The Defence and Evacuation of the Kuban Bridgehead, January -October 1943: examining a forgotten campaign in the German-Soviet War

Abstract

This article examines the little-known battles fought by German and Soviet forces over the Kuban bridgehead on the north-eastern coast of the Black Sea from January to October 1943. The bridgehead formed when the German Seventeenth Army withdrew into the Taman Peninsula as Army Group A retreated from the Caucasus in the wake of the defeat at Stalingrad. Seventeenth Army held the position through the spring, summer and autumn of 1943, before withdrawing to the Crimea. The campaign can be viewed as an interesting microcosm of the entire German-Soviet war. Many of the events and trends of the wider war can be seen at a smaller scale in the Kuban: the seemingly unstoppable German advance that was halted against the odds in a shattered industrial area, and the gradual and often unsteady transformation of the Red Army from the chaos and catastrophe of the early period of the war to a skilfully led and professional fighting force, in parallel with the Wehrmacht’s gradual but inexorable decline in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The entire rationale for holding the bridgehead is an early example of Hitler’s inflexible and unrealistic strategic vision as the tide of war turned, and the campaign fell under post-war rewriting of history by the Soviet leadership to overstate the contributions of senior political figures and erase mistakes and defeats from the record. The campaign has been largely overlooked in the published English language history of the war. This article addresses that lack of attention, providing a detailed exploration of the campaign based on German and Russian sources to offer new insight and understanding of a rarely analysed part of the war.