Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  A new generation of assault guns emerged as well, including one of the war’s signature AFVs. In early 1943 the roomy hulls of obsolescent KV tanks had been used to mount a 152mm howitzer adapted from an artillery piece. Any shortcomings in range and muzzle velocity were balanced by a shell weighing almost 100 pounds. First used at Kursk, the SU 152s were promptly nicknamed zvierboi, “animal hunters,” and supported every Soviet offensive in 1943 before being supplanted by the JS 152 and its variant JS 122, mounting the tank’s 122mm gun in a fixed hull mount.

  In contrast to the Panthers and Tigers, optimized for armored combat, the new Soviet AFVs were designed for breakthrough and exploitation. Compared to their German counterparts, their guns had better high-explosive capacity, enhancing their use against unarmored targets. Their range was longer; their reliability greater. Generally, for the rest of the war the JS heavies, organized by battalions, were the backbone of break-ins and breakthroughs. The T34s, both 76s and 85s, were deployed by brigades in the tank and mechanized corps for the breakout and exploitation stages.

  The Red Army’s summer offensive began when 4th Ukrainian Front isolated the Crimean peninsula in April and overran the garrison a month later. But 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were not merely checked but defeated in their efforts to break through into Romania in April and May. The Soviets threw several bridgeheads across the Dniester but were unable to develop them. Initial Soviet casualties were heavy. The spring thaw slowed their tanks as impartially as it had German ones in other wet seasons. The Germans again scorched the earth partly in preparing their defenses, partly under orders, and partly from choice, leaving a swath of devastation that impeded already overextended lines of communication. The Red Army nevertheless did not bog down. It was checked by a defensive system that succeeded in neutralizing a discrepancy in men, tanks, guns, and aircraft that was about two-to-one across the board.

  Again the panzers played a key role. Three divisions with different provenances: Totenkopf, Grossdeutschland, and 24th Panzer—which still preserved its horse-cavalry panache—illustrated time and again Raus’s metaphor of the fencer who interrupts his opponent’s sequence of moves just when he exposes himself to strike. The 2nd Ukrainian Front described German defensive belts supported by small armored forces operating from ambush, slowing and stopping advances thrown into confusion by their sudden appearance. Recurrent phrases like “poor target identification” and “unobserved artillery fire” suggest that Soviet troops were still on the down side of critical learning curves involving situational awareness and situational response at tactical levels.

  The conclusion reached by Hitler and the High Command that the summer’s main assault would be in the Ukraine has been widely criticized and frequently described as a result of Soviet maskirovka or “deception”; a failure of German intelligence and reconnaissance; a willful overlooking of the geographic vulnerability of Army Group Center’s sector. The frequently overlooked late-spring offensive discussed above also contributed to German decision making. The Russians had been hammering at the Ukraine for 10 months and had gained enough to make following up on successes a solid option. The Germans understood very well the political and economic consequences of further losses in that region. They were aware as well that increasing sectors of the front were in the hands of Romanian and Hungarian troops whose morale was even shakier and whose fighting power was even less than in the weeks before Stalingrad.

  Despite a year’s worth of evidence both that the USSR possessed the resources to mount simultaneous large-scale offensives and that Stavka did not share the German concept of a Schwerpunkt, High Command planners projected the consequences of a Soviet breakthrough in the south in militarily ethnocentric terms. They forecast either a full-strength drive into Romania and the Balkans or a replay of the panzers’ 1940 left hook, aimed toward the Baltic. Should the latter be the case, Army Group Center had done well and fought well the previous year. Its longtime commander, Gunther von Kluge, had been hospitalized by a traffic accident. But his replacement, Ernst Busch, had a reputation as a steady if unspectacular tactician with a good record in defensive operations of the kind he was expected to face.

  That logic indicated the mobile divisions’ deployment. As of May 31, Army Group South Ukraine had Grossdeutschland, seven panzer, and one panzer grenadier divisions. Army Group North Ukraine counted seven panzer and two panzer grenadier divisions, plus no fewer than four full-strength battalions of Tigers. Army Group North, an armored- force stepchild since 1941, possessed one panzer and one panzer grenadier division and a Tiger battalion. Army Group Center had two panzer divisions, a panzer grenadier division, and a lone battalion of Tigers.

