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

At the start of January, Gruppe Hollidt had established a porous HKL along the Taymbiya River, with von Knobelsdorff’s XXXXVIII Panzerkorps holding the northern shoulder, Generalmajor Dietrich von Choltitz’s XVII Armeekorps in the centre and Armeekorps Mieth holding the right flank on the Don. The German front suffered from a lack of quality infantrymen and two Luftwaffe Feld-Divisionen were committed into the centre. Flak units were also inserted into the frontline, using 2cm, 3.7cm and 8.8cm guns in the direct-fire role. A few surviving Romanian battle groups were still at the front, but their combat value was minimal. Hollidt’s three Panzer-Divisionen were a mixed bag; General-major Erhard Raus’ 6.Panzer-Division was down to about 40 tanks, including 4–5 Pz IVs with long 7.5cm guns, but was still full of fight. Hollidt used Raus’ division as the core of XXXXVIII Panzerkorps. Oberst Eberhard Rodt’s 22. Panzer-Division, which was attached to the XVII Armeekorps, had been virtually demolished during Operation Uranus and von Manstein described it as ‘a complete wreck’; by January, the division had been reduced to a regimental-size Kampfgruppen with no more than a dozen tanks.²⁶ Hollidt kept Balck’s still effective 11.Panzer-Division in reserve to deal with any Soviet breakthroughs; this division had 32 tanks, including three Pz IV with long 7.5cm guns.²⁷ It is noteworthy that the Pz III with long 5cm gun remained the principal German battle tank in the winter battles and how only token numbers of Pz IVs participated in these crucial battles.

Flushed with success from Operation ‘Little Saturn,’ Vatutin’s Southwest Front was presented with a multitude of options because the enemy was weak in so many sectors. Although Vatutin concentrated General-leytenant Markian M. Popov’s 5th Tank Army and the General-leytenant Dmitri D. Lelyushenko’s 3rd Guards Army (3 GA) against Gruppe Hollidt, he directed General-major Vasily I. Kuznetsov’s 1st Guards Army (1 GA) to crush Armee-Abteilung Fretter-Pico. Vatutin was one of the Red Army’s best front commanders but he was attempting to mount two simultaneous major parallel operations, which strained Soviet C² and logistic capabilities. Furthermore, most of Vatutin’s mechanized units were in poor condition after six weeks of continuing combat and had less than half their tanks still operational. The two tank corps that had conducted the raids against Tatsinskaya and Morozovskaya airfields on 17–28 December 1942 – Badanov’s 24th Tank Corps and Popov’s 25th Tank Corps – were reduced to wrecks. Rather than pull them out to rebuild in the RVGK as was standard, the Stavka ordered them to remain with Lelyushenko’s 3 GA and they were combined with the equally mangled 1st Guards Mechanized Corps. Vasiliy M. Badanov, who had angered Stalin by his unauthorized withdrawal from Tatsinskaya, was put in charge of this agglomeration of wrecked units; in his memoirs, Badanov noted that these three corps had barely 50 tanks left between them and very few trucks or infantry.²⁸ Consequently, Vatutin’s best field commander – Lelyushenko – was left with very few tanks to support the advance of 3 GA. Popov’s 5th Tank Army (5 TA) still had two tank and mechanized corps with roughly 200 tanks left and it was supposed to be Vatutin’s spearhead, but its performance had been disappointing since the fighting on the Chir River. A large part of the problem was Popov himself, who was a drunk and frequently negligent commander. Eventually, he would be relieved of command for his failings, but in an army that was quick to punish officers, Popov was tolerated for far too long. Even when sober, he was the wrong sort to command a tank army, since he had a linear, set-piece approach to warfare that was not unlike Bernard Montgomery’s. Popov was content to use his superiority to gradually shove Gruppe Hollidt rearward, rather than conduct anything too daring. The recent fate of the 24th and 25th Tank Corps’ Deep Operations likely also dissuaded Popov from trying to go deep, even though Hollidt’s right flank was little more than a screen.

In order to achieve decisive success in war, particularly mobile warfare, one must be willing to take risks, but it takes a combination of experience – and luck – to know when the risks become unacceptably dangerous. German panzer commanders had figured this dynamic out in 1941–42 and often managed to made it work for them; in the post-Stalingrad hubris Vatutin believed that he could accomplish this feat as well, although the tools and subordinates available were not up to the task.