Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  The Red Army was not the only one able to restore itself under emergency conditions. With winter turning to spring, the Germans in Russia emerged as a combination of an ideologically motivated citizen army and a seasoned professional fighting force. The months in Russia had pitilessly exposed weak human and material links. New weapons still existed mostly on drawing boards, but officers and men knew how to use what they had to best advantage. A counterattack in late April relieved 100,000 men cut off in the Demyansk Pocket since January. Infantry, artillery, and pioneers, with substantial support from the Romanians, began the final attack on the Crimean peninsula on May 8. Most of the mobile divisions had been refitted. Some especially hard-tried ones like the 6th and 7th Panzer Divisions were sent all the way to France. The rest remained in Russia but out of the line for a few weeks. They would be ready by the time the rasputitsa, the spring thaw, ended.

  II

  ON APRIL 5, 1942, Hitler issued Directive 41, outlining the operational plan for the summer of 1942. Its focus would be in the south: a major drive toward the Caucasus to destroy Soviet forces in the region and seize the oil fields vital to both Soviet and German war-making. A secondary objective was Stalingrad—not for its own sake, but to cut the Volga River, isolate the Russians south of the industrial city, and cover the main assault’s flank.

  Compared to Barbarossa, the offensive’s scale was reduced but its aims were no less ambitious. It would be launched on a 500-mile front. If it gained the set objectives it would create a salient of more than 1,300 miles—something like the distance from New York City to the middle of Kansas. Road and rail networks would grow thinner as the Germans advanced. Scheduling the main attack for the end of June left at best four or five months before rain and snow put an end to major mobile operations. Even if the offensive succeeded there was no guarantee that the Soviet Union would collapse or cease fighting de facto. It had other domestic sources of oil. It also had the support of the US and Britain, who were committed to keeping Russia in the war at all costs.

  In grand-strategic terms the operation nevertheless made more sense to Hitler—and to his senior commanders—than any other option. It offered the opportunity to consolidate the Reich’s military and economic position against the establishment of a second front in Europe—something Hitler considered possible in 1943. It projected extending the land war into Asia Minor and beyond, where the immediate pickings and possibilities seemed somewhat easier. And it offered a second chance for the reinvigorated German army to do what it so far had done best: win a mobile campaign in a limited time. That meant using the panzers. Again they would be at the apex of an inverted pyramid—this time one with direct global implications.

  Operation Blue, in sharp contrast to Barbarossa, was designed as not a single entity, but a series of interlocking, mutually supporting attacks succeeding each other in a tightly structured timetable. In part that reflected the need to shift limited air assets from one sector to another as a force multiplier. It reflected as well the changing dynamics of the ground forces’ order of battle. The winter campaign indicated that however much the infantry might recover from its December nadir, it could not expect to secure even shut-down fronts with its own resources. No fewer than ten panzer divisions were assigned to Army Groups North and Center. That left only nine panzer divisions available for Operation Blue. The order of battle also included a half dozen motorized divisions, but behind them the picture grew darker. Two-thirds of the infantry divisions projected for the offensive were either newly reconstructed or still in the process. They had time neither to rest the old hands nor to integrate their replacements, thousands of whom would be fresh from basic training. Their projected effectiveness was substantially less than their forebears of 1941.

  The slack must be taken up by the panzers. In December 1941, a newly organized two-battalion Panzer Regiment 201, had been sent to the Leningrad sector. Its hundred-odd Panzer IIIs and IVs achieved the kind of disproportionate successes that reminded the generals why massed armor was a good idea. In February, each panzer division assigned to Blue was ordered to be reinforced with a third tank battalion. By May, however, it was clear the only way that was possible was by transferring them from other divisions. The same was true for the motorized divisions’ tank battalions. When the shuffling and redesig nating was finished, seven of the ten divisions in the “inactive” sectors had only a single tank battalion. In other words they were battle groups in all but name. Even more than Barbarossa, Blue was all or nothing—especially for the panzers.

