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

After marching all night, Cherniavsky was able to begin his counterattack against 1.Panzer-Division in Ostrov at 0530 hours on 5 July. The Germans were dismayed by the appearance of more KV heavy tanks and 1./Panzerjäger-Abteilung 37 was overrun. German Pak guns and vehicles were crushed under the tracks of the KV tanks.

Spearheaded by the KV tanks, one Soviet tank company managed to fight its way into Ostrov and nearly recaptured the bridge. Yet Cherniavsky was only able to get three tank battalions, with no substantial infantry or artillery support, into the battle and the German combined-arms kampfgruppen displayed enormous resilience. A battery of 10cm s.K 18 howitzers engaged the KVs directly with Pzgr Rot (AP) ammunition and managed to knock out a KV-2 and several other tanks.³¹ Cherniavsky pulled his armour back to wait for support units to arrive and he recommenced his attack with armour and two infantry regiments at 1525 hours after a thirty-minute artillery preparation. Although better prepared, this attack failed when the lead elements of the 6.Panzer-Division arrived to reinforce the German defense of Ostrov. A sudden German attack flung Cherniavsky’s forces back in disorder. Altogether, Cherniavsky’s corps suffered about 50 per cent losses, including eight of ten KV tanks and most of the light tanks.

Stalin got personally involved in the armoured counterattack at Ostrov and ordered Sobennikov to continue the operation no matter the cost. Cherniavsky attacked again on 6 July with his remaining forty tanks, as well as the remnants of the 21st Mechanized Corps. Reinhardt’s two panzer divisions easily repulsed these feeble efforts and, by afternoon, the Soviets were in retreat. The Battle of Ostrov demonstrated that the Red Army’s inability to implement combined arms warfare put their armour at a significant disadvantage in a stand-up fight against even a single panzer division.

After failing to stop Reinhardt’s panzers at Ostrov, the 3rd Tank Division fought a delaying action back to Pskov, which was the first city in Russia proper that was threatened by German panzers. In an effort to stop the 6.Panzer-Division from crossing the Velikaya River and reaching the city, the 3rd Tank Division mounted a sacrificial counterattack at Cherekha at 1700 hours on 7 July with about 100 BT and T-26 light tanks. In this kind of tactical combat, the Pz.35(t) and Pz.IV tanks of Oberst Richard Koll’s Panzer-Regiment 11 had the upper hand and they broke through and seized the bridge over the Velikaya intact. Prompt action by Podpolkovnik Gregory N. Pasynchuk’s 5th Tank Regiment stopped Koll’s tanks from exploiting the bridgehead, but Pasynchuk was captured in the scuffle at the bridge. Fighting continued for five hours, but by nightfall the 3rd Tank Division was down to about thirty-five BT tanks, while 1 and 6.Panzer-Divisionen still had a total of over 200 operational tanks remaining. On 9 July, Reinhardt’s panzers fought their way into Pskov – again, this was non-doctrinal for tanks to fight into cities without substantial infantry support – and the remnants of the 3rd Tank Division retreated eastward.

While the tank battles at Ostrov and Pskov were occurring, on the Northwest Front the Soviets were frantically trying to establish a strong blocking position at Luga 140km south of Leningrad to prevent Höpner’s panzers from advancing directly up the highway to Leningrad. Luftwaffe reconnaissance soon detected the Soviet concentration at Luga and Höpner decided to use Reinhardt’s corps for a direct assault upon the town, while using von Manstein’s LVI Armeekorps (mot.) to conduct a wide envelopment of Luga to the east. Manstein’s corps had been lagging behind in the push across Latvia and did not reach Ostrov until five days after Reinhardt’s panzers had captured the town. Höpner was partly at fault, having assigned von Manstein some of the worst marshy and wooded terrain to traverse, but von Manstein also made the kind of mistakes that someone who had never worked with tanks before would make – like mistaking ‘no-go’ terrain for ‘slow-go’ terrain. Generalmajor Erich Brandenberger’s 8.Panzer-Division, which was von Manstein’s only panzer unit, was turning in a very lackluster performance during the Russian campaign. Höpner’s choice of assigning a very difficult mission to a two-division motorized corps with a commander who seemed to have lost his aggressive edge seems rather suspect, and one can only speculate about whether von Manstein’s abrasive arrogance – he was not widely popular among other senior German officers – led to Höpner’s command decision.