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

Oborin’s counterattack began around 0800 hours, consisting of 200 T-26s from Puganov’s and Bogdanov’s tank divisions, but with limited infantry and artillery support. Bogdanov’s armour attacked the 18.Panzer-Division, while Puganov attacked 3.Panzer-Division. In a very one-sided action, German panzers and panzerjäger had little difficulty in destroying the unsupported enemy light tanks, although the Germans did lose a number of tanks as well. Once Oborin’s armour was decimated, Guderian attacked with all four panzer divisions of the XXIV and XXXXVII Armeekorps (mot.) on line, pushing northeast. Puganov’s 22nd Tank Division was demolished by Model’s 3.Panzer-Division and Puganov was killed, while Bogdanov’s 30th Tank Division was shoved aside.¹⁰

Lemelsen’s corps captured Pruzhany and advanced over 80km on 23 June, while von Schweppenburg’s corps captured Kobrin. Oborin was wounded in the mêlée and, when he flew back to Moscow for treatment, he was arrested and later executed for desertion. Bogdanov took charge of the remnants of the corps and retired east toward Pinsk. The tank battles around Zhabinka, Kobrin and Pruzhany had failed to seriously delay Guderian’s panzers and the defeat of the 14th Mechanized Corps sealed the fate of three Soviet armies in the Bialystok salient.

While Oborin’s 14th Mechanized Corps was being taken apart by Guderian and the rest of the Bialystok salient was under attack from all directions, Pavlov was initially uncertain what to do with his armoured reserve – General-major Mikhail G. Khatskilevich’s 6th Mechanized Corps – until others made the decision for him. On Pavlov’s northern flank, the Soviet 4th Rifle Corps, defending a long stretch of the border north of Grodno, was virtually obliterated by the attack of the German VIII Armeekorps on the morning of 22 June. General-leytenant Vasily Kuznetsov, the 3rd Army commander, hastily decided to commit General-major Dmitri K. Mostovenko’s 11th Mechanized Corps to counterattack the German 8.Jäger-Division, which was already on the outskirts of Grodno. Only Polkovnik Nikolai P. Studnev’s 29th Tank Division, stationed south of Grodno, was able to respond on short notice. By 1200 hours, Studnev had deployed his understrength 57th and 59th Tank Regiments on line, which had no more than two KV tanks, twenty-six T-34s and thirty-eight T-26 tanks. Interestingly, this was one of the rare occasions during the border battles where Red tank units were not exhausted by long marches and out of fuel, and they thus had real potential to inflict some damage on a German infantry formation.

However, Studnev was not one of the rising stars of the Red Army; before the war he had twice been relieved of command and was only given a division command in 1941 because Stalin’s purges had so thinned the ranks of senior tank officers. Southwest of Grodno, Studnev’s two tank regiments bumped into a kampfgruppe from Infanterie-Regiment 84, supported by some assault guns from Sturmgeschütz-Abteilung 184. After advancing a few kilometers, Studnev mistook the handful of assault guns for tanks and quickly halted and decided to engage by fire, not maneuver, which handed the initiative to the Germans. Soviet tankers had not been trained in fire discipline and they rapidly fired off much of their ammunition, but hit little. While their short-barreled StuG-IIIs and 3.7-cm Pak guns were useless in a long-range gunnery duel against Studnev’s T-34s, the Germans instead used their excellent radio communications to request close air support from the VIII Fliegerkorps, which promptly dispatched Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers to the scene. For four hours, Studnev’s semi-stationary tanks were pounded from the air and by German artillery, which knocked out virtually all his light tanks and some of his T-34s. Finally, Studnev ordered his survivors to pull back after his division operations officer was killed and both tank regiments became combat ineffective. For the loss of about half his sixty-six tanks, Studnev had inflicted only about fifty casualties on the 8.Jäger-Division.¹¹