  One report submitted in May gave the offensive six months to seize the oil fields, otherwise, not only must offensive operations cease; the Eastern Front itself could not be sustained. Such prognostications left little room at command levels for public questioning. A good many two-o’-clock-in-the-morning doubts were nevertheless resolved when, on May 12, the Soviet Southwestern Front launched a spoiling offensive around Kharkov. Intended to disrupt German plans and regain the initiative, the attack’s 650,000 men and 1,200 tanks were stopped within a week. By May 28 a counterattack built around 1st Panzer Army accounted for 240,000 prisoners, more than 1,200 tanks, and 2,000 guns. To Hitler and the High Command it seemed just like old times. Ivan was still Ivan. Closer to the front, perspectives were different. Eberhard von Mackensen had impeccable military bloodlines. His father was August von Mackensen, one of the more successful German field commanders of World War I. He had commanded III Panzer Corps since the invasion, and had made a reputation as the best horse in 1st Panzer Army’s stable: quick-thinking and hard-driving. The Russians, he reported, had grown “more fanatical, more ruthless, and more solid.” Victory had been won only by an all-out effort—plus a fair bit of luck. A corps commander’s observations changed no one’s mind.

  On June 28, Army Group South tore the front wide open. Its CO was Fedor von Bock, getting a second chance by accident. Reichenau had replaced Rundstedt in Deceember 1941 and died from a heart attack six weeks later. Command in Russia involved unprecedented levels of physical, intellectual, and emotional strain. Bock suffered from stomach trouble—hardly surprising under the circumstances—but a few weeks’ down time restored him sufficiently to take over an appointment for which no other clearly more suitable candidate was available. Six months later he had 68 divisions, 750 tanks, and more than 1,200 aircraft including, predictably, VIII Air Corps, with its obsolescent but devastating Stukas and the ME 109s that covered them. But Bock’s expectations rested with the one-two punch of Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army and the widely traveled 4th Panzer Army, which had moved from Leningrad to Moscow and now to the south under Hoth, transferred from his anomalous infantry command.

  Bock’s order of battle included around two dozen divisions from the Reich’s allies and clients. These were the fruit of a winter’s diplomatic arm-twisting. Mostly Romanian and Italian, these formations were nowhere nearly as well equipped, trained, commanded, or motivated as their German counterparts. Hopes for significant material support from the Reich had proved futile. Their projected roles in Blue were correspondingly limited: flank guards, screening, and occupying low-risk sectors of the line. Their numerical role in the operation nevertheless highlighted the weakness of the German assault force relative to its mission—and implied trouble should things not work as programmed.

  If Hitler’s directive was ambitious, the High Command’s plan was audacious to the point of recklessness. Reduced to its essentials—arguably oversimplified—Blue would begin in the north, with 4th Panzer Army leading a thrust toward the Don River and the rail hub and industrial center of Voronezh, then turning south to trap and finish off the Rotarmisten driven east by 1st Panzer Army and its accompanying infantry. Meanwhile, the 6th Army would advance to the Volga and Stalingrad while the 1st Panzer Army struck down the Volga to Baku and the Caucasus.

  As early as July it was clear that a single headquarters could not manage the force, time, and space factors. Army Group South became Army Group B on July 7, taking over 4th Panzer
Army. A newly created Army Group A assumed responsibility for Kleist’s panzers. In its initial stages, Operation Blue nevertheless bade fair to replicate the summer of 1941. German mechanized spearheads rolled across the steppes under an air umbrella the Red Air Force, still repairing its loss of trained pilots, could not penetrate. By July 4, Hoth’s vanguards were across the Don and at the outskirts of Voronezh. The LX Panzer Corps, pulling the rest of 6th Army behind it, linked up from the left with 4th Panzer Army on July 2, trapping one more Soviet army in a pocket.

  The Red Army was still a heavy, blunt instrument, but not the bludgeon of 1941. The tank brigades formed from the detritus of 1941 were being combined into corps with the approximate armored strength of a panzer division. Beginning in October, they would be joined by newly created mechanized corps: panzer grenadiers without the half-tracks. Stalin and the High Command responded to Blue by launching a series of offensives against Army Groups North and Center, and by committing a high proportion of their increasing reserve forces to successive offensives around Voronezh.

