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

German fuel shortages were exacerbated by the general shortage of wheeled vehicles in the Wehrmacht, which was only temporarily made good by the use of thousands of captured British, French and Russian trucks. Unfortunately, these second-hand vehicles broke down at an alarming rate during Barbarossa, due to lack of spare parts and the poor condition of Russian roads. The panzer division’s mobility was based just as much on the Opel 36S medium cargo truck as it was on its tanks, but German domestic production of this key vehicle was never enough to satisfy authorized levels, never mind combat and non-combat losses. Further adding to German logistic problems, Hitler was so confident of a Russian collapse that only three weeks after Barbarossa began he ordered German industry to curtail ammunition production for the army by autumn 1941.⁷ When the campaign did not end as expected, the German army found itself running dangerously short of artillery and anti-tank ammunition in December 1941. In short, Germany’s panzer forces were powerful and well-led forces, moderately well-equipped, but fragile due to their unpreparedness for a protracted campaign.

The Red Army’s Tank Force

In June 1941, the Red Army had the enormous total of 18,700 serviceable tanks available, plus another 4,500 tanks under repair. About 63 per cent of the available armour – over 14,000 tanks – were deployed in the twenty-eight mechanized corps authorized between July 1940 and March 1941. Another 1,700 tanks were included in five separate tank or mechanized divisions deployed in the Far East and Transbaikal and 6,000 were deployed with cavalry units, training schools, repair facilities and storage depots.⁸ Soviet armour units were in the early stages of re-equipping with the KV-series heavy tanks and T-34 medium tank, but out of 385 KV-I and 185 KV-II built by mid-June 1941, only 433 had been issued to troop units. Similarly, about 1,000 T-34 tanks were built before the German invasion and 903 had arrived at units.

A total of eighteen of the Red Army’s twenty-eight mechanized corps were stationed in the five border districts in the west, with a total of 10,688 tanks, of which roughly 83 per cent were serviceable. Four more mechanized corps were deployed in central Russia, as second echelon forces. None of these formations had existed for even a year and only one had been able to conduct division-level training before Barbarossa began. Consequently, the level of corps and division-level training and experience within these mechanized corps was negligible in June 1941 and severely reduced their combat effectiveness. Unlike the German panzer units, the structure of the Soviet mechanized corps and its component tank and mechanized divisions was fairly uniform in June 1941, even though many units were only partially-equipped skeletons. On paper, the Soviet mechanized corps was a powerful formation that could field two tank divisions, a mechanized division, a motorcycle regiment and a motorized engineer battalion; altogether an impressive total of nine–twelve tank, nine infantry and six artillery battalions, with over 37,000 men and 6,000 vehicles. Compared to the German panzer divisions, the Soviet mechanized corps was tank-heavy, with insufficient infantry and artillery. However, the various deficiencies of the mechanized corps and their constituent divisions rapidly became irrelevant as they were destroyed or disbanded within the first three weeks of the campaign. The Soviet Stavka disbanded all remaining mechanized corps on 15 July 1941 and converted their remnants into tank brigades, which became the de facto primary Soviet armoured formation for the rest of the year. Forced onto the defensive by the violence of the German invasion, the Red Army was forced to disperse its remaining armour and commit it in the infantry support role.

Initially, the Red Army’s best armour was concentrated in the south near Kiev because that is where the Soviet general staff expected the Germans to make their main effort, but the remaining armour units were spread thinly in Lithuania and Byelorussia. The Northwestern Front’s 8th Army defended a 155km-wide front along the Lithuanian-East Prussian border with five rifle divisions and General-major Nikolai M. Shestopalov’s 12th Mechanized Corps, which had a total of 725 tanks and ninety-six armoured cars.⁹