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

Nevertheless, on 15 August the 23.Panzer-Division managed to capture Georgievsk, 200km from Grozny, before its fuel began to give out. Heeresgruppe A managed to repair the rail line all the way from Rostov down to Pyatigorsk by 18 August, but it was a single-track line that could only handle very limited throughput. Given a respite from von Kleist’s pursuit, the Stavka sent reinforcements to the Caucasus, including the 10th Guards Rifle Corps, which enabled Malinovsky to build a more solid defensive line behind the Terek River. Once the German drive on Tuapse stalled, List finally allowed the III Panzerkorps to rejoin von Kleist’s advance toward Grozny, but the 13.Panzer-Division and 16.Infanterie-Division (mot.) ran out of fuel en route and were immobilized, then the OKH decided to transfer the latter unit to Heeresgruppe B. The XXXXIX Gebirgskorps was supposed to support von Kleist’s armour, but List diverted it westward to Sochi – which was never taken. Kleist made it to the Terek river with the 3, 13 and 23.Panzer-Divisionen by 23 August, but with only two infantry divisions of LII Armeekorps in support. While von Kleist had a 3–1 numerical advantage in armour over Malinovsky, the Soviet commander had considerably more infantry. By this point, Malinovsky had scraped together three OTBs to supplement Filippov’s 52nd Tank Brigade, but he had virtually no T-34s; rather, he had about forty-three Valentines, sixty-three Lees and a handful of T-60s.

Due to the difficulty of shipping T-34s from the Urals on the single rail line remaining into the Caucasus, Malinovsky’s forces were almost entirely dependent upon Lend-Lease American and British armour arriving through Persia. On the German side, von Kleist still had most of his armour since there had been relatively light combat in the Caucasus, and he was beginning to receive upgraded Pz.IIIL and Pz.IVG tanks. However, his fuel situation was abysmal and most of his air support had been stripped away as well.

Von Kleist realized that time was running out and he decided to try and get across the Terek River with the forces available. The 3.Panzer-Division managed to seize Mozdok on the northern side of the Terek on 25 August, but efforts to cross the wide river were repulsed. On the morning of 26 August, Generalmajor Erwin Mack, commander of the 23.Panzer-Division, and one of his battalion commanders, was killed by Soviet mortar fire while observing operations along the Terek.⁴⁷ The river proved too wide, deep and fast-flowing to cross under fire and von Kleist was stymied. In desperation, Oberst Erpo Freiherr von Bodenhausen, commander of the 23.Panzergrenadier Brigade, was selected to lead a mixed armoured kampfgruppe toward Chervlennaya on the north side of the Terek, where the junction of the Baku-Astrakhan rail line ran. Von Bodenhausen succeeded in reaching the rail junction on 31 August – only 27km from Grozny – and briefly interrupted Soviet rail traffic from Baku (still 490km distant), but his force was too small to hold this exposed position and he fell back toward the main body.⁴⁸ Von Kleist’s forces were completely out of fuel and he was not able to make another attempt to get across the Terek River until 6 September. The 13.Panzer-Division succeeded in finally getting across the river, but it was too late; Malinovsky’s forces had steadily been reinforced and his numerically-superior troops were too well dug in to budge. Hitler finally relieved List three days later and took personal control over Heeresgruppe A – surely one of his weirdest command decisions of the Second World War. While fighting would continue along the Terek River until early November, when the first snow arrived, von Kleist’s offensive had culminated and the front became static.

The Caucasus was the kind of campaign that the panzer divisions were designed to win, using bold maneuvers across flat steppes against a disorganized foe who lacked proper air, artillery or armour support. However, Hitler and the OKH failed to provide their main effort with the resources it needed to succeed. Reduced to only five fuel-starved divisions at the tip of his spear, von Kleist’s spearhead was stopped more by his own side than the Red Army. In the Caucasus, the Red Army lacked the material advantages in armour and artillery it enjoyed on other fronts. While von Kleist’s panzers failed to seize a significant amount of the oil resources of the Caucasus, they did come exceedingly close to interdicting two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s supply of crude oil. Oil was just as much the Red Army’s strategic center of gravity as it was for the Wehrmacht. Had von Kleist’s panzers reached Grozny and Baku, the Red Army would have likely found it difficult to provide fuel for the multi-front offensives of 1943–44.

Drive on Stalingrad, 16 July–23 August