Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt

On the German side, there were a number of important developments that altered the dynamic of armoured combat. Whereas the German army had concentrated virtually all its tanks in nineteen panzer divisions in the 1941 campaign, the experience of violent Soviet tank attacks against German infantry divisions – such as the 21st Tank Brigade raid against the 36.Infanterie-Division (mot.) at Kalinin in October 1941 – convinced the OKH that the motorized infantry divisions should be provided with their own Panzer-Abteilung as soon as practical. Four of the motorized infantry divisions assigned to Heeresgruppe Süd, including the Grossdeutschland Division, were provided a tank battalion. The Waffen SS also successfully lobbied for their own panzer units, since the four divisions employed during Barbarossa were constantly forced to request armoured support from the army. A total of forty StuG III assault guns had been provided to these four Waffen-SS Divisions, but these were best suited for defensive combat, not a rapid war of movement. After much discussion, the OKH finally authorized the formation of three SS-Panzer-Abteilungen on 28 January 1942; these battalions would go to the LSSAH, Reich and Wiking divisions in March–April. The German army leadership had resisted giving the Waffen-SS tanks because it would make them more independent – which was regarded as a dangerous development – and it meant diverting about 150 tanks from new tank production. Not to be excluded, even the Luftwaffe managed to get authorization to form one panzer company for the new Hermann Göring Brigade. Thus, going into the 1942 campaign, the panzer divisions surrendered their previous monopoly on mobile armoured operations and conceded a role to a variety of new players. Yet the result of this change was to dilute the concentration of German armoured strength that had produced victory in the past in order to placate bureaucratic interests and eventually force the existing panzer divisions into a competition for scarce resources with the Waffen-SS and other so-called elite formations.

Hitler had been eager to form new panzer divisions for future operations and he diverted new tank production in September 1941 to begin forming the 22 and 23.Panzer-Divisionen in France. It took six months to train both divisions and they began shipment to the Eastern Front in March 1942. The 24.Panzer-Division, using the disbanded 1.Kavallerie-Division as a base, began forming in November 1941 and would be sent to the Eastern Front in May. In conjunction with these three new panzer divisions being sent eastward, the OKH ordered the badly-depleted 6, 7 and 10.Panzer-Divisionen to return by rail to Germany to refit and re-equip; it was intended that these three divisions would return in time to provide a second wave of armoured reinforcements for the later stages of the 1942 campaign. By mid-February 1942, Hitler had already decided that he wanted to make the main effort of the 1942 offensive in the south, so he directed the OKH to strengthen the panzer divisions in Heeresgruppe Süd by taking armour from the panzer divisions in Heeresgruppe Nord and Mitte; each of von Kleist’s panzer divisions would be provided with three panzer battalions, but this meant that a number of the panzer divisions along the rest of the Eastern Front were now reduced to just a single panzer battalion. In the short term, this decision by Hitler quickly restored the armoured forces under the control of Heeresgruppe Süd and allowed the Wehrmacht to mount a major offensive on this part of the Eastern Front in the summer of 1942, but it reduced German armoured units on the rest of the Eastern Front to a strictly defensive capability and surrendered the initiative in these areas to the Red Army’s tankers. Instead of trying to rebuild the shattered panzer armies of 1941 – which had proved doctrinally and organizationally sound – Hitler opted to direct the majority of his available armoured resources into one over-sized command, designed for a single purpose: to reach the oilfields in the Caucasus. This was a very risky and dangerous approach – although it did not appear so in Berlin in February 1942 – because if it failed, the Wehrmacht would completely lose the initiative in the East.