdrawal of German troops from Bulgaria.
On September 8 Bulgaria declared war on Germany. Yes, and Turkey was concerned. She maintained neutrality, but was friendly to Germany, and was biding its time when it would be possible to profit at the expense of Russia. Now it was possible to pay for the preparation of the invasion of the Caucasus. The Turks urgently set out to build friendships with the British and Americans.
From a military point of view, the Jassy-Kishinev operation was one of the most successful operations of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. The Yassy-Kishinev Cannes were distinguished by a skillful choice of directions for the main strikes of the fronts, a high level of offensive rates, a swift encirclement and destruction of a large enemy grouping.
Also, the operation was distinguished by close and skillful interaction of all types of troops, high enemy losses, and relatively low losses of Soviet troops. The operation clearly demonstrated the greatly increased level of Soviet military art, the combat skill of the command staff and the combat experience of the soldiers.
Almost immediately after the liberation of Moldova, its economic restoration began. Moscow in 1944-1945 allocated 448 million rubles for these purposes. First of all, the military, with the help of the local population, restored the railway communication and bridges across the Dniester, which were destroyed by the retreating Nazis. Even during the war, equipment was received for the restoration of 22 enterprises, 286 collective farms began to work. For the peasantry, seeds, cattle, horses, etc. came from Russia. All this contributed to the resumption of peaceful life in the republic. The Moldavian SSR also made its own contribution to the overall victory over the enemy. After the liberation of the republic, more than 250 thousand people volunteered for the front.
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The offensive of the Red Army in the spring of 1944 on the southern sector of the Soviet-German front led to a serious defeat of Army Group South and Army Group A, later reorganized into Army Group South Ukraine. In the course of a series of successful offensive operations, the entire southern territory of Ukraine and part of Moldova was liberated, and control over all bases of the Black Sea Fleet was restored. The German-Romanian troops managed to stabilize the situation only by the end of April. By this time, the front line in the south ran along the Dniester River, in the north - along the Iasi-Orhei line (Trajan's defensive line).
When developing a plan for an offensive in the Balkans, one more circumstance had to be taken into account: the Anglo-American allies, according to the "Balkan option", considered the possibility of opening a second front there. In this case, the main role on the peninsula was played by the Anglo-American armed forces, and the Soviet Union would have to overcome significant difficulties of a political nature and coordinate its actions with the allied army. It is worth noting that even during the Odessa offensive operation, the Romanian dictator Antonescu tried to probe the possibilities of his country's withdrawal from the war. Ruling circles Romania, worried about the retreat of the Germans along the entire Soviet-German front, sought rapprochement with the Anglo-American bloc with the aim of concluding a separate treaty. When Soviet troops crossed the Soviet-Romanian border, the USSR government announced at a press conference on April 2 to the whole world that Red Army units had crossed the Prut River and entered Romanian territory.
After two days of reflection and receiving assurances from Hitler that Romania would be defended by German troops as if it were Germany, the Soviet proposal was rejected.
The headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief gave the order to the advancing units of the Red Army to pursue the enemy until his complete defeat and surrender. On April 10, 1944, the State Defense Committee adopted a Decree on the conduct of Soviet troops on the territory of Romania. This decree determined the order of leadership, control and supervision over the activities of civilian authorities by the Military Council of the front. Personal responsibility for its implementation was assigned to General I.Z. Susaykov. The Romanian authorities were ordered to leave, protect the property and property rights of citizens and private societies. A Soviet military administration was introduced on the liberated territory.
After the stabilization of the front and the onset of an operational pause, both Germany and the USSR began to prepare for the summer military campaign.
The top German leadership was almost sure that the Soviet troops would continue to develop success precisely on the southern face of the front and therefore made every possible effort to strengthen the so-called Kishinev salient, formed during the spring offensive.
For a better understanding of the situation, it is appropriate to give some explanations why this sector of the front was so important. Militarily, it blocked the way for Soviet troops to the Balkans and the central regions of Romania. Also, do not forget that the Romanian oil fields were practically the only own source of this raw material for all countries of the Hitlerite coalition. In addition, the territory of Romania was of great geopolitical importance. The successes of the Red Army seriously shaken the positions of the pro-Nazi governments in both Hungary and Romania. At the same time, the anti-fascist movement was gaining momentum in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. In this situation, another serious defeat for the German troops - and the former loyal allies of Hitler will turn their weapons against the soldiers of the Wehrmacht.
It was for the above reasons that the German command expected the main blow in this particular sector of the front. But guess the intention of the Bet German commanders failed.
The first and most powerful blow of the 1944 summer campaign came much further north. Operation "Bagration", launched in Belarus, completely broke the strategic plans of the Reich... In an effort to stop the Soviet troops, which were rushing to Poland and the Baltic States, the German leadership began to hastily transfer its forces from the currently quiet sectors of the front. In June-July 1944, 12 divisions were transferred from the Kishinev salient to the north, which seriously weakened the South Ukraine grouping. And this circumstance did not go unnoticed by the Soviet generals.
On July 31, 1944, the Headquarters held a meeting, at which a plan was discussed to start a new offensive in the southern direction. This day can be considered the date of the start of preparations for an offensive operation against Army Group "South Ukraine", which later received the name of the Yassy-Kishinev Offensive Operation or the Yassy-Kishinev Cannes.
In the upcoming operation, it was decided to involve the forces of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under the command of R.Ya. Malinovsky and the 3rd Ukrainian Front under the leadership of F.I. Tolbukhin. The seizure of the coastal infrastructure, as well as the landing of operational assault forces, were to be ensured by the Black Sea Fleet under the command of F.S. Oktyabrsky and the Danube military flotilla under the command of Vice Admiral S.G. Gorshkov. Air support for the upcoming operation was to be provided by the 5th and 17th Air Armies.
Opposing our troops, Army Group South Ukraine under the command of Johannes Friesner was divided into two army groups: in the north of the Chisinau ledge was the Veler group, in the southeast - Dumitrescu.
