Meanwhile Stavka planned a major offensive toward Rostov, part of a new Stalin-devised grand strategic plan to drive the Germans back across the entire Eastern Front while the winter held, establishing an intermediate stop line extending from Narva to the Black Sea. From the first days of that offensive in late January, the Germans received an unpleasant tactical surprise. The Red Army was no longer following its familiar pattern of engaging German strong points and exposing themselves to paralyzing local ripostes by the panzers. Instead, they were masking the “hedgehogs” and driving past them deep into the German rear. That only reinforced Manstein’s conviction that to restore the German position in south Russia, it was necessary to restore operational maneuver. That in turn meant taking the risk of refusing to use mobile divisions as the core of ad hoc task forces to cope with what were becoming routine emergencies. It involved concentrating the panzers and the motorized divisions, using them in coordinated, multicorps operations focused on the Russians’ weak spots and institutional weaknesses. Operational maneuver, in short, meant returning to the basics tested in 1940 and applied in the summer of 1941.
In the contexts of January 1943, operational warfare had two immediate prerequisites. One was administrative: a united command in the southern sector. The entropy into which Operation Blue had fallen led to tunnel vision—every senior officer emphasizing his own problems, and addressing them without regard for the big picture. The second prerequisite was doctrinal: trading space for time. That concept is so closely associated with the by-now canonical ex post facto criticism of Hitler’s intransigent insistence on holding all ground at all costs that it is easy to overlook its relative absence in a practical sense from the “German way of war.” Prussia had been too small, the Second Reich too isolated, to make the concept viable in operational or strategic contexts; there was no space to exchange. Even tactically, the flexible approach of giving ground and counterattacking had required two years of total war and an increasingly desperate situation on the Western Front to take hold.
It was Manstein who not only understood the theoretical concept, but recognized its applicability on an unprecedented scale. It was also Manstein who had the intellectual force and moral courage to convince Hitler that operational exigencies overrode the strategic and economic arguments Hitler presented against them. With Soviet pressure increasing across the front, Manstein withdrew into the Donets Basin, north of Rostov, shortening the arc of his operational semicircle and concentrating his still- rebuilding mobile formations. The Russians in turn were outrunning their supply and overextending their communications. Forward units were living off the resources they carried for up to two weeks at a time. Their commanders’ contact with higher headquarters was increasingly tenuous—and initiative even at corps level was not a Red Army hallmark. But the prizes on the horizon encouraged Stavka to go a stage further. At the beginning of February, Operations Gallop and Star retook the city of Kursk and drove forward, toward the industrial center and transportation hub of Kharkov.
Manstein benefited when, on February 14, Army Groups B and Don were merged into the reborn Army Group South. That gave him two panzer armies with a near-ideal command mix. Hoth had the longest tenure in senior panzer command. Not merely seasoned, but marinated, he was wise in the ways of the Soviets and clear-eyed in evaluating the capacities of his own forces. Mackensen had taken over 1st Panzer Army on Kleist’s promotion, and his force and flair were still undiluted. Reinforcements were arriving steadily: men and vehicles for the veteran outfits beginning to see, if not exactly light at the end of the tunnel, then a chance of getting payback. Relief also came from some of the remaining best of the mobile divisions, Grossdeutschland and 7th Panzer; and a new player in the East, one with some fundamental differences in skills, equipment—and baggage: the SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser.
The question remained how best to use these resources. Not only did the Führer risk a little of Stalingrad by giving Kharkov’s defense top priority, some of Manstein’s subordinates were unwilling to give ground on Manstein’s proposed scale. Manstein in general receives correspondingly high marks for cool calculation in conceding the loss of Kharkov in order to lure the Soviets forward and into better position for the counterstroke he was preparing. His postwar memoirs are more sanguine than the contemporary mood at his headquarters. Manstein did not sacrifice the city in order to recapture it. He saw the loss instead as the unpleasant but acceptable consequence of the few days needed to convince a visiting Hitler of the advantages of concentrating real reserves for a real counterattack. The Führer was nevertheless considering installing a newer broom when a relatively lowly panzer corps commander disregarded a chain of orders and withdrew his men at the last minute from a situation he considered hopeless.
