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

When von Weichs took over Heeresgruppe B, Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee was in the midst of disengaging from the armoured battles between Bolkhov and Voronezh and Paulus’ AOK 6 had begun to advance eastward with its left flank anchored on the Don. Timoshenko’s forces had suffered 232,000 casualties since the start of Blau and had just been redesignated as the Stalingrad Front. The Stavka allowed Timoshenko to conduct a fighting withdrawal eastward, rather than the die-in-place missions of 1941. In an effort to envelop Timoshenko’s retreating forces, the great pincers of Hoth’s and von Kleist’s panzer armies closed around Millerovo but caught very little in their net. Even worse, every time the Germans panzer armies moved distances of 100km or more, their logistic situation virtually collapsed and jury-rigged improvisations became the norm. Throughout Blau, fuel shortages seriously undermined the German panzer armies’ ability to conduct operational-level maneuver warfare. It was only the fact that Luftflotte 4 had nearly 300 Ju-52 transports available and was willing to provide regular aerial resupply runs to the panzer spearheads that Heeresgruppe B could maintain any offensive momentum at all.⁴⁹

Paulus’ AOK 6 was ordered to advance upon Stalingrad but since the bulk of Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee had been shifted by Hitler to support Heeresgruppe A’s advance into the Caucasus, Paulus did so with no appreciable armoured support. Furthermore, Hitler also accorded priority of supplies and air support to Heeresgruppe A, which meant that Paulus’ AOK 6 had insufficient fuel to move all its divisions at once. Instead of Blitzkrieg, Paulus’ AOK 6 waddled toward Stalingrad with only two infantry divisions of VIII Armeekorps in the lead. When the German pursuit slowed after Millerovo, Timoshenko was able to recover and began to deploy the 62nd and 64th Armies in the Don Bend to block Paulus’ advance upon Stalingrad. Yet Stalin finally had enough of Timoshenko’s fumbling and ineffectual operations and replaced him with General-leytenant Vasily N. Gordov on 21 July.⁵⁰ Gordov found that he had plenty of infantry to rebuild his front, but he was short of tanks since the Bryansk, Southwest and Southern Fronts may have lost as much as 2,400 tanks between 28 June and 24 July, or about three-quarters of the armour they had at the start of Blau. In late July, the Stavka rushed tank replacements to the Stalingrad Front to begin outfitting the 1st and 4th Tank Armies, which were intended to be used in a general counteroffensive in early August.

It was not long before Hitler, in his Wehrwolf headquarters near Vinnitsa in the western Ukraine, grew concerned that Paulus’ slow advance toward Stalingrad was giving Timoshenko time to recover and ordered the transfer of von Wietersheim’s XIV Panzerkorps with 16.Panzer-Division and 3 and 60.Infanterie-Divisionen to energize the AOK 6 offensive. He also issued Fuhrer Directive 45 on 22 July, which switched the main priority from the Caucasus to Stalingrad and returned Hoth’s 4.Panzerarmee to Heeresgruppe B. The XIV Panzerkorps pushed the infantry of the 62nd and 64th Armies back into the Don Bend west of Stalingrad, but Paulus continued to plead for more armour support and received the XXIV Panzerkorps with the 24.Panzer-Division, which meant that he now had 300–350 tanks. Hube’s 16.Panzer-Division fanned out in front of AOK 6, deployed in four kampfgruppen.⁵¹ On 24 July, the 3 and 60.Infanterie-Divisionen (mot.) pierced the 62nd Army’s thin screening forces and advanced 50km in a single day, approaching Kalach on the Don. Yet by the time that XIV Panzerkorps neared the Don, they were very low on fuel. As a result of von Wietersheim’s advance, three divisions of the 62nd Army were isolated by the German breakthrough and Gordov sent General-major Trofim I. Tanaschishin’s 13th Tank Corps from 1st Tank Army across the Don on 25 July to prevent Hube’s panzers from completing the encirclement. A brisk tank skirmish near Manolin involving about 100 German and 150 Soviet tanks developed on 26 July between Hube’s panzers and Tanaschishin’s 13th Tank Corps, with losses on both sides.