The command of the German group believed that in the event of an offensive, the Soviet armies would deliver the main blow in the Chisinau direction, since it was through Chisinau that the shortest route to the oil-bearing regions of Romania lay, moreover, the terrain in this direction was the most favorable for the offensive. Based on this, the German units, as the most combat-ready, were concentrated in the center of the ledge, and Romanian units were located on the flanks, significantly inferior to the Wehrmacht troops, both in weapons and in combat training.
Thus, the Germans themselves suggested to our command a plan for a future offensive.
The general concept of the operation assumed that the 2nd Ukrainian Front would deliver the main attack from the area northwest of Yass in the direction of Vaslui. At the same time, the 3rd Ukrainian Front goes on the offensive from the Dniester bridgehead south of Tiraspol, captured during Odessa operation, and advances towards the troops of Malinovsky.
Later, Sergei Matveyevich Shtemenko, then the head of the Operations Directorate of the General Staff, described the plan for the upcoming campaign as follows: |
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Realizing that it would not be possible to completely hide the moment of preparation from the enemy, the Soviet command took a number of measures designed to preserve the confidence of the German military leadership that the offensive would be on Chisinau. In particular, the 5th Shock Army of General N.E. Berzarin was demonstratively preparing an offensive from the area of the village of Sharpen (Sherpen). At the same time, in the area of Dubossary and Grigoriopol, the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front also showed signs of preparation for an offensive. All these measures finally convinced the German leadership of the correctness of their initial conclusions.
Thus, even at the stage of preparation, the enemy was outplayed both tactically and strategically..
Special attention should be paid to reconnaissance activities carried out during the preparatory period. To obtain data on the location of the enemy's firing points, for the first time since the beginning of the War, a massive prospective photographing of the enemy's defense was carried out to its entire operational depth. With the help of optics installed on Il-2 aircraft, very high-quality images of the enemy's fortified positions were obtained. Before the offensive, the commanders of ground units received special photographic plates, on which the entire system of German defense was displayed to a depth of 10 kilometers.
The Iasi-Kishinev operation, brilliant in design and execution, rightly entered the history of the Great Patriotic War as one of the most effective offensive operations of the Red Army. This operation is the largest military event of the twentieth century that took place on the land of Moldova. It rightfully went down in history as one of the strategic blows with which the Soviet / Russian army knocked out the spirit from the strongest army of the West - the German one. It also remains a remarkable page in the history of Moldova, a victory achieved with the participation of its peoples.
In the historiography and mass media of the Republic of Moldova, the Jassy-Chisinau operation is a taboo topic. The reason for this is not only the activation of ideological heirs in Eastern Europe political forces who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, but also the reluctance of the countries of "old Europe", bound by a common victory in the Cold War, to include the events of 1939-1945 in the arsenal of means designed to promote European integration (1). Taking advantage of the situation, Romanian historians and Moldovan authors, creating in line with the course "history of Romanians", avoid touching on the events of 20-29 August 1944. What happened then on the land of Moldova?
In March 1944, during the Uman-Botoshan operation, the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front under the command of General I.S. Konev liberated the northern and eastern regions of Moldova. On March 26, on an 80-kilometer stretch from Lipkan to Skulian, the USSR State Border along the Prut was restored, Soviet troops entered the territory of Romania. The protection of the state border was resumed by the 24th border regiment, which took over the 1st strike of the German troops on June 22, 1941.
The offensive in the south was also successful. Parts of the front on the move captured a bridgehead on the western bank of the Dniester near the villages of Chitcani, south of the city of Bender, and further north, near the village of Varnitsa. The front line ran along the Dniester from the Black Sea to the city of Dubossary and further north-west to the town of Cornesti and north of the Romanian city of Iasi. To the enemy, its outlines painfully resembled the configuration of the front in the Stalingrad region on the eve of the Soviet counteroffensive. Glancing at the map, the commander of Army Group South Ukraine, General G. Friesner, suggested that Hitler withdraw his troops from the Kishinev ledge, but he did not meet with understanding (2).
Such a long prelude
On April 12, 1944, units of the 57th Army crossed the Dniester near the villages of Butory (eastern bank) and Sherpeni (western bank). They captured a bridgehead with a front width of up to 12 km and a depth of 4-6 km, necessary for an attack on Chisinau. To the north of Bender, in the village of Varnitsa, another bridgehead was created. But the resources of the advancing troops were exhausted, they needed rest and replenishment. By order of the Supreme High Command on May 6, the troops of I.S. Konev went on the defensive. The main aviation forces of the 2nd Ukrainian Front were deployed to Poland to cover the Sandomierz bridgehead.
The newly created grouping of German-Romanian troops "South Ukraine" blocked the Red Army's path to the oil sources of Romania. The central part of the German-Romanian front, the Kishinev salient, was occupied by the "restored" German 6th Army, defeated in Stalingrad. To eliminate the Sherpen bridgehead, the enemy formed an operational group of General Otto von Knobelsdorff, an experienced German participant in the Battle of Staligrad. The group included 3 infantry, 1 parachute and 3 tank divisions, 3 divisional groups, 2 brigades of assault guns, a special group of General Schmidt and other units. Their actions were supported by large aviation forces.
On May 7, 1944, the Sherpensky bridgehead began to be occupied by five rifle divisions - a corps under the command of General Morozov, which is part of the 8th Army of General V.I. Chuikov. The troops on the bridgehead lacked ammunition, equipment, anti-tank defenses, and air cover. The German counteroffensive on May 10 caught them by surprise. During the fighting, Morozov's corps held a part of the bridgehead, but suffered heavy losses. On May 14, he was replaced by the 34th Guards Corps of the 5th Shock Army under the command of General N.E. Berzarin. The front line was stabilized. On May 18, the enemy, having lost most of their tanks and manpower, stopped their attacks. The German command recognized the Sherpen operation as a failure, Knobelsdorf was not awarded any awards. The Sherpeni bridgehead still chained large forces of the 6th German army to itself. Between the bridgehead and Chisinau, German troops equipped four defense lines. Another defensive line was built in the city itself, along the Byk River. For this, the Germans dismantled about 500 houses (3). And most importantly, the expectations of an offensive from the Sherpensky bridgehead predetermined the deployment of the main forces of the 6th German army.