  These were not mere counterattacks, but parts of a systematic effort to regain the strategic initiative secured in December. Bock urged taking the fight to the Russians where they stood. Hitler and the High Command instead ordered Hoth south. Führer Directive 45 dispatched it toward Rostov, to cooperate with Kleist in encircling Soviet forces in the region and opening the way to the Caucasus. The infantry divisions and Allied formations left to Army Group B were ordered to capture Stalingrad and secure Army Group A’s flank and rear. Bock was summarily dismissed, this time permanently.

  Directive 45 reflected the consensus of Hitler and the High Command that keeping to time justified overriding the judgment of the commander on the ground. Robert M. Citino correctly interprets this decision as a long step away from a Prussian/German tradition of validating subordinates’ initiatives. On the other hand, a case could be made—and was widely debated between the wars—that the Battle of the Marne in 1914 had been lost because of the German High Command’s unwillingness or inability to control the movements of the army’s right wing. Then, communications and maneuverability were alike severely limited. Now, radios and aircraft enabled constant contact among headquarters. And on the ground, the panzers could implement any sequence of decisions—even when, like this one, the result was a military snipe hunt.

  With losses rapidly mounting, especially in the best divisions, the Soviet High Command, the Stavka, insisted space must temporarily be exchanged for time. Stalin finally authorized retreat on July 6, and the Soviets in front of Army Group A gave ground. Rostov fell on July 24 in a virtuoso cape-and-sword tactical performance by Mackensen and III Panzer Corps, executed at an overall cost of fewer than 1,500 casualties. There was no pocket, no gigantic new bag of prisoners and weapons. The new string of defeats and the abandonment of more of the industrial facilities created at such high human cost nevertheless generated a crisis in public morale serious enough for Stalin to issue Order 227 on July 28. It called for an end to retreat and demanded that every foot of Soviet soil be defended. Penalties ranged from service in a penal battalion to summary execution: a quarter-million Red Army soldiers were sentenced to death for failure to obey

  On July 19, Stalin put Stalingrad on a war footing; on July 21, Stavka established a Stalingrad Front. Its three armies were a mixture of green troops and formations already hard hammered. But Order 227 was a reminder that there was nowhere to go. Stalingrad’s citizens responded not only by digging trenches and filling sandbags, but by reporting to work and finishing their shifts.

  The German High Command responded by reassigning Hoth’s army to Army Group B and ordering it to attack Stalingrad from the south. The back-and-forth odyssey of Panzer Army 4 resembled the Kiev maneuver of 1941 in wearing down men and tanks. It was also a sign that Stalingrad was beginning to loom larger in German thinking than originally intended. No less significant was the fact that Directive 45 gave the Caucasus operation a separate code name. Calling it Edelweiss meant that Army Groups A and B were in effect now pursuing two objectives simultaneously rather than sequentially, as in Blue’s original conception. This was no simple manifestation of Hitler’s unfocused, dilettantish interference in command decisions. The High Command as well as the Führer were in the process of convincing themselves that for the Caucasus to fall, Stalingrad must be captured, not merely blockaded and screened. Hitler’s concept was based on pursuit; Halder was thinking in terms of a battle. The underlying gulf between the presumptions was bridged by the assumption that the panzers would make prioritizing—creating a Schwerpunkt—unnecessary.

