Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943-1945: Red Steamroller

By 1943, most of the junior panzer officers were former enlisted men or NCOs who were awarded reserve commissions after attending Panzertruppenschule I or II. The term ‘reserve officer’ suggests a callow, hastily-trained officer with limited ability to lead troops in the field, but Germany’s wartime reserve officers were anything but ‘90-day wonders’. Rather, these men usually had the advantage of prior combat service, often in tanks, although some candidates came from other branches as well. One example was 20-year-old Leutnant der Reserve (d.R.) Otto Carius, who had served as a tank loader in the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa, then was promoted to Unteroffizier in August 1941 before receiving his commission in 1942. By the time he was assigned to schwere Panzer-Abteilung 502 as a platoon leader in January 1943, Carius was a veteran tanker and would ably prove himself as a leader at the front.¹⁸

The introduction of the Tiger tank in late 1942 and the Panther tank in early 1943 forced the Germans to make major adjustments to their tank training programmes. Even veteran panzer crews and the unit-level mechanics required extensive training on the new vehicles, since they were so different from the existing Pz III and Pz IV medium tanks. A special unit, Panzer-Ersatz-Abteilung 500, was established at Paderborn to train all Tiger tank crews and mechanics; this unit could train 24 crews at a time. However, the demand for Tigers at the front was so extreme in 1943 that most crews passed through the training course in 4–6 weeks, which was barely sufficient. In March 1943, the Panther Lehrgänge (Training Course) was established at Erlangen, which provided convenient technical support from the manufacturer MAN in Nurnberg. Manoeuvre and gunnery training for Panther crews was conducted at Grafenwöhr, but like the Tiger training, the Panther training was rushed. Important items, such as training crews how to recover a 45-or 54-ton tank on the battlefield, received minimal time. Since the Germans intended to convert one Panzer-Abteilung in each Panzer-Division to the Panther, there was great pressure to push crews rapidly through the training, which would soon cause major problems in combat. Furthermore, neither the Waffen-SS nor the Luftwaffe had their own training structure for Panzertruppen and simply borrowed the Heer’s – which seriously interfered with the introduction of the Panther in 1943.

Impact of Fuel and Spare Parts Shortages

By 1943, shortages of fuel and spare parts at the front were seriously reducing the operational readiness of Germany’s Panzer-Divisionen. The Third Reich went to war with the Soviet Union with completely inadequate fuel reserves and exhausted nearly half its stockpile during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Although Germany made great efforts to increase synthetic fuel production, during 1942 monthly military consumption of fuel exceeded production in seven out of 12 months. At the end of 1942, Germany’s reserve stockpile of motor gasoline was down to 313,000 tons, equivalent to less than three months’ worth. By 1943, minus civilian consumption, Germany was producing about 136,000 tons of motor gasoline per month and consuming about 120,000 tons – enabling a slight increase in the strategic reserve. In addition, about 47,500 tons of diesel oil per was produced per month.¹⁹ Thus, Germany’s military machine was living a hand-to-mouth existence that left little or no room for unanticipated losses of production due to enemy action, such as Allied bombing. Nor could the Germans really afford to continue to mount large-scale manoeuvre operations like Barbarossa and Blau without further depleting their reserves; the new norm shifted to mount short-objective operations measured in weeks, not months.