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

For the coming Operation Blau, Heeresgruppe Süd formed two main armoured strike groups: comprising the III and XIV Panzerkorps under von Kleist’s 1.Panzerarmee and the XXIV and XXXXVIII Panzerkorps under Generaloberst Hermann Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee. However, Stumme’s XXXX Panzerkorps was attached to Paulus’ AOK 6 and Kirchner’s LVII Panzerkorps was kept under von Bock’s direct control as a reserve. Altogether, Heeresgruppe Süd managed to assemble nine panzer and six motorized infantry divisions, with a total of 1,582 tanks for Operation Blau. Von Bock was provided thirty-two of forty-six Panzer-Abteilungen and thirteen of twenty-one Sturmgeschütz-Abteilungen, or roughly 70 per cent of the available German armour on the Eastern Front for Blau, including virtually all the available new-model Pz.III and Pz.IV tanks. The rest of the German armies in the Soviet Union were left with minimal armour support – just 200–220 tanks and assault guns in Heeresgruppe Nord and 650 tanks and assault guns in Heeresgruppe Mitte. Unlike 1941, the Wehrmacht lacked the resources to mount offensives on more than one sector of the Eastern Front and was forced onto the permanent defensive along two-thirds of the front. The restoration of the German armoured force on the Eastern Front to a force with more than 2,200 tanks and 400 assault guns by 1 July was something of a mini-miracle, but committing the bulk of this force to a single offensive risked catastrophic consequences if something went wrong. As in 1941, the Wehrmacht was committing itself in Blau to deep-penetration mobile operations with no appreciable reserves.

Distribution of German Armour on the Eastern Front, June 1942

Another significant factor in the revitalization of German armoured strength in early 1942 was the tripling of the production of the Sd.Kfz.251 Schützenpanzer-wagen (SPW) half tracks, including over 350 built in the period March–June 1942. The number of Schützen-Abteilung in the panzer divisions equipped with the Sd.Kfz.251 rose from just three in 1941 to twelve in 1942, which significantly improved the tactical mobility of the infantry, mortar platoons and engineers in the German combined arms team. For example, the 9.Panzer-Division in Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee received eighty-five SPWs just prior to the beginning of Blau.³⁴

Soviet armoured strength increased dramatically during May–June, with the first tank army – although designated as 3rd Tank Army – formed at Tula on 25 May. The 5th Tank Army began forming near Moscow in June. The tank armies were intended to be the Red Army’s answer to the German Panzerarmee and would be used as breakthrough armies to create major penetrations in the enemy front and then cause a collapse by exploiting deep into their rear areas. By forming the first two of four tank armies created in 1942, the Stavka indicated that it was ready to move beyond the use of armour strictly for the infantry support role and allow more mobile, independent operations for tank units. However, the tank armies had very little organic artillery support – just one regiment of BM-8/13 multiple rocket launchers – and lacked the combined arms structure of a German Panzerkorps. Nor was the equipment initially provided to the tank armies anything different from other Soviet tank units of mid-1942; the 5th Tank Army had 439 tanks, of which there were only fifty KV-1 and 132T-34 (42 per cent), with the rest consisting of eighty-eight Matilda II and 159 T-60 tanks. Assigning tanks like the slow-moving, short-ranged Matilda II to a tank army rendered Deep Battle operations problematic.

By early July, Soviet industrial output enabled the Red Army to achieve an overall numerical superiority of about 3.4–1 over Germany’s armoured forces on the Eastern Front, although the Stavka was unaware of this superiority. Soviet intelligence grossly over-estimated German tank production by nearly 400 per cent in 1942 and believed that the Germans were building almost as many tanks as the Soviet Union – thus Red Army leaders did not expect to have a large numerical superiority in armour.³⁵ About 48 per cent of the available Soviet armour was comprised of KV-1 and T-34 tanks that were still superior to most German tanks, but 12 per cent were foreign-built tanks (Matilda II, Valentine, Stuart, Lee) and the remaining 40 per cent were near-useless T-60 light tanks.