The army group South Ukraine, created by the enemy, included the 6th and 8th German armies, the 4th and - until July 25 - the 17th armies of Romania. Preparations for a new offensive required the preliminary delivery of 100,000 wagons of equipment, weapons and equipment to the troops. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1944, the destruction of railroad Moldavia were executed by the German-Romanian troops under the full "scorched earth" program. The Soviet service of military communications and sappers had to alter the railway tracks to the wide allied track, rebuild the bridges, technical and service buildings blown up by the enemy, and restore the station economy (4). In what time frame could this be done?
In July 1941, when Soviet sappers and railroad workers disabled only a few railway facilities, the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu ordered "with the assistance of the population" to "normalize" traffic on the Bessarabian railway within two weeks (5). However, the population sabotaged forced labor, and the Romanian military railroad workers turned out to be unskilled. Until October 16, while the defense of Odessa continued, not a single echelon passed through Bessarabia. The bridge over the Dniester in Rybnitsa was rebuilt only in December 1941, and the strategically even more important bridge in Bender - on February 21, 1942 (6).
In the spring of 1944, the destruction was incomparably greater, but the population helped the Red Army with all its might. In the spring, in muddy conditions, thousands of volunteers manually delivered shells to positions and evacuated the wounded. The peasants gave their last to provide Russian soldiers with food. 192 thousand recruits from Moldova joined the ranks of the Soviet troops. 30 thousand peasants went to the construction of the railway, another 5 thousand were rebuilding the Rybnitsa Bridge. The bridge was put into operation on May 24, 1944. The railroad units also worked very efficiently. By July 10, 660 km of the main track were converted to the wide allied gauge, 6 water supply points, 50 artificial structures, 200 km of a pole communication line were restored. By the end of July, 750 km of railway tracks were brought into working order in the liberated regions of Moldova and 58 bridges were rebuilt. Also, 300 km of highways were built or overhauled. Workers from Balti, Ocnita, Tiraspol have repaired damaged equipment (7). The supply of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian troops was ensured. Having accomplished this miracle of restoration, the railway troops of the Red Army and the population of Moldova contributed to the coming victory.
In early May 1944, the commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, instead of I.S. Konev, appointed commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, was appointed General R. Ya. Malinovsky, on the 3rd Ukrainian Front he was replaced by General F.I. Tolbukhin. They, as well as the chiefs of staff of the fronts S.S. Biryuzov and M.V. Zakharov began to develop plans for the offensive. The idea for the operation was enchantingly simple. The attack on Chisinau from the Sherpen bridgehead made it possible to split the enemy's front, it was from here that the Germans were expecting a strike. However, the Soviet command preferred to strike on the flanks, where the Romanian troops, less combat-ready than the German ones, defended. It was decided that the 2nd Ukrainian Front would strike northwest of Yassy, and the 3rd Ukrainian Front from the Kitskan bridgehead. The bridgehead was located at the junction of the positions of the 6th German and 3rd Romanian armies. Soviet troops were to defeat the opposing Romanian divisions, and then, advancing in the directions converging in the area of the cities of Khushi, Vaslui and Falchiu, encircle and destroy the 6th German army and quickly advance deep into Romania. The tasks of supporting the actions of the 3rd Ukrainian Front were assigned to the Black Sea Fleet.
The idea was to arrange for the enemy not even Cannes, but something more ambitious - the second Stalingrad. “The concept of the operation, developed on the basis of the proposals of the front command,” the researchers note, “was distinguished by exceptional determination and decisiveness. The immediate goal was to encircle and destroy the main forces of Army Group South Ukraine, hoping to prevent it from retreating to strong defensive lines west of the Prut and Seret rivers. The successful solution of this task ensured the completion of the liberation of the Moldavian SSR. The exit of Soviet troops to the central regions of Romania made it impossible for her to continue the war on the side of Nazi Germany. Through the territory of Romania, the shortest routes to the borders of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, as well as exits to the Hungarian Plain, were opened for our troops ”(8).
The enemy was to be misled. "It was very important," General of the Army SM Shtemenko noted later, "to make an intelligent and experienced enemy wait for our offensive only in the Chisinau region." Solving this problem, Soviet troops staunchly defended the bridgeheads, and Soviet intelligence played dozens of radio games. “And we achieved that,” the general stated further, “Time has shown: the cunning Friesner believed for a long time that in no other place would the Soviet command strike him ...” (9). 5th Shock Army of General N.E. Berzarina demonstratively prepared an offensive from the Sherpensky bridgehead. A false concentration of troops was carried out north of Orhei and on the right flank of the 2nd Ukrainian Front. "The results of the activities of our aerial reconnaissance," the German commander admitted, "were generally very insignificant until the last days before the start of the offensive [...] Since the Russians were good at masking such events, our intelligence agents were able to provide the necessary information also only with a great delay" ( ten) .
On June 6, the Second Front was finally opened in northern France. Soviet tank armies were on the southern flank of the Soviet-German front, and the enemy was expecting an attack from the area north of Chisinau (11), so he made no attempts to transfer troops from Romania and Moldova to Normandy. But on June 23, the Soviet offensive began in Belarus (Operation Bagration), and on July 13, the Red Army struck at Army Group Northern Ukraine. Trying to keep Poland under its control, the German command transferred up to 12 divisions to Belarus and Western Ukraine, including 6 tank and 1 motorized. However, in August Army Group Southern Ukraine still included 47 divisions, including 25 German ones. In these formations, there were 640 thousand combat personnel, 7600 guns and mortars (caliber 75 mm and above), 400 tanks and assault guns, 810 combat aircraft. In total, the enemy grouping consisted of almost 500 thousand German and 450 thousand Romanian soldiers and officers.