Kharkov’s loss was a major defeat in itself. In the wake of Stalingrad it seemed to prefigure disaster. The city fell on February 16. But next day 4th Panzer Army struck. Kharkov was retaken on March 14; Hoth’s spearheads were back on the Donets a few days later. Mackensen’s 1st Panzer Army covered Hoth’s right against the Soviet Southwest Front, cutting off and cutting up its overextended 5th Tank Army and reaching the Donets on February 28. Seventh and 11th Panzer Divisions proved a lucky combination, with Hans von Funck handling Rommel’s division like a master and Balck enhancing an already formidable reputation for coup d’oeil. The Luftwaffe played a vital role, mounting as many as a thousand sorties a day while shifting its emphasis between the two panzer armies. The weather for once worked in the Germans’ favor just as they reached the Donets, with the rasputitsa setting in and immobilizing Soviet reserves.
Otherwise the tactical and operational patterns of Manstein’s riposte are surprisingly familiar on both sides. He described a tennis player’s “backhand blow.” By this time Germans and Russians alike were more like boxers in the late rounds of a bruising fight: exhausted, punch-drunk, working more from memory than inspiration. The final version of the front line strongly resembled its spring 1942 predecessor. Strategic consequences were another, more complex story. Manstein’s success in restoring and stabilizing the southern sector of the German front has inspired assertions that Hitler and the High Command should have continued the offensive instead of throttling back and preparing for a climactic battle at Kursk. The obvious counter is that despite Manstein’s careful stewardship, the panzers were fought out by the end of March, needing rest and reinforcement before going anywhere. Stavka had responded by reinforcing the sector from other parts of the front, to a level that made continuing the attack an invitation to overextension.
To contextualize that sentence it is necessary to return in time and space to the other half of Operation Uranus. Mars had been delayed a month by heavy rains, giving the Germans time to prepare—and for once, intelligence accurately predicted something like the massive Soviet forces involved.
More useful for the Germans, paradoxically, was Mars’s timing. The attack began on November 24. And with the Stalingrad front collapsing, Hitler and the High Command were quite willing to allow early commitment of local reserves and “adjustments” of local front lines. The command team on the spot was also well suited to its responsibilities. Von Kluge had replaced Bock as CO of Army Group Center the previous year, and he had long expected an attack on his front. The sector hit hardest was held by Model’s 9th Army, and Model took justifiable pride in his defensive skills.
The Red Army’s initial commitment to Mars matched that to Uranus: 37 rifle divisions, 45 tank and mechanized brigades, plus dozens of independent artillery regiments: guns, howitzers, and the truck-mounted rockets veterans of the Eastern Front regularly described as the most terrifying of all Soviet weapons. They hit the Rzhev salient on both sides of its base. In some sectors penal battalions were in the first wave: men sentenced for a variety of military and political offenses, with at least a chance of pardon if they survived. Initially German strong points held. German panzers took heavy toll on their Russian counterparts. But numbers and courage w
ore down the determined defenders. More and more panzer grenadiers were being committed in sectors where original infantry garrisons were worn down by what seemed endless bombardment and assault.
Had the Soviets been able to get out of their own way, the German front might have broken from the attack’s sheer mass. Instead, traffic and supply problems slowed and constrained the Red Army columns just long enough. By November 28, 9th and 5th Panzer Divisions were in position not merely to hold the flanks of a narrow salient driven into 9th Army’s eastern flank, but to cut off elements of two tank corps at its apex. In the western sector it was the 1st Panzer Division, overcoming mud that immobilized even its light reconnaissance vehicles, which hung on along with elements of Grossdeutschland Division, then shifted into a series of local counterattacks in battle group strength—meaning whatever could be scraped together in the face of the latest Russian assault.
