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

The 22nd Army also achieved a breakthrough in the Luchesa valley north of Belyi, into which it committed General-major Mikhail E. Katukov’s 3rd Mechanized Corps, with 232 tanks, against the 86.Infanterie-Division. With both flanks giving way, Harpe’s XXXXI Panzerkorps was on the verge of collapse. Adding to Model’s problems, the 39th Army also managed to gain ground on the northern side of the Rzhev salient. Model left part of the Grossdeutschland Division, which had been transferred from Heeresgruppe B in August, to contain the 39th Army, but sent two kampfgruppen that included tanks from Panzer-Abteilung Grossdeutschland to block Katukov’s tanks. The Luchesa River valley was a poor maneuver area for Katukov’s tanks, since it was swampy and heavily forested, with only a single trail. By 27 November, Katukov had advanced 12km and was close to destroying Harpe’s right flank, but Kampfgruppe Kohler from the Grossdeutschland Division was beginning to arrive. A very sharp tank battle developed on 29 November, pitting the 49th Tank Brigade against Kampfgruppe Kohler; the T-34s and KV-1s managed to overrun a battery of 5cm Pak38 antitank guns, but the arrival of a battery of 8.8cm flak guns halted Katukov’s tanks. By 30 November, about half of Katukov’s armour had been knocked out and he had failed to break out of the Luchesa valley, but Panzer-Abteilung Grossdeutschland was also ground down considerably.⁹⁰

Faced with simultaneous enemy breakthroughs all around his army’s perimeter, Model acted with speed – unlike Paulus at Stalingrad – to commit local reserves to shore up the most threatened sectors while assembling his panzer reserves for a counterstroke. As a battlefield commander, Model consistently displayed the trait of Fingerspitzengefühl (‘finger on the pulse’) or ‘situational awareness’ in modern parlance. He worked first with von Arnim to crush Konev’s mobile group, then reoriented to deal with Harpe’s collapsing front. Model recognized that the depleted 1.Panzer-Division could not stop two full-strength Soviet mechanized corps on its own, so he activated a prearranged contingency plan with Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge, commander of Heeresgruppe Mitte, to temporarily receive the 12, 19 and 20.Panzer-Divisionen, which had a heterogeneous collection of 195 tanks. While 12.Panzer-Division had received seventeen Pz.IIIJ/L/M and eighteen Pz.IVF2/G, the other two panzer divisions were still equipped with obsolete Pz.38(t) tanks and short-barreled Pz.III/Pz.IV tanks, meaning that their combat effectiveness against Soviet armour was limited.⁹¹ While these units were en route, Harpe’s troops conducted an epic defense of Belyi, which prevented the two Soviet mechanized corps from linking up. By early December, most Soviet attacks had ground to a standstill, unable to overcome German centers of resistance. On 1 December, the 19 and 20.Panzer-Divisionen launched a coordinated attack with about 120 tanks that cut off Solomatin’s 1st Mechanized Corps and 6th Rifle Corps – which were demolished over the course of a week. Throughout December, Zhukov kept demanding that his subordinates continue attacking, but this only resulted in tired units becoming burnt-out wrecks and by 20 December it was clear the Operation Mars had failed.

Operation Mars cost the Western and Kalinin Fronts about 335,000 casualties in four weeks. Six elite Soviet corps were destroyed or crippled, including the 1st and 3rd Mechanized Corps and 5th and 6th Tank Corps. About 85 per cent of the Soviet armour engaged in Operation Mars was lost, with the Germans claiming 1,852 tanks knocked out.⁹² At the tactical level, Zhukov’s forces demonstrated poor tank-infantry cooperation and an inability to overcome German strongpoints. Model used aerial resupply to keep isolated Stützpunkte from running out of supplies and entrenched German infantry, when supplied with magnetic antitank mines and better anti-tank guns, could keep KV-1s and T-34s at bay. Although Konev and Purkaev had plenty of infantry, tanks and artillery, they consistently failed to employ them in coordinated fashion – which demonstrates that those historians who claim that the Red Army’s victory was ‘inevitable’ are divorcing Soviet industrial output from battlefield realities. The strongest lesson of Operation Mars and Operation Uranus, when viewed together, was that the Red Army could not simply rely upon mass to win, because the kill-ratios almost always favored German defenders – the brute force approach of Timoshenko, Konev and Zhukov would result in the Red Army attacking itself to death. In order to win, the Red Army needed to employ cunning, deception and maneuver at the operational level of armoured warfare, and learn effective tank-infantry coordination at the tactical level.