Chapter Eighty-eight: Red Blooms on the Snow
(15-31 December 1946)
Polish infantry march towards the enemy in the culminating battle of the Bobruysk Pocket, December 1946.
=
==
==
==
The Gomel Bridgehead: 15-18 December
By mid-December 1946, the first two weeks of Poland’s
Operacja Zimowa Burza (Operation Winter Storm) had made strong gains in Byelorussia (or Belarus, as the Poles would now start referring to it) as the Mozyr Coup saw a friendly regime installed in the south of the country and over 150,000 4thInt troops isolated in the frozen marshland of the Bobruysk Pocket.
For the next few days, Polish efforts would concentrate on expanding the line of advance in Gomel and consolidating their victory in the major Battle of Khmelnytskyi in the southern sector in the face of Soviet counter-attacks.
A secondary effort to support a C-Y attack in the north of Belarus west of Vitebsk, with mixed success, an expensive victory eventually being achieved in the far north after another six days of bitter fighting to gain the bridgehead (and noting not all the casualties suffered were Polish).
By midday of 16 December, the initial battle to defend the first bridgehead in Gomel had been won, and then expanded to the south with another Polish corps lodged.
The air war over Belarus had intensified, with a massive injection of German air power, plus considerable support from the RAF and other Allied air forces. Soviet losses were mounting as both sides used ground attack missions to support their troops in the field.
Note: I’m still not really sure if the loss figures related to all the Allies or just Polish aircraft.
The next phase of the Gomel Bridgehead battle began early on 17 December and saw the line of attack extended to the east, against Soviet opposition that was light or non-existent initially but kept building up.
Soviet numbers increased as Polish supply and the weather became more difficult. Momentum was slowed a little, but not stopped and both battles would be won in the next four days.
During this time, the Bobruysk Pocket had been ‘left to stew’, as sporadic Yugoslav attacks ran down 4thInt supplies without promising victory. On the Allied side, supply shortages in the breakthrough salient remained difficult but not critical.
By the evening of the 17th, the next bridgehead battles remained in progress with stiffening resistance while the Bobruysk Pocket was firmly surrounded but no longer under C-Y attack.
In the southern (Ukrainian) sector, the Soviets were trying to counter-attack after the Poles occupied the city of Khmelnytskyi.
The Americas
On 15 December the Polish-led DMK (7th Army) was still trying to help the Allies hold the line in central Mexico but the gaps were too many and enemy strength growing through a mix of US/TRA and MAB forces.
By 22 December, 340 Infanterie Div had completed its withdrawal, the Luftwaffen-Feld-Div 2 was trying to fight its way out of a possible encirclement and the 198th was also falling back to the closest port on the west coast.
Three days later, on Christmas Day 1946 Luft-Div 2 was still stuck in its breakout attack, so the now in-position 198 Inf was able to assist. The battle was finally won that night.
Having reached safety the next day, Luft-Div 2 continued falling back as 3 Gerbirgs-Div also tried to extract itself. The rest of the DMK either fell back towards its planned evacuation point or was covering the retreat if their comrades.
As 1946 came to a close, Newfoundland/Labrador held its perimeter and all was temporarily quiet there. But in Mexico, the collapsing Allied position remained under heavy pressure as another potential disaster loomed: it was hoped the rest of the Allies managed to extract as many of their remaining troops there as possible before the end.
The Battle of the Bobruysk Pocket: 18-23 December
At 0400hr on the morning of 18 December an intense artillery barrage heralded the start of the main Polish effort to reduce the Bobruysk Pocket, where 16 mainly Soviet divisions had been trapped for some days now.
Ten Polish divisions from three different armies reinforced a struggling attack by four Yugoslav divisions on the main eastern end of the pocket, where eight Soviet and one Byelorussian division were trapped. This soon shifter the momentum in the Allies’ favour.
In the Gomel Bridgehead, an attempt to expand the lodgement further to the south had failed against increasing Soviet resistance on the evening of the 19th. But late that night an advance was made to the east of the bridgehead and the battle just north of that continued.
By the afternoon of 20 December, the Soviets were counter-attack in many places across the front with mixed success and maintaining a perimeter around the Byelorussian temporary capital of Gomel. But the Allies were also still attacking in some places, with the greatest emphasis remaining on the Bobruysk Pocket.
That battle was won shortly after and the eastern half of the pocket occupied at 0800hr on the 22nd. Within an hour of those lead Polish divisions had arriving, they had begun the final assault, reinforcing the almost-failed Yugoslavian attack before the enemy could regroup, immediately shifting the balance.
Some shifts in the aircraft numbers deployed over Belarus had caused air superiority to shift in favour of the 4thInt on 21 December and Allied (Polish?) losses had begun to increase quite significantly. The Polish jet fighter reserve now numbered 62 aircraft, but they had yet to be risked in combat as the PAF continued to want the far larger Luftwaffe and RAF to carry the heaviest load.
