Wiking SS division Breaks out of the Korsun Pocket.
The Korsun–Shevchenkovsky Offensive led to the Battle of the Korsun–Cherkasy Pocket which took place from 24 January to 16 February 1944. The offensive was part of the Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive. In it, the 1st and 2nd, commanded, respectively, by Vatutin and Konev, trapped German forces of Army Group South in a pocket near the Dnieper river. During weeks of fighting, the two Red Army Fronts tried to eradicate the pocket. The encircled German units broke out in coordination with a relief attempt by other German forces, with "roughly two out of three" encircled men succeeding in escaping the pocket, "and almost one third of their men ... dead or prisoners."
The Soviet victory in the Korsun–Shevchenkovsky Offensive marked the successful implementation of Soviet deep operations. Soviet Deep Battle doctrine envisaged the breaking of the enemy's forward Soviet defences to allow fresh operational reserves to exploit the break through by driving into the strategic depth of the enemy front. The arrival of large numbers of U.S. and British built trucks and halftracks gave the Soviet forces much greater mobility than they had in the earlier portion of the war. This, coupled with the Soviet capacity to hold large formations in reserve gave the Soviets the ability to drive deep behind German defenses again and again. Though the Soviet operation at Korsun did not result in the collapse in the German front that the Soviet command had hoped for, it marked a significant change in operations. Through the rest of the war the Soviets would place large German forces in jeopardy, while the Germans were stretched thin and constantly attempting to extract themselves from one crisis to the next. Mobile Soviet offensives were the hallmark of the Eastern front for the remainder of the war.
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