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

Red Army tankers demonstrated increasing competence in tactical infantry support missions throughout 1941–42, but were singularly ineffective at using their armour to conduct independent Deep Battle operations. Even once the Red Army gained a significant numerical superiority in mid-1942 with its tank corps and tank armies, it lacked the ability to penetrate German defensive lines in any real depth. At Kharkov, Rzhev, Bryansk and Leningrad, Soviet tank attacks failed to crack the German defenses and suffered ruinous losses in the process. It was not until Operation Uranus offered the Red Army an opportunity to pit its armour against less-capable Romanian forces that Soviet tank units demonstrated an ability to conduct Deep Battle operations. Thus, irrespective of other strategic factors, the dynamic of armoured warfare on the Eastern Front was characterized by German superiority until November 1942, at which point the balance began to shift irrevocably toward the Red Army’s tank forces.

While it was theoretically true that the Red Army could win a war of attrition with the Wehrmacht, that does not mean that it could win a lopsided war of attrition where the Germans inflicted 7–1 or more casualties in personnel and tanks. A succession of costly failures such as Kharkov, the Crimea and the Don Bend crippled the Red Army’s best armoured forces for months and provided the Wehrmacht with an opportunity to reach the Volga and the Caucasus. At the heart of the Red Army’s lop-sided tank losses was an amateurish and selfdestructive style of decision imposed by Stalin from the top down. Generals such as Timoshenko, Budyonny, Konev and even Zhukov often abandoned military common sense in order to appease Stalin’s incessant demands to attack in impulsive half-baked offensives. Without logistics, armoured operations could not be sustained and without training, armoured units performed poorly in combat and fell apart – this was the root cause of the Red Army’s dysfunctional armoured operations of 1941–42.

In order to win, the Red Army needed to relearn operational maneuver art and combined arms warfare, as well as gaining a cadre of tactically-astute junior and mid-level leaders, but this did not occur until eighteen months into the war. Until the Red Army learned these lessons, it could not win, it could just avoid losing. In November 1942 there was a subtle shift in the Red Army, as months of military disasters finally caused Stalin to reduce some of his interference in military operations and allow the quiet professionals such as Vasilevsky, Vatutin and Rokossovsky to prepare proper offensives such as Uranus and Little Saturn. Nevertheless, the use of Soviet armour at the operational level remained impulsive and Zhukov and other commanders repeatedly made the same mistake of committing their armoured exploitation forces before a true breakthrough had been achieved. Both sides grappled with the problems of armoured logistics throughout the war and neither ever completely mastered the ability to sustain mobile operations for extended periods. Just as the German failure to sustain their armoured spearheads in late 1941 led to the failure of Barbarossa, the Soviet inability to sustain their tank corps in 1942 prevented Operation Little Saturn from becoming an immediate death-blow to Heeresgruppe Don.

Appendix I Rank Table

Appendix II Armour Order of Battle, 22 June 1941

German

Heeresgruppe Nord (Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb)

Panzergruppe 4 (Generaloberst Erich Höpner)

• XXXXI Armeekorps (mot.) (General der Panzertruppen Georg-Hans Reinhardt)

○ 1.Panzer-Division (Generalleutnant Friedrich Kirchner)

○ 6.Panzer-Division (General der Panzertruppen Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma)

○ 36.Infanterie-Division (mot.) (Generalleutnant Otto-Ernst Ottenbacher)

• LVI Armeekorps (mot.) (General der Infanterie Erich von Manstein)

○ 8.Panzer-Division (General der Panzertruppen Erich Brandenberger)

○ 3.Infanterie-Division (mot.) (Generalleutnant Curt Jahn)

• Army Group Reserve

○ SS-Division “Totenkopf” (SS-Gruppenführer Theodor Eicke) WIA – 8 July 1941

Heeresgruppe Mitte (Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock)

Panzergruppe 2 (Generaloberst Heinz Guderian)

• XXIV Armeekorps (mot.) (General der Panzertruppen Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg)

○ 3.Panzer-Division (Generalleutnant Walter Model)

○ 4.Panzer-Division (Generalmajor Willibald Freiherr von Langermann und Erlencamp)

○ 10.Infanterie-Division (mot.) (Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm von Loeper)

• XXXXVI Armeekorps (Generaloberst Heinrich von Viettinghoff-Scheel)

○ 10.Panzer-Division (General der Panzertruppen Ferdinand Schaal)

○ SS-Division “Reich” (Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Paul Hausser) WIA – 15 October 1941

○ Infanterie-Regiment (mot) Großdeutschland (Oberst Wilhelm-Hunold von Stockhausen)

• XXXXVII Armeekorps (General der Artillerie Joachim Lemelsen)