There was more unpleasant news when an Allied despatch reported that the Soviets had retaken Narva in Estonia. The Allies had many more divisions in reserve but at the front the odds were far more even. Whether this was because of logistics, weather and/or timidity was unknown to the Poles.
As the fighting raged in the pocket west of Bobruysk, the Poles attempted to secure the southern flank of Khmelnytskyi with a large force overrunning a Soviet division there on the afternoon of the 22nd.
In Bobruysk, the first Polish division had reinforced the front line of the attack. For the Poles, there were only minor logistical problems (-7.4%) but it was terrain (-43.6%) and the enemy’s entrenchment that were the major difficulties. The weather was an issue for both sides, while for the Soviets being unsupplied and encircled were the telling problems.
The net effect was far more heavily in favour of the Allies than the Soviets on balance, despite the 4thInt’s greater numbers.
In Khmelnytskyi, the Soviets managed to slip in four better organised divisions by midday on the 23rd to resume the defence as the Poles and Yugoslavs tried to push onto the major rail junction of Vinnytsia. Soviet numbers had decreased somewhat in this sector over the last couple of weeks but they were still able to offer determined resistance.
=======
The Rest of the World
The front in Iran and the Middle East remained relatively stable in the second half of December, though by the 29th a determined attack on the Kerman salient had swung decisively in the Soviets’ favour.
The Poles there were not willing to take on the brunt of the casualties and there was no desire to throw more troops into an exposed position. 5 and 32 DPs were ordered out before they started taking heavier casualties.
At the end of 1946, the Allies had lost more ground in Western China, mainly to the MAB. The fronts in Turkey and the Middle East to the Persian Gulf remained stable.
Not much had changed in the South-West Pacific either as the Allied defence of both Papua and Northern Australia had firmed up.
One new development was a new US landing in east-central Sumatra, just across from Kuala Lumpur. There were considerable Allied defenders in the vicinity, so this looked like being another large side-show for both factions.
The Last Dark Days of 1946: 24-31 December
The last week of the troubled year of 1946 began with one of the largest Allied victories of the war to date, certainly on the Eastern Front. Resistance in Bobruysk ended at 0500hr on 24 December, with over 150,000 enemy troops either killed or (mainly) captured. Not only did this permanently remove 16 enemy divisions from the order of battle, but in also freed up ten Polish divisions (all of them ‘foot’ infantry and militia) for other duties.
In the Gomel Bridgehead, things were tough in the last week of December. In the south of the lodgement, two defensive battles secured that flank but further progress proved impossible for now, especially with the weather and supply conditions in the salient.
But in the north of the bridgehead, no fewer than eight battles would be decided from 27-30 December over the depth objective. Three times, the Poles got troops in and three times they were ejected in increasingly small skirmished between exhausted opponents. But still the Poles persisted.
South of Khmelnytskyi the long battle raged on, flagging on the 24th, seemingly back on track when reinforcements were thrown in at midday, only to eventually be called off on the afternoon of Christmas Day when the Poles had been unable to reinforce the Yugoslavs to break through.
That attack was discontinued, then re-launched as a purely Polish operation involving three corps later that night. This time the battle was won convincingly a day later, the province occupied and then defended from a Soviet counter-attack by the morning of the 28th.
Supply in the cauldron of the Gomel bridgehead remained poor by 27 December as the Poles tried to maintain some forward momentum and awaited reinforcements released from the Bobruysk Pocket battle.
Finally, by the end of the month a sturdier defence of the latest bridgehead breakthrough east of Mogilev seemed to have been established, though the latest Soviet counter-attack remained in progress. It remained to be seen how much regrouping and resupply would be needed before the next phase of the northern pincer thrust in Gomel could begin.
In Ukraine, the key city of Zhytomyr was now contained in a large salient as the Allies, led by the Poles, encroached on Vinnytsia from the west and north in tough fighting. The Soviets had massed 16 divisions in the city itself. If another pocket could be created, their determination to hold it might be converted into an Allied triumph – though at what cost?
Polish casualties had risen in the second half of December as the fight got nastier, though this was more than balance by the other heavy casualties suffered by the Soviets including in the Bobruysk Pocket, which helped to increase what would otherwise have been a closer casualty ration from ‘ordinary’ battles.
It also appeared the Soviets must have been taking heavy casualties on other fronts too (depending on how some of these were being allocated) as they seemed to have suffered a massive loss of 620,000 men on all fronts in December. Their manpower reserves had now been reduced to around 330,000, while the Poles remained at a healthy 1.45M, essentially balancing their losses with new recruits for a roughly neutral outcome during a whole month of the offensive in atrocious winter conditions.
Few in any of the four major factions believed the new year of 1947 was likely to see the overall war swing decisively in favour of one side or the other, though both optimists and cynics had their views. Realists just saw another generation at war without relief ...
