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

On 19 March, the Soviet 8th and 55th Armies attacked, hoping to capture the rail junction at Mga. The 1./s. Pz. Abt. 502, now with four Tigers and three Pz III, was committed to stop the 55th Army’s push to Krasny Bor. In three tense days of action, the Tigers knocked out 40 Soviet tanks and helped to shut down the Soviet offensive. Although the Tiger’s 8.8cm gun proved itself to be highly lethal when giving a good field of fire, the tank’s weight and lack of mobility had been a definite liability in this kind of terrain. The Tigers were continually bogging down in the soft soil and frequently required major recovery efforts. In contrast, the T-34 was somewhat inhibited in this terrain, but the light T-60s and T-70s were quite handy in the Leningrad sector. While the Leningrad sector was far from ideal tank country, the operations in the winter of 1942–43 demonstrated that light tanks could still operate in areas that would generally be considered ‘no-go terrain.’

Operation Gallop ( Skachok ), 29 January–18 February 1943

Vatutin’s Southwest Front was still recovering from Operation Little Saturn and the advance to the Donets, when the Stavka directed it to begin planning for a follow-on operation to crush Heeresgruppe Don and liberate the Donbas region. Most of Vatutin’s units were at 50 per cent strength or less and his supply lines had not caught up with his forward combat units. Nevertheless, he believed that he still had enough strength to deal von Manstein a decisive defeat. Vatutin’s plan was characteristically bold, using the 6th Army and the 1st Guards Army to smash through a thin screen of German infantry divisions northwest of Voroshilovgrad and then pivot southward to seize a crossing over the Donets. Once these armies had secured a crossing over the Donets, an armoured group led by Popov would be committed to push south to seize Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, thereby cutting off Heeresgruppe Don. It was a vision of mobile warfare influenced by the pre-war concept of Deep Operations (glubokaya operatsiya), which had theorized armoured penetrations of up to 200km. Thus far in the Second World War, Deep Operations had only been attempted once before, during the armoured raids against the Tatsinskaya and Morozovskaya airfields in late December 1942, with mixed results.

Mobile Group Popov consisted of the 3rd, 10th and 18th Tank Corps and the 4th Guards Tank Corps, with a total of just 212 tanks. All these units were reduced to one-third of their authorized strength in tanks and manpower; for example, General-major Pavel P. Poluboyarov’s 4th Guards Tank Corps started Operation Gallop with just 40 tanks.⁴⁰ Vatutin had transferred much of the assets of the 5th Tank Army into this ad hoc group, leaving the ‘tank army’ with just three rifle divisions and no tanks. This reconfiguration of his remaining armour was done in large part in an effort to deceive von Manstein about his intentions, since the rump 5 TA remained in place opposite Gruppe Hollidt on the lower Donets. However, the mobile group was an ad hoc formation that lacked the support units to conduct a protracted mobile operation. Vatutin expected Mobile Group Popov to traverse 270km in one lunge, whereas full-strength Soviet armour units in Operation Uranus and Little Saturn had only been able to advance 100–120km in one lunge, which corresponded with how far a T-34 could be expected to go cross-country on one load of fuel. Nor was the lacklustre Popov the man to lead a daring armoured advance deep behind German lines, and he had demonstrated an inability to defeat Gruppe Hollidt when he had far stronger resources.