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

Since Stalin was convinced that the Germans would make another attempt to capture Moscow, one-third of the Red Army’s 9,100 tanks were massed around Moscow in Zhukov’s Western Front or nearby in reserve. Zhukov believed that the most likely German avenue of approach to Moscow was from the south, as Guderian had tried, so Rokossovsky’s Bryansk Front was also provided with an unusually large amount of armour – over 1,500 tanks – and one of the two new tank armies. The Stavka expected the main tank battles of 1942 to be fought in the center of the Eastern Front and the armour possessed by Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky had nearly an 8–1 local superiority over Heeresgruppe Mitte’s depleted armoured forces. Elsewhere, Timoshenko’s armoured forces in the Southwest Front bounced back quickly from their defeats in May–June, but they were still outnumbered by Heeresgruppe Süd’s concentration of armour. The other Soviet fronts, between Leningrad–Staraya Russa in the north and Rostov in the south, were provided sufficient armour for infantry support missions but not for large-scale offensive operations. It is also interesting that more than one-quarter of the Red Army’s available armour – about 2,400 tanks – was in reserve and not even at the front. In contrast, the Wehrmacht had no appreciable armoured reserves on the Eastern Front or in the west – everything was committed up front.

Distribution of Soviet Armour on the Eastern Front, June 1942

Case Blau: Hoth’s Advance to Voronezh, 28 June–15 July

In Führer Directive 41, issued in April, Hitler specified that the objective of the main summer offensive was ‘to wipe out the entire defense potential remaining to the Soviets, and to cut them off, as far as possible, from their most important centers of war industry.’³⁶ Although Hitler wanted to destroy as much of the Red Army in southern Russia as possible with his next grand summer offensive, his main goal was to secure the oil fields in the Caucasus which were vital for Germany’s war effort. In this regard, Hitler was correct – chronic fuel shortages had significantly reduced the combat power of the Luftwaffe and the panzer armies in 1941. Seizure of oil fields in the Soviet Union could redress this problem, while also serving to deny fuel resources to the Red Army. Three oilfields – near Maikop, Grozny and Baku – produced 82 per cent of the Soviet Union’s crude oil. Without this oil, the Red Army would lose its ability to conduct sustained large-scale offensive operations with tank armies and air armies.³⁷ Thus, Case Blau was intended to be a war for oil, with victory measured by the seizure of specific geographic objectives, not a free-wheeling war of maneuver with no definite end. To some extent, Hitler and the OKH recognized that they would get better results in using their armour in operations that were tailored to available resources, in order to avoid continuous operations that ground their panzer divisions down to combat ineffectiveness. Blau was premised on the idea of a multi-phase operation that employed all available forces toward one objective at a time. Nor did the distances to the objectives chosen for the summer offensive seem unreasonable, compared to what the Wehrmacht accomplished in 1941.

The distance from the German AOK 6 front-line positions in June 1942 to Stalingrad and the Volga River was 500km. From von Kleist’s frontline on the Mius River, the distance to the oilfields in the Caucasus was 350km to Maikop, 700km to Grozny and over 1,000km to Baku. Given three months of decent weather, these distances seemed attainable to the Panzerwaffe.