by Alexey Statsenko
In the early morning of September 19, 1941, an oppressive silence descended on Kyiv. The city streets were completely empty, trams stood frozen in the middle of their tracks, the water pipes were out, and the electricity was out. The last regular units of the Red Army were retreating across the bridges to the left bank of the Dnieper.
The horrors of encirclement awaited them: as early as September 14, the enemy had closed the encirclement behind the defenders of the Ukrainian capital and the units that "held" the Dnieper banks north to the mouth of the Desna and south to Kremenchuk. All these days, they had been busy strengthening and expanding the inner and outer "walls" of the encirclement.
All of this was known at the headquarters of the commander of the Southwestern Front, but the Headquarters directive was signed by Chief of the General Staff Boris Shaposhnikov only late in the evening of September 17, 1941. The text was as follows:
"To the Commander of the 37th Army. Due to the current situation on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in the Kiev area, the General Headquarters authorizes the abandonment of the Kiev Fortified Region and the city of Kiev and a withdrawal to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River, taking over the grouping under the orders of the Commander of the Southwestern Front.
During the retreat, remove and evacuate all weapons from the fortified area. Anything that cannot be removed due to the situation must be destroyed; all bridges over the Dnieper River and other military installations must be blown up."
This decision was frankly belated.
At the headquarters of Major General Andrei Vlasov's 37th Army, who in 1941 was not yet a traitor general but commanded a defensive sector, the order was received at two in the morning. A plan was immediately developed for a gradual withdrawal of troops from the defensive line to the bridges and the left bank.
That same night, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, Vasily Sergienko, gave the order to urgently prepare the bridges and crossings across the Dnieper, which were guarded by the division's soldiers, for demolition.
The withdrawal was complicated by the enemy's renewed offensive on September 16 on the southern face of the defensive line near the village of Pirogovo. Attacking units of the 75th and 95th Infantry Divisions, along with the 99th Light Infantry Division, which had been transferred the day before to reinforce them, advanced two to three kilometers in two days, capturing Pirogovo, Novosyolki, Myshelovka, and Zhukov Island.
A large group of Soviet troops—1,650 soldiers and commanders—was blocked at the latter point. They surrendered to the Slovak motorized division advancing in the second echelon on September 19.
The Germans were desperate to break through to Kyiv's southern bridges: the Darnitsky railway bridge and the Navodnitsky road bridge. They needed to use some force, doomed to destruction and capture, to hold off the enemy in order to conduct a retreat.
On September 18, the Germans launched another offensive. They only managed to advance through the Goloseevsky Forest, approaching the approaches to the Lysogorsky Fort, protected by powerful barbed wire entanglements. This was a powerful stronghold, blocking the route to the southern bridges of Kyiv.
During September 18, the units and formations defending Kyiv received orders to withdraw unnoticed at nightfall, having first destroyed all equipment that could not be evacuated.
Second Secretary's Gold
On the night of September 19, the retreating regular units were covered by units of militia, police, NKVD, and other armed groups, mostly formed from local residents, who would later manage to dissolve into the civilian population.
Apparently, this is precisely the reason for the death of Timofey Shamrylo, the second secretary of the Kyiv City Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. He was supposed to remain in occupied Kyiv to lead the underground, but then disappeared. Rumors circulated in Kyiv throughout the post-war period about Shamrylo's gold, which he had left behind for the needs of the underground and hidden somewhere.
Residents of Kyiv erect barricades on the city streets. 1941.
Some said that the party functionary ended up in Gestapo cells, and that the subsequent destruction of the underground was connected with this; others said that Shamrylo had defected to the Germans.
In 2011, Kyiv searchers found the remains of Shamrylo and 127 other Red Army soldiers and commanders near the village of Hatne in the Kyivo-Svyatoshinsky district. Here, on September 18 and 19, militias fought to cover the retreat of our troops.
Apparently, the party leader and member of the city's Defense Headquarters went to the front lines to support the Komsomol youth fighting there – and died.
"Farewell, Motherland! 1941"
Most of the line of contact ran in front of the pillboxes of the Kyiv Fortified Area, which were defended by three separate machine-gun battalions. Their commanders received orders to blow up the fortified firing positions and retreat. But there was nothing to blow up the pillboxes with—there were no explosives there except grenades.
Therefore, the garrisons were simply transported out or carried out if horse-drawn transport was unavailable. They carried machine guns, ammunition, and personal weapons, assembled at designated points, and then retreated in battalion columns to designated bridges.
The last remaining crews in position fired, simulating the presence of large forces in position.