  Those ratios remained essentially unchanged over the next month. For the first time in its brief history, the Eastern Front was becoming something of a stepchild. Its strategic reserve lay 1,500 miles away, preparing to throw the Allies into the English Channel as invasion loomed in the long-neglected West. Its operational reserve did not exist—not least because too many of the East’s mobile divisions were in no condition to be redeployed casually from sector to sector. Neither replacements nor reinforcements were prominent in their pipelines. As late as May, only five panzer divisions had a Panther battalion. Third Panzer Division listed 12 operational Panzer IVs; 12th Panzer only three. This was thin protection against a looming storm.

  The run-up to Operation Bagration also offers an opportunity to address a subject that almost disappears from view after 1941: panzers and partisans. In the proliferating body of literature analyzing German anti-partisan operations in the context of a war of extermination implemented by ordinary soldiers against ordinary victims, panzer units are conspicuous by a marginal presence. That reflects three facts. Neither the Reich nor the Wehrmacht was interested in winning hearts and minds. Once the Eastern front stabilized in 1942, the limited strength of German rear security forces relative to the burgeoning partisan movement encouraged near-random violence as a deterrent. And when additional force was needed to ratchet up the terror, infantry divisions were more likely to be deployed than panzers always in demand at the front and ill-equipped for fighting in swamps and forests.

  Those points made, there is no evidence that when panzer formations were employed behind the lines in Russia, they systematically behaved any differently from any other units. In March 1944, Army Group Center’s 9th Army established camps in its rear zone. They were meant to contain all civilians unable to work—whether due to age, gender, or sickness—to keep them from aiding the partisans. The victims, as many as 50,000, were confined in barbed-wire enclosures without shelter, clean water, or sanitary facilities. A few loaves of bread thrown over a fence caused panic and riots. Fires were forbidden at night though the ground froze hard. After a week, hunger, cold, and disease had turned the swamp into a cemetery. As many as 13,000 Russians died.

  The units involved in this roundup included 5th and 20th Panzer Divisions—as normal a pair of formations as the Wehrmacht offered. Twentieth Panzer did distinguish itself by bringing in 7,000 more civilians than the trains could accommodate. Otherwise it was a routine exercise. There was nothing spectacular: no mass shootings, no more than occasional brutality—just indifference; just another day’s work on the Russian Front.

  V

  OPERATION BAGRATION BEGAN on June 22, 1944—three years to the day after the German invasion. The Red Army struck in the initial phase alone with 1.25 million men, more than 4,000 tanks and assault guns, more than 23,000 guns, mortars, and Katyushas, and almost 6,500 aircraft. Army Group Center simply disappeared so completely that it required years and decades to begin piecing together a coherent narrative of events in the first hours and days.

  With only a single panzer division immediately available, any notion of a zone defense was illusory. The three panzer divisions transferred in were committed by battalions to stabilize critical situations, if only for a few hours. The army group’s assault guns desperately shifted from sector to sector, fighting by bat
teries and single vehicles to cover retreats and open escape corridors. Model relieved Busch on June 28. The best he could propose was to construct a new front around Minsk, stabilizing it with new divisions from Germany. But Hitler continued to insist on holding ground, hanging on to “strong points” existing in little more than name, and counterattacking at every opportunity. Some units tried to obey; others dismissed the directives as Soviet deception. At least one division commander committed suicide.

  On June 30, Zeitzler, turning at the last like a stepped-on worm, refused to take responsibility for Hitler’s order to hold on in the Baltic despite what was happening to Army Group Center. By his own account at least, Zeitzler concluded by insisting the war was militarily lost and it was time to make an end. In the aftermath of the confrontation he collapsed. Whether from a heart attack or a nervous breakdown, the result was the same: an exacerbation of order-counterorder-disorder. Both the Führer and the High Command believed the “real” Soviet offensive in the Ukraine was yet to come. The fighting in Normandy was absorbing more and more of the Western theater’s mobile forces. Army Group Center was on its own.

