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

This is not intended to be a day-by-day campaign narrative, although it may seem that way at times. Nor is it intended to be a ‘guts and glory’ compilation of tactical vignettes, although it will have some elements of that as well. Rather, this book will focus on the operational and tactical levels of combat in order to answer how and why the Red Army’s tank units managed to defeat the heretofore undefeated panzer armies of the Third Reich.

Issues that are tangential to armoured operations will only be addressed in passing or omitted altogether, but I do intend to touch upon many topics related to tank technology, production and maintenance that are usually left out of other histories. I also intend to tell this story, as much as the reference materials allow, from both sides’ points of view rather than just one, which has unfortunately been the case in so many previous Eastern Front histories.

Introduction

‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us’.

Josef Stalin, 4 February 1931

Popular Mythology

The Russo-German War in general, and armoured combat on the Eastern Front in particular, have remained popular subjects in English-language historiography of the Second World War for the past six decades. However, much of what Anglo-American readers know or think they know about armoured warfare on the Eastern Front has been shaped by self-serving memoirs such as Guderian’s Panzer Leader or von Mellenthin’s Panzer Battles, or popular wargames such as SPI’s Panzerblitz (1970) and a new generation of computer wargames. A cult of German tank-worshippers has arisen and its members are now firmly entrenched in their belief that all German tanks (meaning their beloved Tiger and Panther series) were better than any Soviet tanks and that the Red Army’s tank forces only prevailed because of numerical superiority. There is a grain of truth in this argument, which was fostered by German veterans seeking to perpetuate the Third Reich’s propaganda-line that the victory of the Red Army’s ‘barbarian hordes’ was due to mass, not skill. However, the quantity over quality argument ignores a variety of critical factors encompassing the opposing war-fighting doctrines, strategic miscalculations and terrain/weather that significantly influenced the outcome of armoured operations in the East. Key facts, such as the German inability to develop a reliable diesel tank engine while the Soviets had one in production before Operation Barbarossa began, are often just ignored – even though it had a significant impact on the outcome of mechanized operations on the Eastern Front. Yet material factors were not the only influences upon armoured warfare on the Eastern Front. Napoleon’s dictum that, ‘in war, the moral is to the material as three is to one,’ proved quite apt on the Eastern Front of 1941–45, with a host of moral and non-material factors influencing the outcome of battles and campaigns.