German and Romanian troops had combat experience and relied on an echeloned system of field fortifications. Colonel-General G. Friesner, appointed commander on July 25, after the assassination attempt on Hitler, was known as an experienced and prudent military leader and, as events showed, was a loyal Nazi. He stepped up the construction of fortifications. On the 600-kilometer front from the Carpathians to the Black Sea, a powerful echeloned defense was created. Its depth reached 80 kilometers or more (12). In addition, the enemy had considerable reserves; more than 1,100 thousand soldiers and officers were under arms in Romania (13). The command of the German-Romanian troops expected the Russian offensive with confidence in their capabilities (14).
However, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command managed to create superiority in forces in the decisive sectors of the front. The combat strength of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts was increased to 930 thousand people. They were armed with 16 thousand guns and mortars, 1870 tanks and self-propelled guns, 1760 combat aircraft (15). The superiority of the Soviet side in the number of troops was small, but they outnumbered the enemy in armament. The ratio of forces was as follows: in humans 1.2: 1, in field guns of various calibers -1.3: 1, in tanks and self-propelled guns - 1.4: 1, machine guns - 1: 1, in mortars - 1.9: 1, in planes 3: 1 in favor of the Soviet troops. In connection with the insufficient superiority necessary for the success of the offensive in the direction of the main attack, it was decided to expose the secondary sectors of the front. This was a risky measure. But on the Kitskany bridgehead and north of Yass, the following ratio of forces was created: in people 6: 1, in field guns of various calibers - 5.5: 1, in tanks and self-propelled guns - 5.4: 1, machine guns - 4.3: 1 , in mortars - 6.7: 1, in planes 3: 1 in favor of the Soviet troops. Worth mentioning is the fact that in rifle units up to 80 percent of the rank and file were replenished from among those called up in the regions of Ukraine, liberated in the spring of 1944; the troops also received more than 20 thousand conscripts from Moldova. These young people still had to be trained in military affairs. But she survived the occupation and hated the invaders. In the course of exercises and battles of local importance, in communication with old soldiers, the replenishment received proper combat training. The actions of the two fronts were directed to coordinate the Marshal of the Soviet Union S.K. Tymoshenko.
The concentration of troops and military equipment in the areas of the breakthrough was carried out by the Soviet command covertly and, mainly, immediately before the offensive. More than 70% of the forces and assets of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts were transferred to the Kitskansky bridgehead and northwest of Yassy. The density of artillery in the breakthrough areas reached 240 and even 280 guns and mortars per 1 kilometer of the front. Three days before the start of the offensive, the German command suspected that the blow would be delivered not from the area of Sherpen and Orhei, but on the flanks of the 6th German army (16). At the meeting, without the participation of Romanians, held at the headquarters of Army Group South Ukraine on August 19, it was allegedly clear to all its participants that a major Russian offensive should be expected on August 20 at the latest ”(17). They even considered a plan for the withdrawal of Army Group South Ukraine, called the "Medved Option". But even for flight, the Soviet command did not leave the enemy time.
On August 20, 1944, the troops of both fronts launched an offensive with powerful artillery preparation. A participant in the events, General A.K. Blazhey left an almost poetic description of the offensive from the Kitskansky bridgehead: “The hands on the clock converge at the number eight. - Fire! The roar of guns merged into a mighty symphony. The earth trembled and heaved. The sky was traced by fiery trails of rockets. Gray fountains of smoke, dust, stone rose like a wall over the enemy's defenses, closed the horizon, eclipsed the sun. With a roar swept through, ironing out the enemy fortifications, stormtroopers. [...] Guard mortars started playing. [...] Following the volleys of the Katyushas, a thousand-voiced "hurray" rolled over the field covered with smoke. […] An avalanche of people, tanks, and vehicles rushed to the enemy defense line ”(18). “In the early morning of August 20,” Friesner also testified, “the roar of volleys of thousands of guns announced the beginning of the decisive battle for Romania. After the strongest one and a half hours of artillery preparation, the Soviet infantry, supported by tanks, went on the offensive, first in the Yass region, and then on the Dniester sector of the front ”(19). Aviation carried out bombing and assault strikes against strongpoints and firing positions of enemy artillery. The fire system of the German and Romanian troops was suppressed, on the very first day of the offensive, they lost 9 divisions.
Having broken through the German-Romanian front south of Bendery, the formations of the 3rd Ukrainian Front routed the enemy's operational reserves, which it had thrown in front of them, and resolutely, without looking back at the flanks, continued their advance to the west. Supporting the offensive, the 5th and 17th Air Armies, commanded by Generals S.K. Goryunov and V.L. Sudets, achieved absolute air supremacy. On the evening of August 22, Soviet tanks and motorized infantry reached Comrat, where the headquarters of the 6th German army was located, the 3rd Romanian army was cut off from the 6th German army. Units of the 2nd Ukrainian Front already occupied the Yassky and Tirgu-Frumosky fortified areas on August 21, and the 6th Tank Army of Lieutenant General A.G. Kravchenko, other formations of the front entered the operational space and moved south, reaching Vaslui on August 22. The enemy forces of three divisions, including the Romanian Guards Tank Division "Great Romania", organized a counterattack, Soviet troops were detained for a day. But this did not change the general situation. The breakthrough by the Russian troops of the German front west of Jassy and their advance to the south, G. Friesner admitted, blocked the retreat path for the troops of the 6th German army. The threat of encirclement of the 4th Romanian army was also created. Friesner already on August 21 gave the 6th Army the order to retreat. The next day, the withdrawal of the troops of Army Group South Ukraine was also allowed by the command of the German ground forces (20). But it was too late.
The first to reach the Prut were units of the 7th Mechanized Corps from the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front. On August 23 at 13.00, the 63rd mechanized brigade from this corps broke into the village of Leusheny, where it defeated the rear of the 115th, 302nd, 14th, 306th and 307th infantry divisions of the 6th German army, captured a lot of prisoners - the tankers had no time to count them - and took the Prut line in the Leuseny-Nemzeny area. The 16th Mechanized Brigade, destroying the enemy in the area of the villages of Sarata-Galbena, Karpineny, Lapushna, cut off the German troops' path to the west from the forests east of Lapushna (21). On the same day, the 36th Guards Tank Brigade captured the crossing of the Prut north of Leovo. In the offensive zone of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, the 110th and 170th tank brigades of the 18th Panzer Corps under the command of Major General V.I. Polozkov of the 2nd Ukrainian Front. They established contact with the tankers of the 3rd Ukrainian Front and closed the encirclement ring around 18 German divisions (22). “As a result of four days of the operation,” I.V. To Stalin at 23:30, Marshal of the Soviet Union SK Timoshenko, - the troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts today, on August 23, completed the operational encirclement of the enemy's Chisinau grouping. " The first stage of the strategic operation was completed.
