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

The Wehrmacht ended 1942 with nineteen panzer divisions on the Eastern Front, but three were surrounded and would be annihilated by late January 1943. The loss of these three panzer divisions, plus the three Panzergrenadier-Divisionen in the Stalingrad kessel was a catastrophe that had never occurred before. Far more serious than the loss of equipment – which was bad enough – was the loss of trained personnel. Some panzer cadres were flown out of the kessel, including Hube, or missed the kessel altogether by being on home leave, but the junior leaders and experienced crews could not be made good. The hard-fighting 16.Panzer-Division managed to save 4,000 of its personnel, but the remaining 9,000 would be lost.¹⁰² The Ersatz-Abteilungen back in the home Wehrkreis found it difficult enough to train replacements to fill gaps created by normal combat losses, but it could not simply recreate experienced company commanders, platoon leaders and NCOs. Consequently, the quality of panzer crews – which was of decisive importance in the tactical success of German armoured units in 1941–42 – declined steadily after Stalingrad. Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht still had more than 1,500 operational tanks and assault guns on the Eastern Front – a far better situation than they had faced in December 1941 – and the panzer divisions still had a tactical edge over the Soviet tank corps.

Conclusions

From September 1939 until November 1941, the German use of combined arms tactics – melding armour, artillery, air power and other branches in order to produce a superior synergy of combat power at a schwerpunkt or decisive point, never failed. Even the failure at Moscow in November 1941 was due more to German logistical deficiencies and adverse terrain/weather considerations than any defects in German doctrine or methods. In many respects, Operation Typhoon was an aberration, where wishful thinking by the OKH led the panzer armies into a no-win situation. Yet when the German logistic situation and the weather improved in the spring of 1942, the Wehrmacht demonstrated again that it could use its combined arms tactics to pierce Soviet defensive lines at chosen points and encircle its opponents. Soviet operational-level use of tank forces was sub-par for most of 1941–42, negating much of the advantage offered by their numerical superiority. Despite the purported economic weakness of Germany in a protracted war of attrition, German armoured units retained their ability to conduct successful offensive operations until Operation Wintergewitter failed to break through the Soviet ring encircling AOK 6 at Stalingrad. Although there had been occasional failures by individual panzer divisions to achieve their objectives in May–July 1942, the German panzer-led schwerpunkt could generally penetrate or bypass Soviet linear defensive positions until Wintergewitter. As far as operational-level armoured warfare was concerned, the Germans lost the war in the East when their panzer–Luftwaffe combined arms teams lost the assured ability to penetrate Soviet defensive lines and, conversely, the Red Army gained the ability to break through German defenses with their tank corps.

In the German Panzerwaffe, Fascist attitudes toward war were evident in the lionizing of Ritterkreuz war heroes and embellishing tanks with names such as the Tiger and the Panther – which has helped to perpetuate Nazi mythology to this day. While the Germans were masters at using symbology to bolster morale on the Eastern Front, senior panzer commanders had little regard for the industrial basis behind their combat power. If they had, they would have been aware that Hitler reduced ammunition production in July 1941 and terminated the production of tungsten-core armour-piercing rounds in June 1942 and argued that they couldn’t compete with the Red Army with this kind of decision-making.

In contrast, the Red Army’s inherent Marxist–Leninist attitude to war was evident in the total mobilization philosophy of all state resources, and the recognition that the production/labor front was just as important as the war front. Soviet tanks had no fancy names, just numbers. In the end, the Red Army’s sober, material-oriented mindset proved of more value when the chips were down in 1941 as well as when Soviet industry could finally provide the means in 1942–43 to drive out the hated invaders.