  Success in that unspoken mission would in good part depend on the kind of command initiative that had just cost Bock his job. Army Group A was under Field Marshal Wilhelm List. Not a tanker by experience or ascription, he had worked with the panzers in France, commanded an armor- heavy army in the Balkan campaign, and was a reasonable choice to oversee the drive for the Caucasus. Kleist was expected to do the heavy work with three panzer and two motorized divisions plus, for what it might prove worth, the “Fast Division” of the Slovak army: about the same numbers he took into Greece against far less formidable opposition. The Germans were reckoning heavily on being received as liberators by the Caucasian people, and reckoning even more heavily on intelligence estimates that described Soviet forces in the region as on the edge of collapse. Instead, during August, resistance stiffened all along the line of advance. The 1st Panzer Army took Maikop on August 9, but the progress was slowed by the Red Army, by temperatures regularly exceeding 100 degrees, and by roadless, trackless, mountainous terrain unlike anything the panzers had experienced.

  “Jungle-like thicket with no visibility,” reported Hitler’s aide Army Major Gerhard Engel. Kitchens could not be moved forward; wounded could not be moved back. Even the mountain troops, the German army’s other elite force, made slow progress. Hitler fired List on September 9 and began directing Army Group A himself—his greatest departure from procedure to date. By the end of September, Soviet resistance—in particular air attacks enabled by the increasing withdrawal of German fighters to Stalingrad—combined with dust, broken terrain, fuel shortages, and unreplaced losses in men and tanks, brought 1st Panzer Army to a halt well away from the oil fields of Grozny and Baku, the original objective of Operation Blue. In the rear, Maikop’s refining facilities had been well demolished, and the bureaucratic inefficiency endemic in the Third Reich handicapped their reconstruction. Specifically the technical experts declared that the equipment designated for the Caucasus would be better employed in Romania—or even the Vienna region.

  One possibility remained. In the nineteenth century the Russian government had constructed the Georgian and Ossetian military roads through the Caucasus: still solid highways and ideal axes of blitzkrieg. It took a month for Kleist to concentrate and redistribute what remained of his striking power—by now half-strength and less in men and tanks. On October 25 the 2nd Romanian Guard Division broke open the Soviet front. The next night, 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions, Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps, broke out and started south. Outrunning Soviets who had never experienced a real German lightning attack, 23rd Panzer closed the Ossetian Road on November 1. To the south, 13th Panzer Division was 10 miles away from the Georgian Road. The next day it cut that distance to five miles; by November 3 to a mile and a half. Soviet resistance centered on the city of Ordzhonikidze. The 13th Panzer Division’s infantrymen attacked on foot, into the teeth of a network of trenches, bunkers, and pillboxes matching anything in Stalingrad itself. A temporarily attached assault-gun battery supporting the riflemen accounted for twenty T-34s. On October 20 the division had 130 tanks. A month later it was down to 27. Division and corps had nothing left to stop the Soviet attack on December 6 that tore into the 13th Division’s flanks while a blizzard kept the Luftwaffe grounded. On December 9, what remained of 13th Panzer broke the encirclement and fought its way home. They took their wounded with them—in the first trucks out
. They were not a broken gaggle of stragglers. They were the 13th Panzer Division, and Ivan knew it.

  Robert M. Citino’s image of “a hard-driving panzer corps stopped, but still churning its legs” cannot be bettered. This was as far as the Germans got in Russia, and no less than Rommel’s contemporary position in North Africa. Does the question arise as to what Kleist and Mackensen might have done with another two or three divisions? The question is even more apt because Mackensen’s 16th Motorized Division had been detached to screen the widening gap between Army Groups A and B. In an exercise in irrelevance spectacular even by German standards for the time and place, it drove eastward onto the Kalmuck Steppe at right angles to the rest of 1st Panzer Army, getting to within 20 miles of the Caspian Sea before reality in the form of the Soviet counteroffensive intervened.

  One more worn-down division was unlikely to have carried III Panzer Corps through the Russians to the far side of the Caucasus and the Turkish frontier. Had 4th Panzer Army been deployed alongside Kleist instead of fed into the Stalingrad blowtorch, the panzers would probably have run out of fuel 300 miles earlier. Had the Caucasus offensive been given logistical priority, the chances for a massively decisive Soviet counterattack against the correspondingly weakened German positions around Stalingrad would have suddenly improved. But had the 16th Motorized been in its doctrinal place, directly supporting the 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions . . . who knows?