Leaving 34 divisions to eliminate the encircled grouping, the Soviet command sent more than 50 divisions into the interior of Romania. During the day, the front was pushed back 80-100 kilometers. The pace of the Soviet offensive was 40-45 km. per day, the encircled had no chance of salvation. The German command understood this. “Since August 20, 1944,” wrote the Chief of Staff of the 6th Army, General Walter Helmut, in the Journal of Combat Actions, “a new stage of this great war... And here, as at Stalingrad, the 6th Army stood at the center of the events of world history ... After the breakthrough of the Russians south of Tiraspol and near Yass, events developed with such impetuosity that no one could have expected before ”(23).
It was not the arrest of Antonescu that ensured the victory of the Red Army during the Jassy-Kishinev operation, but the defeat of the German troops and the Romanian army, the support of the pro-Hitler regime, created the conditions for its overthrow. This is also recognized by the right-wing radicals of Romania, who defend the Romanians and King Mihai from accusations that they "cheated" on the Nazis. “The Iasi-Kishinev battle - we read in the Romanian synthesis“ The History of Bessarabia ”, - opened the way for the Red Army to the Gates of Moldova and further, to the routes providing access to the Balkans. Under these conditions, a coup took place on 23 August 1944 ... ”(24). “The difficult martial law on the front of Targu Neamt - Pashkani - Targu Frumos - Iasi - Chisinau - Tighina,” the authors of the online reference “70 years of the liberation of Bessarabia” concretize, “prompted the democratic forces of Romania to eliminate the government of Antonescu and propose a truce with the United Nations represented by The Soviet Union "(25).
Defeat is always an orphan. German memoirists and historians like to explain the defeat of the 6th Army by the betrayal of the Romanians. But the fate of Army Group South Ukraine was decided even before the coup in Bucharest. As noted, G. Friesner gave the order to retreat to his troops on August 21. Regarding the exit of Soviet units to Comrat and other events on August 22, he admitted: "Thus, our entire operational plan was upset by the enemy." With a speech about the arrest of the government of I. Antonescu and the cessation of hostilities against the USSR, King Mihai spoke "after 22 hours", on the night of 23-24 August, and Romania declared war on Germany only on 25 August. Aware of the precariousness of the thesis about the decisive role of the coup in Bucharest in the defeat of his troops, G. Frisner tried to expand the time frame of the Romanian "treason". “Increasingly,” he argued in his memoirs, “there were reports that the Romanian troops were losing their combat effectiveness, not only in cases fully justified by the current situation, but also far from being in a hopeless situation, allowing the enemy to infiltrate into their positions and even fleeing from the battlefield to the beginning of the enemy's attack. " The general cited many facts about the insufficient firmness of the Romanian troops, and the Romanian commanders, in essence flattering them, even accused them of "sabotaging" the struggle against the Russians (26), but did not provide an explanation for these phenomena. On August 22, G. Friesner noted, I. Antonescu still declared his determination to continue the war on the side of Germany and, as he himself put it, “pumped out everything that was possible from the Romanian people just to keep the front” (27). In fact, the Romanian dictator intended to hold the front by the forces of the Germans. On the same day, he gave the order to the Romanian troops to retreat beyond the Prut (28). Leaving the fleeing units, General Petre Dumitrescu, commander of the 3rd Romanian army and the army group of forces, immediately carried out this order.
The Germans did not show Teutonic firmness either. Throwing in troops, the commander of the 6th German army, General Fretter-Pico, fled to the west. In the offensive zone of General Kravchenko's 6th Panzer Army, in the ranks of not only Romanian, but also German troops, Friesner admitted, "incredible chaos began." “Under the onslaught of the advancing to the west of the Soviet armies,” the general continued, “scattered units of combat divisions, mixed with supply units, airfield service units of the Air Force, individual small units, etc., are rolling back through the southwestern spurs of the Carpathians” (29). Oddly enough, the presence of these and similar facts in the scientific circulation does not prevent the construction of the German myth about the Romanian stab in the back to the valiant Germans as the main factor in the victory of the Red Army.
The finest hour of the Moldovan partisans
Consider the plot of the Iassy-Kishinev operation, revealing the participation of the population of Moldova in the Patriotic War, but mentioned by historians in passing. In August 1944, more than 20 partisan detachments with a total number of over 1,300 armed fighters fought in the still occupied regions of the republic. In their composition there were only two dozen officers. Almost all of them were wartime officers - with minimal theoretical training, but rich combat experience. The detachments were commanded by the sailor captain of the second rank A. Obushinsky, who lost his hand in the battle on the Black Sea, infantry captains G. Posadov and pilot E. Yarmikov, paratroopers lieutenants A. Kostelov, V. Aleksandrov, I. Tyukanko, L. Diryaev, M. Zhemadukov , N. Lyasotsky, I. Nuzhin, A. Shevchenko. The commanders of the detachments, journalist M. Smilevsky, V. Shpak, P. Bardov, I. Anisimov, Y. Bovin, M. Kuznetsov, the young peasant M. Chernolutsky and a resident of Chisinau P. Popovich were practitioners of partisan warfare. The largest partisan detachment in Moldova was commanded by a junior lieutenant of the NKVD E. Petrov.
