Encirclement Battles of WWII

[AJFFM]

Hello to you all

Encirclement battles are in my opinion the dominant feature of fighting in WWII. No war before it saw so many encirclements.

Yet finding information about those encirclements is quite tricky. Not long ago I discovered that there was a massive encirclement in Lille during the battle of France and currently reading David Glantz's epic "Barbarossa Derailed" I discovered several encirclements and sieges I never heard of.

This thread aims to hopefully list all relevant encirclements of the war that saw a corps size equivalent or larger formation being encircled.

The format I suggest and feel free to suggest one of your own is:

Front:
Campaign:
Date:
Attacking Forces:
Defending Forces:
Units encircled:
Result:

So, shall we start?

I will begin with arguably the mother of them all:

Front: Eastern Front.
Campaign: Operation Barbarossa.
Date: August-September 1941.
Attacking Forces:German Army Group South: 1st PzG, 6th and 17th armies. Army Group Center: 2nd PzG, 2nd Army.
Defending Forces: Red Army's South Western Front: 5th, 37th, 26th and 21st armies.
Units encircled: The armies mentioned above
Result: All 43 divisions of the armies above perished. Soviet estimate that 616000 men were either killed, captured or missing with 700k men being the total number of casualties. Only 15000 men were estimated to have escaped.

Please join the discussion.

[Kingfish]

It might help if you added another heading for name of encirclement, since everyone knows the Falaise Pocket but few know it as "Normandy, August 16-20 1944".

[AJFFM]

It's a free for all, add whatever heading you like.

[Carl Schwamberger]

Front: Tunisia

Campaign: African

Date: January-May 1943

Attacking Forces: Allied naval air & ground forces Mediterranian

Defending Forces: Axis (German Italian) air and ground forces in Tunisia

Units encircled: Two German/Italian armies including personnel from air and naval support units.

Result: Allied air and naval interdiction of Axis Sea Line of Communication between Tunisia and Italy was sucessful. Axis army group denied sufficient fuel & other supplies for resistance. Small numbers, approx. 10% of the total Axis force were able to evacuate. Over 180,000 German/Italian soldiers killed or captured.

[AJFFM]

Front: Eastern Front.

Campaign: Battle of Leningrad.

Date: May-July 1942.

Attacking Forces: German I and XXXVIII army Corps of German 18th Army.

Defending Forces: Soviet 2nd Shock and 52nd and 59th Armies of Volkhov Front.

Units encircled: Entire 2nd shock Army.

Result: Destruction of the 2nd shock Army. 94k total casualties including the army Commander, Vlasov who was POW.

[Art]

Defending Forces: Red Army's South Western Front: 5th, 37th, 26th and 21st armies.
Units encircled: The armies mentioned above
Result: All 43 divisions of the armies above perished. Soviet estimate that 616000 men were either killed, captured or missing with 700k men being the total number of casualties.

They didn't estimate it, I'm quite sure about it.

[AJFFM]

Hi Art

I lost my copy of Krivosheev a year ago but I remember that his estimates of the Kiev Defensive Operation (If I am not mistaken, the official Soviet name of the battle) was about 700k casualties of these 616k men were listed as KIA/MIA/Captured. The Germans claim 600k POWs I think but the discrepancy is a result in the definition of the battle between the two armies.

Any more battles?

[Art]

I lost my copy of Krivosheev a year ago but I remember that his estimates of the Kiev Defensive Operation (If I am not mistaken, the official Soviet name of the battle) was about 700k casualties of these 616k men were listed as KIA/MIA/Captured.

That covers period from 7 July to 26 September and apart from the Kiev pocket proper includes also battles at Uman, Malin, Kiev, Gomel and other things. Contrary to some persistent myth based on confusion with original data the German side didn't claim 650 thousands POWs in the Kiev pocket alone. I'll post some info on that later, if you don't mind.

[stg 44]

I lost my copy of Krivosheev a year ago but I remember that his estimates of the Kiev Defensive Operation (If I am not mistaken, the official Soviet name of the battle) was about 700k casualties of these 616k men were listed as KIA/MIA/Captured.

That covers period from 7 July to 26 September and apart from the Kiev pocket proper includes also battles at Uman, Malin, Kiev, Gomel and other things. Contrary to some persistent myth based on confusion with original data the German side didn't claim 650 thousands POWs in the Kiev pocket alone. I'll post some info on that later, if you don't mind.

Wasn't the claim over 600k casualties of which PoWs were included?

[Art]

Here is a record on prisoners and weapons captured from the KTB OKW:

One can see that the common number of 660 thousands POW in fact included claims from operation at Gomel in August 1941 and others. The Kiev pocket proper accounted for some 510 thousands POWs which is in better agreement with available Soviet data on the personnel strength of encircled forces.

