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

The Red Army had no practical experience planning this kind of Deep Battle operation and expected that the corps could advance at a steady rate of 50km per day. However, Badanov was forced to move at 25km per day in order to conserve fuel and keep his corps together. While German panzer units regularly called upon Luftwaffe aerial resupply when fuel ran out during mobile operations, the Red Army and VVS were unable to employ similar methods. Vatutin expected both corps to reach their objectives in four days, but they were unable to keep to his timetable – Clausewitz referred to this as ‘friction’, which needs to be factored into planning. Even the T-34s found it difficult to move cross-country through 1-meter deep snow for over 200km, and the GAZ-AA trucks carrying extra fuel and ammunition, as well as the motorized rifle brigades, fell behind before halfway to the objectives. Crews froze in their tanks and trucks, requiring frequent halts, and there were only eight and a half hours of daylight at this time of year. In short, terrain, weather and possible enemy resistance were ignored in the hasty planning process for Little Saturn, and no effort was made to get updated intelligence about the targets to the raiding forces once they were en route. Isserson’s prescient pre-war calculation that a mechanized exploitation force would become vulnerable to attrition and enemy reaction after a three-day long Deep Battle operation were ignored.⁹⁵

Badanov and Petrov’s corps also found themselves moving rapidly out of Vatutin’s command and control radius. Soviet armoured units were plagued throughout 1941–42 by inadequate radios, but this became particularly harmful during Deep Battle operations. Each tank corps only had a single RSB-F HF transmitter mounted on a GAZ-AAA truck, which could only communicate with higher headquarters to a maximum range of 30km while on the move. In order to achieve its maximum transmission range of 160km, the truck had to stop and put up a long whip antenna. Consequently, Badanov and Petrov were only in contact with Vatutin when they stopped at night and, when they approached the objective, not at all. Despite all these logistical problems, Badanov’s and Petrov’s corps plowed on through the snowy void to their objectives while the 1st and 3rd Guards Armies pushed south through the wreckage of the Italian 8th Army.

Von Manstein had little at hand to stop Vatutin’s offensive and he could only guess at what was happening south of the Don. By chance, the fresh 306.Infanterie-Division was en route from Belgium to join Heeresgruppe Don and von Manstein detached part of it to protect the Stalingrad airlift airfields. Once Luftwaffe reconnaissance detected Soviet armour moving south toward Tatsinskaya and Morozovskaya airfields, the German 306.Infanterie-Division was ordered to set up hasty blocking positions along the Bystraya River. Pavlov’s 25th Tank Corps encountered a regiment of the 306.Infanterie-Division at Milyutinskaya on the morning of 23 December. First blood went to a German panzerjäger platoon equipped with a few 7.5cm Pak 40 anti-tank guns, which knocked out nine of Pavlov’s tanks.⁹⁶ Rather than bypassing the strongpoint, Pavlov committed his entire corps to eliminating the German infantry in his path. The German infantry regiment could not stand up to 100 Soviet tanks and a battalion was overrun with heavy loss, but it was a pyrrhic victory because Pavlov consumed a great deal of his dwindling fuel stocks in a day-long battle around the village. The beleaguered German infantrymen called upon the Stukas of I./St.G.2, which mercilessly pounded Pavlov’s exposed tanks and trucks. The last twenty-five operational tanks in Pavlov’s tank corps continued to crawl forward, but finally ran out of fuel 16km short of Morozovskaya airfield.