The paratroopers who were thrown into Moldova with parachutes and the partisans from former prisoners of war also had combat experience. But the majority of the fighters were peasant youth. Local partisans provided the detachments with food, conducted reconnaissance, but they had to be taught the basics of military affairs. However, almost every detachment had radio communications with the headquarters of the partisan movement under the Military Councils of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts, and received aid by air with weapons and medicines. The partisans set up ambushes and sabotage, smashed the occupation administration and successfully fought off the punishers. Summing up the punitive expeditions carried out from June 1 to August 19, 1944, the command of the 6th German Army admitted that “west of Chisinau, due to the presence of large forests in this area, a center of partisan activity was gradually formed. Bessarabia with its heterogeneous population groups became fertile ground for espionage, as well as for the organization of new partisan detachments, which, despite all the measures of the Romanian authorities, continued to remain the masters of the situation. " The reviewers identified the forests on both sides of the Lapusna-Ganchesti road as an area “exclusively inundated with partisans” (30).
On the morning of August 20, the partisan headquarters notified the detachments by radio that the troops of the two fronts were on the offensive. The partisans were tasked with preventing the withdrawal of enemy troops, the removal of material values and the hijacking of the population. Detachment P.S. Bordova destroyed a convoy of 17 vehicles near Lapushna that day. At the Zloty station, partisans from the detachment of V.A. Shpaka was launched down the slope of the train. The sabotage group of I.S. Picuso from the detachment under the command of I.E. Nuzhina, having blown up a train with ammunition on the Comrat-Prut line, interrupted the movement on the railway. German sappers restored the route, but on August 21 the partisans staged another crash, and on the 22nd a third. This time, they blew up a steam locomotive and 7 carriages on the Bayush-Dezginja stretch, killed 75 and wounded 95 Romanian soldiers and officers. The actions of the partisans west of Comrat disrupted military transport in the days of decisive battles at the front. In Comrat, at the stations of Bessarabskaya and Abaklia, the enemy was forced to leave 10 serviceable steam locomotives and up to 500 wagons with military equipment and fuel. At the Comrat station, 18 echelons with equipment, ammunition and looted property remained.
On August 21, the For the Honor of the Motherland detachment under the command of A.I. Kostelova destroyed a column of 10 vehicles and 300 enemy soldiers and officers on the Kotovsk-Lapushna road, on August 22, on the Kotovsk-Karpineny road, 5 vehicles, 100 carts, a large number of invaders and captured 4 serviceable guns. On August 24, the partisans of this detachment defeated a train of 110 carts guarded by 60 cavalrymen on the Stolnicheny-Lapushna road. On August 22, partisans of the detachment I.E. Nuzhin fired at a column of German troops from an ambush near the village of Kochulia west of Comrat, and near the village of Largutsa destroyed a German convoy of 200 carts. On August 23, this detachment fired at the column of the headquarters of the 6th German army retreating from Comrat near the village of Yargora, and only the partisans' lack of heavy weapons prevented them from destroying the staff officers (31). In the Novo-Anensky district (north of the city of Bender), partisans of the detachment of M.M. Chernolutsky, having previously reconnoitered the location of the enemy's minefields, assisted the tankmen and infantry of the 3rd Ukrainian Front in overcoming them (32).
On the night of August 23, partisans of the detachment to them. Lazo under the command of M.V. Kuznetsov, "removing" the guard, blew up a concrete bridge near the village of Dolna. The next morning, in search of detours, the convoys of enemy vehicles moved along the forest roads. The detachment set up several ambushes between the villages of Bursuk and Cristesti, destroying or capturing about 100 German and Romanian soldiers and officers. Increasing the panic, the partisans blew up an ammunition depot four kilometers from the village of Nisporeny. Detachment I.I. Ivanov on 23 August defeated the enemy's column by force up to a battalion near the village of Boltsun. On August 24, having discovered 5 guns near the village of Sparits, firing at Soviet troops, a group of partisans under Ivanov's command fired at the battery. The infantry cover scattered, and the cannons, the supply of shells and the radio station became trophies of the partisans. The detachment also captured 150 prisoners. On the same day, at the edge of the forest near the village of Sarata-Meresheny, partisans threw grenades at four 122-mm enemy guns (33).
Detachment A.V. Obushinsky smashed enemy carts for four days in the vicinity of the village of Metropolitan. However, on August 24, a group of partisans under the command of the chief of staff of the detachment G.M. Khramova, laying mines, did not notice the tankette and armored personnel carrier in the tail of the enemy column. The partisans met the infantry column that approached the ambush site with fire from two machine guns. The infantry retreated. But then, pouring fire on everything, a tankette moved onto the partisans' chain. Temples and three soldiers were injured. The wedge was blown up by a partisan mine, but its crew continued to fire. The partisans nevertheless managed to retreat in an organized manner and carry out the wounded. Covering the retreat of his comrades, machine gunner S.P. Porumba (34).
On August 20-22, in the same area, the detachments of L.I. Diryaeva, M.Kh. Zhemadukova, N.A. Lyasotsky and A.G. Shevchenko defeated three large convoys, and on August 23-24, they generally blocked traffic on the road on the section between the villages of Metropolitan and Lipoveny. Fighting off enemy attacks, the partisans of these detachments disabled 3 tanks, an armored personnel carrier, 175, destroyed 250 and captured about 600 soldiers and officers. One of the tanks was knocked out by a Czech paratrooper Jan Kroshlak with a grenade. He was awarded the Order of the Red Star by the Soviet government, and at home he was awarded the title of Hero of Czechoslovakia (35).
In May-August 1944, the Moldavian partisans destroyed over 11 thousand enemy soldiers and officers, derailed 13 military echelons, blew up 9 bridges, destroyed 25 tanks and armored vehicles, about 400 vehicles (36). The partisans captured 4,500 German soldiers and officers and handed them over to the regular troops of the Red Army. In essence, they destroyed an entire enemy division. The peoples of Moldova, like the entire country, fought the Patriotic War against Germany and Romania.
The rout
On the night of 23 August, the enemy's Chisinau grouping began to withdraw from its positions. Having discovered this, the troops of the 5th Shock Army of Lieutenant General N.E.Berzarin, overcoming minefields and shooting down the enemy rearguards, began pursuit. By the end of the day, part of the divisions under the command of generals V.P. Sokolova, A.P. Dorofeeva and D.M. Syzranov broke into Chisinau. From the direction of Orhei, units of rifle divisions under the command of General M.P. Seryugin and Colonel G.N. Shostatsky, and from the area of the village of Dorotskoye, the rifle division of Colonel S.M. Fomichenko. Chisinau was captured by Soviet troops from the north-east and south.