On the night of September 18-19, the glow of fires blazed here and there over the city. In their light, accompanied by artillery fire and the rattle of machine guns, columns of retreating soldiers made their way toward Kyiv's bridges.
On the railway bridges: Petrovsky, located north of the city, and Darnitsky (Struve), in its southern part, sappers covered the rails with boards.
They also constructed makeshift temporary ramps, and vehicles used them to climb onto bridges and cross to the east bank. But even this solution couldn't completely eliminate the traffic jams.
The morning of September 19th dawned. The Germans launched an offensive, which now had to be held back only by a small force of soldiers, practically deprived of artillery support.
From the left bank, some batteries were attacking the advancing enemy, but communications had already been disrupted, and there was no one to direct their fire. Some units panicked, and in some places the enemy managed to break through.
In one of the posterns of the Lysogorsk fort, where militiamen from the Kirovsky district (modern-day Pechersky) fought against the infantry of the enemy's 95th Division, the Germans captured 319 prisoners. Even today, an inscription has been discovered on one of the bricks:
"There were three of us. We stood to the death. Farewell, Motherland. '41."
Gaidar was the last to leave.
The Germans completely captured the Lysohirsky fort on the morning of the 19th. The 95th Infantry Division stormed the Pechersk Citadel of the old Kyiv Fortress (now the site of the Museum of the History of Ukraine in World War II) and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.
At one o'clock in the afternoon, advance units of the 296th Infantry Division entered the monastery grounds from the north. Soon, the Germans approached the bridges, and explosions began.
The sappers first blew up the southernmost Darnitsky railway bridge. The continuous stream of people, carts, and vehicles flowing toward it was redirected to the Navodnitsky Bridge.
Military engineer A. A. Finkelstein, who was responsible for its detonation, waited until the last moment. A detachment from the pontoon regiment defending the bridgehead had already entered the battle, and enemy motorcyclists had already flown ashore and opened fire on the retreating troops.
Finally, rockets shot into the sky, and the bridge deck burst into flames. Panic broke out among those who hadn't managed to cross. Many jumped into the water. Horses reared. The last defenders of the bridgehead ran across the burning planks, followed by German machine gunners.
The sappers waited until the last of our soldiers reached the left bank and blew up the bridge, which was thrown down from the piers by the explosion.
The next to explode was the northernmost railway bridge, named after Petrovsky. The last to collapse, at 4:00 PM, were the spans of the Evgenia Bosh Bridge. Writer and war correspondent Arkady Gaidar participated in its explosion —he was one of the last to leave Kyiv. Sappers simply dismantled the pontoon bridges.
Maximum possible damage to the enemy
At the same time as the bridges, objects in the city began to explode - the KRES, the water pumping station, the telegraph, the radio center, the railway station and many others.
The sky was clouded with smoke from the fires. From the left bank, it seemed as if all of Podil was ablaze. The city's last defenders—NKVD soldiers from the 57th Railway Regiment and the 34th and 81st Separate Industrial Protection Battalions—crossed the Dnieper in boats. Covering the army's retreat, they lost up to two companies.
But the 299th Infantry Division broke the fighting on the approaches of the militias of the Stalinsky and Zheleznodorozhny districts in the villages of Kryukovshchina and Sofievskaya Borshagovka only by evening.
On the northern face of the Kyiv fortified area's defense, garrisons of the separate machine-gun battalion that occupied the pillboxes remained, which the Germans were forced to storm until late in the evening.
This slowed the enemy advance and allowed the withdrawal of most of the troops. By the end of September 19, the Germans had occupied the entire right-bank part of Kyiv. The only district on the left bank remaining Soviet at that time was Darnitsky District.
On September 20, 1941, another explosion rocked the city. At the Pechersk Lavra, a retaining wall and the "View" observation deck of the so-called Upper Lavra were blown away.
An entire group of German officers perished, including Colonel Hans-Heinrich von Seydlitz und Golau, commander of the 29th Army Corps' artillery department. He was posthumously promoted to general.
This loss had a depressing effect on the German command, but the main impressions from the occupation of the mother of Russian cities were still to come.
In September 1941, reports from Army Groups South and Center headquarters to Berlin declared the capture of Kyiv an unqualified success. However, judging by later memoirs, German military leaders did not view this operation as a strategic success. From July to September 1941, excessively significant Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe forces were tied down near Kiev, and the pace of the offensive clearly slowed.
Modern historians believe that this two-month "bogged-down" of the Germans near Kiev gave our command a head start to prepare the defense of Moscow. The tactical defeat essentially nullified the plans for the blitzkrieg, which seemed close to being realized in the summer of 1941. The first, catastrophic phase of the war was over.