December 16 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Vatutin, who was a prominent Soviet military commander during the Second World War. Staff officers called him a “general for victories”, and his name is correctly associated with many WWII victories, the Voice of Russia’s Alexander Vatutin reports.
Napoleon Bonaparte was quoted as saying once that each and every soldier had a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. In this regard, Nikolai Vatutin is a classic example of a Soviet private-turned-general. He was born in the village of Chepuhino in the Voronezh Governorate into a Russian peasant family on December 16, 1901. He left a commercial school before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and was sent to the Red Army in 1920 as a private. Shortly afterwards, he was promoted to the rank of officer. He successfully combined military service with studies and on the eve of WWII, he was appointed First Deputy Chief of Staff. It was at that time that many started calling him an “inconvenient general,” in a reference to the fact that he always spoke his mind when it came to the real state of affairs in the Red Army. Joseph Stalin, on his part, felt ambivalent about reports by Vatutin who is now praised as one of those Soviet generals who made a great contribution to the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. Mikhail Myagkov is a Moscow-based military historian.
"Always taking the lead was a motto of General Vatutin who realised long before WWII that Nazi Germany was a formidable force to be reckoned with, Myagkov says, referring to Vatutin’s reports on the matter submitted to the Military Chief of Staff in the first half of 1941. They included a report submitted on May 15, 1941, when Vatutin called for launching a preemptive attack against Germany, a document that drew the ire of Stalin who deep in his heart realized that Vatutin was right when he warned about the nature of modern warfare at the time. Despite this, Stalin decided to turn a deaf ear to Vatutin’s warnings."
Many major WWII battles on the territory of the Soviet Union are associated with the name of Nikolai Vatutin, historians say, praising his contribution to the Soviet troops’ victories in the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk in 1941, 1942 and 1943, respectively. In a separate development in the summer of 1941, troops led by General Vatution helped halt the Nazi forces’ advance on Leningrad. During the Battle of Stalingrad, Vatutin received command of the newly formed Southwestern Front and played an important role in the planning of the Soviet counter-offensive and the encirclement of the 6th German Army led by Field Marshal Paulus. The Battle of Kursk saw Vatutin take command of the Voronezh Front, where one of the largest tank battles in military history took place at Prokhorovka on July 12, 1943. More than 1,000 tanks were involved in the battle.
On 6 November 1943, General Vatutin’s troops liberated Kiev, in a victory that was followed by the Korsun-Shevchenko operation in January 1944, when the Soviet forces finalised the defeat of German troops in right-bank Ukraine. This facilitated the Red Army’s advance to the Soviet Union’s state borders.
Sadly, Nikolai Vatutin did not live to see the Victory Day. On February 29, 1944, Vatutin was fatally wounded after being ambushed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army far behind the front lines. He succumbed to his injuries at a hospital in Kiev on April 15, 1944 and was given a state funeral there several days later. Moscow paid tribute to Vatutin by firing 20 artillery salvos.
Even after his death, Vatutin remained an 'inconvenient' general, and only in 1965, he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, in an event timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of WWII Victory. Soviet soldiers used to say: “the name of Vatutin implies victory”, while Germans called him a “grandmaster”, in a sign of recognition. No doubt, the name of General Nikolai Vatutin holds a worthy place among renowned Russian military commanders.
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