The city burned, explosions thundered: on the orders of the German commandant Stanislaus von Devitz-Krebs, a team of sappers of Chief Lieutenant Heinz Klik destroyed the largest buildings and economic facilities. After a three-hour battle, as noted in the battle summary, the 89th division of General M.P. Seryugina seized the stations Visternicheni and Petrikany, crossed the Byk river and by 23.00 one regiment reached the southwestern outskirts of Chisinau, with two regiments by 24.00 occupied the villages of Durleshty and Boyukany. In cooperation with the 94th Guards Rifle Division, by 24.00 Chisinau was basically cleared of enemy troops. However, skirmishes in the city continued at night. The liberation of Chisinau was completed on the morning of August 24 (37). Realizing that they were surrounded, the German troops in the city, about 12 thousand soldiers and officers, laid down their arms.
West of Chisinau, in the area of the villages Lapushna, Stolnicheny, Costeshty, Rezeny, Karakuy, Soviet troops surrounded the remnants of 12 German divisions. In columns of several thousand soldiers and officers, supported by artillery and tanks, they tried to break through in the southwest direction. In the fields north of the town of Leovo, the fighting took on the character of beating up the attackers. “The Nazis,” recalled the commander of the artillery battery V.E. Sekhin, “walked in droves, distraught, lost control. I remember an incident. German division. […] From a distance of 200m, all the guns and 4 captured MG-12 machine guns, which were also in the battery's arsenal, opened a hurricane of fire on the moving convoy. and enemy officers, 228 were taken prisoner, including the division commander. "(38) Thousands of enemy soldiers and officers drowned while fleeing in the Prut. Their bodies formed congestion on the river (39). crossings, and this allowed him to penetrate part of his forces to the western bank of the Prut. 2-3 September they were destroyed in the area of the cities of Khush and Bacau.
In an effort to end the bloodshed, on August 26, the commander of the 3rd Ukrainian Front F.I. Tolbukhin suggested that the encircled enemy troops surrender. The general guaranteed life, safety, food, inviolability of personal property to all who surrendered, and medical assistance to the wounded. The terms of surrender were conveyed through the envoys to the commanders of the encircled formations, they were reported on the radio, broadcast sound installations. Despite the humane nature of the terms of surrender, the Nazis rejected them. However, on the morning of August 27, when the term for surrender expired and Soviet troops resumed fire, enemy units began to surrender in whole columns. In the south of Bessarabia, having landed troops at the mouth of the Danube, the forces of the Black Sea Fleet and the 3rd Ukrainian Front cut the retreat path of the 3rd Romanian army. On August 25, Romanian troops surrendered in the area of the villages of Tatarbunary, Bayramcha, Budaki (40). On August 26, 5 Romanian divisions surrendered to the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front in full force. On August 30, Soviet troops entered Bucharest.
The victory achieved by the Red Army in the Jassy-Kishinev operation brought down the southern flank of the Soviet-German front and opened the way for it to the Balkans. It made it possible to wrest Romania and Bulgaria from the power of the pro-Nazi regimes and created the conditions for their joining the Anti-Hitler coalition. She forced the German command to withdraw its troops from Greece, Albania, Bulgaria. On August 25, Romania declared war on Germany, and on September 9, the pro-fascist regime in Bulgaria was overthrown. In September, Soviet troops established direct contact with the Yugoslav partisans and liberated Belgrade on October 23. The Balkans were lost by Hitler, the formations of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts went to Hungary.
During the Jassy-Kishinev operation, the enemy suffered huge losses. Of the 341 thousand soldiers and officers of the 6th German army, 256 thousand were killed or taken prisoner (41). Only 6 heavily battered divisions of the 8th German army managed to retreat beyond the Carpathians, which escaped encirclement. The units formed from these, according to G. Friesner, spiritually and physically exhausted people, the German command did not even have enough to lock the Carpathian passes, of which there were only six. On September 5, already in Transylvania, the command of Army Group Southern Ukraine stated that the encircled formations of the 6th Army should be considered as completely lost and that this defeat constituted the greatest disaster that the Army Group had ever experienced (42 ).
The statistics of the losses of the Romanian army is mysterious. According to the official certificate "The War of Romania for the Restoration of National Integrity (1941-1945"), it includes only soldiers (no officers?), Including: 8.305 killed, 24 989 wounded and 153.883 "disappeared and captured" (43). We can forgive, but not forget "signed by 2830 persons (as of August 17, 2011), a text was published under the title, claiming irony," Stalin and the Russian people brought us freedom. "For the destruction of the army of invaders who invaded the country, neither Russia, neither Moldova nor Ukraine need Romanian forgiveness, but the article contains statistical information:
“More than once our historians and Western historians, less often Soviet ones, considered the consequences of the coup d'état of 23 August 1944 more severe for the Wehrmacht than the Stalingrad ones. It is true, there is nothing to argue against this point of view. Only, according to the statistics of the General Staff [of the Romanian Army], this event caused the Romanian Army damage in people and military property significantly greater than the battle in the Don bend, a component of Stalingrad operations. […] From November 1 to December 31, 1942, during the period of the most violent clashes with the Soviets at the front in the Don Bend, the Romanian army lost 353 officers, 203 non-commissioned officers and 6,680 soldiers killed in action, 994 officers, 582 non-commissioned officer and 30,175 soldiers wounded in battle, and 1,829 officers, 1,567 non-commissioned officers and 66,959 soldiers missing, in most cases captured by Soviet captivity. Much more were the losses of the Romanian army in the period from June 1 to August 31, 1944, with the clarification that between June 1 and August 19, the date of the start of the Soviet offensive, the front in Moldova and southern Bessarabia was stable, and more or less significant battles did not take place ... It was about casualties in personnel, including 509 officers, 472 non-commissioned officers and 10262 soldiers killed, 1255 officers, 993 non-commissioned officers and 33317 soldiers wounded and 2628 officers, 2817 non-commissioned officers and 171 243 soldiers missing, more partly captured by the Soviets after the king announced a non-existent ceasefire on the radio. As you can see, in all categories, the numbers of losses incurred in the 12 days of August 1944 exceed the losses for November 1 - December 31, 1942, even twice "(44).
