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

A week after Operation Wilhelm defeated the 28th Army, von Kleist’s 1.Panzerarmee launched Operation Fridericus II against the 9th and 38th Armies. Once again, the III Armeekorps (mot) – temporarily commanded by Geyr von Schweppenburg – formed the schwerpunkt which sliced through the enemy’s infantry, resulting in the Battle of Kupyansk. Hube’s 16.Panzer-Division bumped into determined resistance from the 9th Guards Rifle Division, supported by the 6th Guards Tank Brigade and three anti-tank brigades, which temporarily halted the panzers on 24–25 June. Hube lost four tanks to enemy mines but, once again, the Soviet forces chose to retreat rather than stand and die.

By the time that Fridericus II concluded, the 38th Army had been badly hurt, with more than 22,000 of its troops captured and another 100 tanks sacrificed. Altogether, Wilhelm and Fridericus II further reduced the Southwest Front’s ability to stop a major German offensive by severely depleting its armour and artillery.

In the Crimea, von Manstein did not achieve his big breakthrough until 29 June, when he penetrated the final defensive lines at Sevastopol. The Soviets managed to evacuate some troops by sea, but the last resistance was crushed on 4 July. The fall of Sevastopol cost the Soviets 113,000 troops, but victory did not come cheaply to von Manstein’s forces, which suffered 27,000 German and 8,454 Romanian casualties.³² Armoured units only played a supporting role at Sevastopol, but the Germans would not have been able to breach the Soviet defensive lines at an affordable cost without the assault-gun battalions. It has been implied by some historians that since the Soviet Union had greater material resources and industrial output, that somehow the losses of the Red Army did not really matter because they were replaceable, but Axis losses were less likely to be replaced in toto. In essence, the argument that the Red Army was best suited to win a battle of attrition tries to depict German victories as essentially empty triumphs. Yet Soviet losses did matter, and when they occurred on a grand, sudden scale as in 1941–42, they often provided the essential conditions for subsequent German operational-level success.

Between 10 May and 4 July, a period of just eight weeks, Heeresgruppe Süd managed to encircle and destroy major parts of nine Soviet armies in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, inflicting over 612,000 casualties and the loss of 1,400 tanks. Von Bock’s subordinate armies accomplished these victories at a cost of 67,000 German casualties and 140 tanks and assault guns, yielding an exchange ratio of 9–1 in personnel and 10–1 in armour. The lop-sided nature of these losses handed the strategic initiative back to the Wehrmacht and set the stage for Operation Blau, as Hitler had intended.

With the summer weather at hand, the German logistic situation improved considerably and the OKH directed most of the available new weapons, fuel and ammunition toward von Bock’s Heeresgruppe Süd. The quartermasters of Heeresgruppe Süd established a large fuel depot in Stalino, with subsidiary depots close behind the German frontline.³³ From 7–19 June, Heeresgruppe Süd received a significant quantity of new anti-tank weaponry, including forty-eight Marder II and twelve Marder III tank destroyers with the Soviet-built 7.62cm Pak gun, ninety of the new 7.5 cm Pak40 (with only twenty rounds of ammunition per gun), 160 7.5-cm Pak 97/38 (with only thirty-five rounds of HEAT per gun) and 144 4.2cm Pak41. German armoured strength was replenished in part as over 400 Pz.IIIJ and 100 more Pz.IVF2 arrived by rail from Germany and many previously damaged tanks were repaired. On 21 June, all the Armeekorps (mot.) headquarters were redesignated as ‘panzerkorps’.