Here too the German line bent but did not break. It is no disrespect to the infantry that did most of the fighting and bore the heaviest losses to say that the backbone and muscle of the Rzhev salient’s initial defense was provided by the panzers—and not least by the two corps headquarters that controlled the battle: Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s XXXIX Panzer on the east and Josef Harpe’s LXI Panzer on the west. Von Arnim’s career would be truncated by his next assignment to a collapsing North African front. Harpe would rise—briefly—to army group command, and sustain a dual reputation as a master of the well-timed armored riposte and one of the panzer generals openly sympathetic to National Socialism.
With his reputation, perhaps his position, and possibly his neck at stake, Zukhov brought the offensive’s senior commanders together on November 28 for counseling and admonition. The attack resumed with renewed vigor the next day, featuring everything from tank attacks to cavalry charges. The weather grew more bitter in the first days of December. This year the Germans were well supplied with winter clothing, and had learned how to use trees and drifts to keep from freezing. The Landser held. When they could no longer hold, they pulled back. One battle group broke out with fewer than 100 men and three tanks: the last of what had been a reinforced panzer grenadier battalion. Its parent, 5th Panzer Division, was down by more than 1,600 men and 30 tanks. In Harpe’s western sector, T-34s with “tank marines” mounted on the vehicles brought 1st Panzer Division to the breaking point before 12th Panzer Division arrived from army reserve. First Panzer Division was one of the divisions stripped to a single tank battalion earlier in the year. One of its companies accounted for more than 40 Soviet tanks in four days. Only two of its Mark IIIs remained operable at the finish.
Men, tanks, and ammunition: the Soviets seemed to have limitless supplies of each, and committed them regardless of losses everywhere along the German reinforcements arrived in driblets. Most of the antiaircraft guns were being used as ground support, and the Sturmoviks had a correspondingly free hand. By battery and battalion, sometimes singly, the assault guns were essential wherever the panzers were unavailable. StuGs were the rallying points for battle groups cobbled together from whatever rear echelon troops were at hand, around the survivors of an infantry or panzer grenadier battalion. In turn they formed the nuclei of counterattacks that kept the Russians off balance, unable to break through where they broke in.
With the salient beginning to stabilize, Zukhov prepared for another major effort on December 7 and 8—only to be forestalled by a German counterattack launched one day earlier. Elements of Grossdeutschland and 1st Panzer Division struck the Russian front in Harpe’s sector. Nineteenth and 20th Panzer Divisions hit the flank from the south, from outside the salient. By December 9 they had succeeded in cutting off a mechanized corps and most of a rifle corps—between 40,000 and 50,000 men. It was an order of magnitude short of Minsk, Smolensk, or Kiev. Compared to what was happening around Stalingrad, it was a victory to be celebrated.
From close up, the differences between 1941 and 1942 were even more pronounced. The pocket’s front was being held not by infantry, but by panzer and panzer grenadier battle groups forming small strong points around the perimeter, linking up where possible, and pushing forward in fighting that was slow enough and costly enough to replicate in the open what had earlier happened in Stalingrad. It was not a tankers’ battle in the previously understood sense: 19th and 20th Panzer Divisions were even under command of an infantry corps. On December 16, the Russians succeeded in breaking out as organized formations, albeit with losses exceeding 75 percent.
Harpe’s effort to mount a major counterattack to the northeast was stopped by a Russian defense that wore down the battalion-strength battle groups that were all Grossdeutschland and the 1st, 12th, and 20th Panzer Divisions were able to muster after days of close-quarters attri tional fighting. In the end, however, it was the Red Army that stood down. Soviet casualties were more than 200,000 men, half of them dead. More than 1,800 of the 2,000 tanks committed had been lost. Grimly, the Germans reported fewer than 5,000 prisoners: quarter was neither asked nor given in most times and places in the Rzhev Salient.
David Glantz correctly describes the original strategic plan for Mars as too ambitious and Zukhov as too stubbornly optimistic to modify it. Operationally and tactically, Rzhev was nevertheless a watershed. This was the last time in a major sector the Red Army made the adolescent mistakes characteristic of its post-Barbarossa reconstruction: poor tank-infantry-artillery cooperation; inflexibility at all command levels; a tendency to reinforce failure at the expense of exploiting success. In a comparative context Rzhev, seen from a Soviet perspective, resembles the French offensives of 1915 in the Champagne and the later stages of the Somme a year later: a study in learning curves, facing an instructor charging high tuition.