Thus, 11,243 Romanian soldiers and officers were killed - since they managed to draw up the relevant documents - in the first days of the offensive, and 176,688 were missing, i.e. were killed or captured. The answer to the question about the number of prisoners can be found in the Internet article "The War of Romania for the Restoration of National Integrity (1941-1945)". Even after King Mihai's speech on the radio, the authors say, “the Russians continued their operations against the Romanian armies, capturing all the Romanian troops in Moldova and Bessarabia overtaken by them. This fate was experienced, having passed the way of prisoner-of-war camps in Russia, 114,000 still combat-ready Romanian military ”(45).
The statement that the Russians beat their future allies too painfully seems strange: the aggressor should have been beaten mercilessly. The camp sufferings of the former occupiers do not evoke sympathy either. An opportunity missed by the Soviet command is the refusal to form a dozen divisions from Romanian prisoners of war. They could be thrown into battle against the Germans and, especially, against the Hungarians. However, we are interested in the Romanian losses incurred during the Jassy-Kishinev operation. The given figure of 11,243 killed Romanian military should be supplemented by the difference between 176 thousand and 114 thousand people. The total number of Romanian soldiers and officers who died during the Jassy-Kishinev operation amounted to 73.9 thousand people. Thus, during the Yassy-Kishinev operation, Soviet troops destroyed or captured 50% of the personnel of the opposing enemy troops.
The victory was won with little bloodshed. The losses of the Red Army in the Iassy-Kishinev operation included 13,197 dead and missing (1 percent of the total number of troops of the two fronts) and 53,933 wounded, which seems to be a very small price to pay for a victory in an operation involving more than a million troops.
The lightning-fast, within eight days, defeat of the enemy army group revealed the superiority of the strategy and tactics of the Red Army, combat training and weapons, the spirit of soldiers and officers. The Soviet command correctly chose the places of the strikes and planned the offensive in terms of time, means and methods. It carried out the maximum concentration of forces and means quickly and secretly from the enemy. The Jassy-Kishinev operation remains an example of the effective use of mobile formations of tanks and motorized infantry, clear interaction of ground forces with aviation and the navy; the partisans successfully interacted with the front.
The Iasi-Kishinev operation, brilliant in design and execution, rightly entered the history of the Great Patriotic War as one of the most effective offensive operations of the Red Army. This operation is the largest military event of the twentieth century that took place on the land of Moldova. It rightfully went down in history as one of the strategic blows with which the Soviet / Russian army knocked out the spirit from the strongest army of the West - the German one. It also remains a remarkable page in the history of Moldova, a victory achieved with the participation of its peoples.
See: A.B. Edemsky. To the problem of the ambitious task of creating a unified pan-European textbook on the history of Europe: how it will present the Second World War and the role of the USSR in the victory over Nazism. // World War II and World War II in history textbooks of the CIS and EU countries: problems, approaches, interpretations. Materials of the international conference (Moscow, April 8-9, 2010). - M., 2010.S. 162.
National Archives of the Republic of Moldova. Form 680. Op. 1. D.4812. L. 156.
I. V. Kovalev Transport in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945 - M., 1982.S. 289-291.
NARM. F.1931. Op. 1. D.69. L. 70.
In the same place. Form 706. Op. 1. D.529. L. 94.
History National economy Moldavian SSR. 1917-1958 - Chisinau. Shtiintsa. 1974.S. 213.
Liberation of the Southeast and Central Europe... 1944-1945. - Moscow. 1970. S. 59.
Frisner G. Lost battles. –M., Military Publishing. 1966. p.67.
See: S.M. Shtemenko General Staff in years. -M., 1968.S. 234, 239.
Samsonov A.M. The collapse of the fascist aggression. 1939-1945. Historical sketch. -Moscow. The science. 1975. S. 488, 489.
Aftenyuk S., Elin D., Korenev A., Levit I. Moldavian SSR in the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union 1941-1945. - Chisinau. Shtiintsa. 1970.S. 356.
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In the same place. S. 490, 491.
Frisner G. Decree. cit., p. 72.
Http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/blazhey_ak/04.html
Frisner G. Decree. op. P.72.
In the same place. S. 75, 105.
Moldavian SSR in the Great Patriotic War… .T.1. P.591.
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Frisner G. Decree. cit., p. 85, 86.
In the same place. P. 80.
Moraru P. Serviciile secrete si Basarabia. Dictionar 1918-1991. –Bucuresti. Editura militara. 2008. P.34.
Frisner G. Decree. cit., p. 84, 85.
Cit. Quoted from: Aftenyuk S., Elin D., Korenev A., Levit I. Decree. cit., p. 345.
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Aftenyuk S., Elin D., Korenev A., Levit I. Decree. cit., p. 345, 346; Elin D.D. Decree. cit., p. 208, 209; Moldavian. SSR in the Great Patriotic War ... V.2. S. 495, 608, 611, 545; Vol. 1. S. 431.590.
Aftenyuk S., Elin D., Korenev A., Levit I. Decree. cit., p. 346,347.
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Aftenyuk S., Elin D., Korenev A., Levit I. Decree. cit., p. 349 ..
Jassy-Kishinev Cannes (Ed. By R. Malinovsky). -Moscow. 1964.S. 157.
Moldavian SSR in the Great Patriotic War… .T.1. S. 436, 590, 591.
Moraru A. Istoria romanilor. Basarabia si Transnistria. 1812-1993. –Chisinau. 1995. P. 387.
Aftenyuk S., Elin D., Korenev A., Levit I. Decree. cit., pp. 366-368.
In the same place. P.368.
Frisner G. Op. Cit., P. 103.