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

The Germans also unveiled a new anti-tank weapon during the Rzhev battle in August: the 7.5cm Pak 41, an advanced tapered-bore weapon that fired tungstencore Panzergranate 41 rounds that could penetrate a T-34 or KV-1 at ranges up to 1,500 meters. Panzerjäger-Abteilung 561 was equipped with twelve Pak41s and managed to bring the 6th and 8th Tank Corps to a halt in a three-day battle around Zubtsov. The KV-1 tankers were particularly stunned to see that their previous invulnerability was now gone and forty-one out of forty-eight KV-1 tanks committed to the battle were knocked out. However, Red Army policy dicated that armour units could not disengage from an assigned mission unless all tanks were knocked out, so tank units were expected to attack until completely ineffective.⁶⁸

Zhukov did what he always did when a battle did not go his way – he added more forces, ordering 5th Army to attack the neighboring 3.Panzerarmee at the base of the Rzhev salient on 11 August, followed by the 33rd on 13 August. Forced to divert some forces to deal with these new attacks, which stretched Heeresgruppe Mitte’s limited panzer reserves, Model was forced to grudgingly give some ground against Zhukov’s armoured wedges. On 23 August, the 8th Tank Corps captured Karmanovo and the 31st Army captured Zubtsov, but this was the high-water mark for Zhukov’s offensive. He allowed the offensive to continue until early September, but no more significant gains were made. Overall, in a month Zhukov had advanced up to 32 km, at great cost, but failed to cut off the Rzhev salient or crush the 9.Armee. To be sure, Model’s 9.Armee was hurt by Zhukov’s offensive, suffering 32,974 casualties in August, including 8,700 dead and missing – which was 23 per cent more than 6.Armee’s casualties during the same period on the approaches to Stalingrad. The 9.Armee had been saved by the ability of Heeresgruppe Mitte to provide up to five panzer divisions to reinforce the front-line defenses before they completely collapsed, but this was an exorbitant use of armoured resources to hold a position of no strategic value. Model was quick to recognize that he could not hold the Rzhev salient without the permanent support of several panzer divisions, and he recommended evacuation of the salient as an economy of force measure, but Hitler vetoed the idea. Yet had Hitler listened to Model in September 1942, he would have had several additional panzer divisions available in reserve on the Eastern Front – which could have made a real difference when the Soviet winter counter-offensives began.

Enter the Tigers, August–December 1942

The first Pz.VI Tiger heavy tanks were completed at the Henschel factory in Kassel in August and began to equip three new separate heavy tank battalions. The 56-ton Tiger I was not a major breakthrough in tank technology because its layout was similar to the Pz.IV medium tank, it failed to incorporate sloped armour and its Maybach HL 210 P45 engine (641hp), which still used petrol, had poor fuel efficiency and power output. The Tiger was intended to be a breakthrough tank, used in the forefront of any schwerpunkt, but it lacked the mobility for true mobile warfare. The Tiger’s armour was much thicker than previous German tanks and it was impervious to 76.2mm fire from its frontal arc, but it could be successfully engaged with flank shots at ranges under 500 meters. Yet the Tiger earned its reputation – and the admiration of later generations of tank enthusiasts – due to its superior firepower. The 8.8cm Kwk 36 L/56 cannon provided the Tiger I with a very high hit/kill probability against armoured targets out to 1,000–1,200 meters; very few Second World War tank engagements occurred at ranges beyond this. After more than a year of operating in dread of the T-34, the Germans finally had a tank that could negate the Red Army’s qualitative edge in armour. Unfortunately for their cause, the Tiger could only be produced in token quantities.