[Art]

And here are Soviet data mentioned from the report submitted by Pokrovsky and Bagramyan on 2 October 1941:

As of 1.09.1941 the complete personnel strength was:
5 Army - 93 412 men
21 Army - 106 831
26 Army - 85 456
37 Army - 113 718
Units subordinated to the Front HQ - 53 303
Total - 452 720
Losses in the first days of September would decrease those figures somewhat especially for the 5 and 21 Armies. Pay attention to a very small number of remaining tanks (64). In addition four railroad engineer brigades had some 12500 men on 1.09.1941. There were apparently some losses suffered by air force, SOS, replacement and construction units, patients in hospitals etc. of the South-West Fronts, yet the report makes no mention of them. The conclusion is that we have a bracket of total losses in the pocket from 450 (Pokrovsky) to 510 (KTB OKW) thousands men.

[AJFFM]

Front: Eastern Front.

Campaign: Dneper-Carpathian Offensive, Kaments-Podolsky Pocket.

Date: March 25-April 15th, 1944.

Attacking Forces: 1st Uk. Front, 2nd Uk Front.

Defending Forces: AG South's 1st Pz Army.

Units encircled: Entire 1st Pz army including four corps, XLVI Pz (XXXXVI in some books), III Pz, XXIV Pz and LIX Inf. corps, total of almost 200k men.

Result: Successful breakout. After dramatic battles including penetration by Soviet 4th tank army which successfully captured the center of the pocket, a shift of the entire pocket westerward, unseasonable heavy snow followed by a speedy melting ushering the "rasputitsa", II SS Pz corps opened the way for the escape. Compared with other encirclements the German suffered, this was perhaps the most successful one. Roughly 15k Germans were listed as casualties however the army lost almost all its precious heavy equipment especially tanks. Only 45 armoured vehicles escaped.

[Kelvin]

Here is a record on prisoners and weapons captured from the KTB OKW:

One can see that the common number of 660 thousands POW in fact included claims from operation at Gomel in August 1941 and others. The Kiev pocket proper accounted for some 510 thousands POWs which is in better agreement with available Soviet data on the personnel strength of encircled forces.

Hi, Art, of 20 big encirclement battles occured in 1941. If Kiev were exaggerated, so remainder 19 battles, I also suspect it for a long time : e.g.

Battle of Uman (Aug 1941) and Mariupol (Oct 1941) really captured over 100,000 Russian separately ? Too many ?

Battle of Nikolaev (Aug 1941), based upon combat strength of Russian 9th Army between JUly and Aug 1941, German figures of 60,000 is too much too ?

One battle called Dnieper Bend which had 84,000 Russian captured, how accurate about that ? And also small battle of Gomel also took 84,000 men ?

And how true of battle of Staraya Russia which German took 53,000 ?

And at Minsk, some said 287,000 and other said 327,000, also exaggerated ?

Lastly, when German replused Russian offensive at Kharkov in 1942, Russian really suffered 310,000 casualties ?

[AJFFM]

First of all, no one will ever know the extent of Soviet losses in WWII, or even German losses for that matter. The Red army raised nearly 300 divisions many of them DNO/NKVD divisions in the time frame where Barbarossa happened and some of these didn't survive a single day in combat (one DNO division raised in Leningrad was wiped out within 24 hours of action and it had 12,000 men according to Erickson) meaning they practically died without paper trails.

Now to numbers, I see no problem with these numbers and of course there were exaggerations but they were within reasonable limits. Krivosheev mentions 2.3 million MIA and 800,000 dead of various reasons. Others of course (Glantz for example) estimate the dead at 3 million and the total casualties of about 6 million. The Wehrmacht claims 3 million PoWs. Regardless of both numbers one can argue that German numbers are not that far from reality when they claim high numbers in encirclements.

In one example, the Smolensk encirclement, which ended in a successful breakout by the 16th and 20th armies the totals for both armies were about 50-60 thousand after the breakout from a pre-breakout strength of 200,000 roughly. Here the Germans claimed 300k men but definitions matter since the Germans defined the battle differently from the Soviets and if I am not mistaken the numbers included the less known encirclements at Mogilev, Gomel and Vitebsk. If all these are included the 300,000 PoWs, which is still an exaggeration, starts to make sense.

[Art]

Hi, Art, of 20 big encirclement battles occured in 1941. If Kiev were exaggerated, so remainder 19 battles, I also suspect it for a long time :

I hope you're aware that answering your question would require and entire PhD thesis. As a general note OKH reduced the claims of prisoners captured by half a million by the end of 1941:
http://ww2stats.com/pow_ger_okh_gen.html
which suggests that similar corrections must be applied to individual episodes. Then what was the proportion of militia/police/construction workers/civilians among the prisoners captured is question hardly to be answered by anybody.