The German victory was also a product of the limited geographic scope of Operation Mars. The essential difference between Mars and Uranus, the reason the Soviets succeeded on one front and not the other, was that in the south the Red Army established in Uranus’s opening stage a force-to-space ratio in both halves of the breakthrough that the panzers could counter in neither. The German mobile forces immediately available lacked the mass to give weight to their impulsion, and were correspondingly swamped. At Rzhev the panzers were able to do what they did because the Soviet generals were obliging enough to commit their formations in action in limited sectors, as one might push candles into blowtorches, in a force-to-space ratio the Germans were just able to match.
Model, his subordinates—especially Harpe—and the mobile division commanders excelled at assembling, shifting, and committing both organized and ad hoc battle groups at key places and times. The initially limited, steadily eroding strength of the armored forces made that technique dependent on a battlefield small enough for the fire brigades to reach critical spots before the fires burst out of control. At Rzhev, the Germans were correspondingly able to assume control of the battle—albeit at a cost so heavy that the salient was abandoned in March.
In tactical terms Rzhev was characterized by the increasing long-term employment of panzer troops in the front lines. The panzer grenadiers in particular were the shock troops of the defense, time after time taking the brunt of Soviet attacks that had exhausted the undermanned and underequipped infantry formations. With only a battalion’s worth of tanks available, a panzer division’s counterattacks depended heavily on surprise and finesse while lacking the force to have more than a temporary effect. As had been the case in World War I, the Germans could no longer exploit their tactical successes.
Both of these developments moved the panzers away from their original roles. Both foreshadowed major revisions in the Germans’ theory and practice of armored war but, in the immediate context of events in the winter of 1942-43, Rzhev invited interpretation as the counterpoint to Manstein’s more visible, more spectacular riposte in the Don Basin. The conditions were different; the point was the same. A bear hunted long enough might increase his strength and improve his cunning. Killing him might be more difficult. But a bear remained a bear
: a trophy waiting to be collected.
V
A HUNTER EXPECTING to take his trophy and live to admire it could nevertheless ill afford to lag behind his prey. If the second half of 1942 proved anything about the Eastern Front at the operational level, it was that the panzers were more than ever not merely the army’s core, but its hope. The Reich’s manpower resources continued to erode, making it impossible to keep the infantry divisions at anything like authorized strength. A new generation of personal weapons was coming off the drawing boards. Light machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers would enhance the infantry’s firepower and fighting power alike beginning in 1943. But at unit level the new hardware would at best be able to balance the lost men. In a wider context the Reich’s factories could not produce enough of it to replace existing weapons in anything but fits and starts. What had begun in the 1930s as a choice to enable forced-draft rearmament had become a necessity in the context of forced-draft war. The panzers must be the focal point of the army’s post-Stalingrad reconstruction.
Seven panzer and three motorized divisions—four if the 90th Light Africa Division were counted—had gone under in Stalingrad or surrendered in Tunisia. More than half the rest had been battered back to near-cadre status at Rzhev, on the south Russian steppes, or from Leningrad to points south. Reorganizing and reequipping them took most of a year. Even more than their predecessors, the revised tables of organization and equipment tended, in practice, to be approximations depending on what was available. The tank regiment was returned to its authorized two-battalion strength, each with four companies of 22 tanks—Panzer IVs in theory; in practice a mix of IIIs and IVs, depending on what was available. The antitank battalion was up-gunned to three batteries of open-topped, self-propelled Marders carrying the 75mm PAK 40, the definitive German antitank gun in the second half of the war, which inflicted much of the damage credited to the 88. The artillery regiment converted one of its battalions to self-propelled, full- tracked mounts: twelve 105mm howitzers and six 150mms. Both equipments were excellent. The lighter Wespe (Wasp), based on the still-useful Panzer II chassis, was a rough counterpart of the US M7 Priest. The 150mm Hummel (Bumblebee), with a chassis purpose-built from Panzer III and IV components, outmatched anything any other army’s self-propelled divisional artillery would see until well into the Cold War.
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