  Minsk went under on July 3 as the 5th Panzer Division and a Tiger battalion sought vainly to keep open the way west. By July 8, 5th Panzer was down to 18 operational tanks. Vilna’s garrison was authorized to break out only when Adolf Heusinger, who had temporarily replaced Zeitzler, urged Hitler to allow the surrounded men to choose how they wished to die. For two and a half years 3rd Panzer Army had been an armored army virtually without tanks. Now Reinhardt, last of the original panzer chieftains, remembered he had led a division before he became a colonel general. Taking command of elements of 6th Panzer Division, just arrived from reconstitution in Germany, he rode with the leading tanks, cut a 20-mile corridor through the Red Army to Vitebsk and brought out 3,000 survivors.

  It was another fine piece of panzer soldiering—in a minor key. The Red Army did even better armored work on a decisive scale. On July 18, 1st Byelorussian Front drove two spearheads deep into Army Group Center’s southern sector, trapped most of 2nd Army, and headed for the Vistula. Driving into a near-vacuum, the Front’s vanguards reached the river on July 25; the first permanent bridgehead was established four days later.

  If the frontline emergency was not enough, Heusinger was among those injured in the unsuccessful July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life. His successor as Chief of Staff (officially Acting Chief) was Heinz Guderian. He seems to have been at least aware of the assassination plot, and probably indirectly approved. Certainly Guderian authorized temporarily delaying the movement from Berlin to the Eastern Front of some armored units the conspirators intended to use to take control of the capital after Hitler’s death. On July 20 he took pains to be absolutely elsewhere: hunting by himself on his new estate in East Prussia. Though Guderian was able to sidestep the suspicion that fell on him, there seems to be little doubt that he would have served a new government with the same competence with which he continued to serve Hitler: a combination of ambition, opportunism, and patriotism, marinated in an increasing level of fatalism.

  For the record Guderian referred to his appointment as a burden he felt compelled to accept. He briefly underwrote Hitler’s perspective by denouncing proposals for withdrawal as defeatism and pessimism. Whether that behavior reflected opportunistic gratitude for his promotion or lack of information on what was really happening in Russia remains unknown—perhaps even to Guderian himself.

  The events of July 20 further complicated responding to a disaster reaching such dimensions that Hitler overlooked Model’s policy of breaking out encircled troops where possible and establishing a new, firm defensive line along the Vistula. Here again the panzers bore the weight of the action. Viking and Totenkopf Divisions were returning from brief stints in the rear after having been taken off the line in the Ukraine. The Skulls were Himmler’s pets because of their concentration camp origins, and he saw to it that the division received a full battalion of Panthers. Viking had no similar patron, but on August 1 it managed to field 64 tanks, two-thirds of them Panthers. Fourth Panzer Division, fresh from a long spell in France and Germany, was one of the only two fully equipped panzer divisions in Russia, with 80 Panzer IVs and the same number of Panthers. The newcomers’ battle groups managed to clear a path for 2nd Army’s more or less orderly retreat. They sustained enough fighting power to play vital roles as well in the second half of Model’s operational plan, a riposte aimed at the Red Army formations drawing up to the Vistula.

  Soviet losses had been heavy; Soviet organizations had been disrupted by victory; Soviet logistics had been overextended by distance. These are usually cited as the operational reasons the Red Army slowed and stopped east of Warsaw. On the political side it is frequently asserted—and sometimes held as an article of faith—that Stalin ordered the halt in order to leave the Germans free to destroy the Polish Home Army, which rose on August 1 expecting Soviet support, and thereby facilitate Poland’s “liberation” as a Soviet satellite.

  Hitler’s panzers also had a good deal to do with that course of events. Taking a chapter from Manstein’s book in the winter of 1942-43, Model pulled three panzer divisions out of the line, sacrificing ground to concentrate force. He added the newly arrived Parachute Panzer Division “Hermann Göring” to the blend, and hit the 2nd Tank Army from four sides at once in the open ground east of the Vistula with about 300 AFVs against 800. Clogged roads and disrupted rail schedules were almost a relief to staff planners able to turn their attention away from the dismal overall prospects. The result was a reduced version of another classic envelopment executed 60 miles north in 1914: the Battle of Tannenberg which destroyed an entire Russian army. Now SS, army, and Luftwaffe tankers fought side by side in a three-day battle that cost 2nd Tank Army two-thirds of its strength and perhaps threw Stavka and Stalin off at least part of their game.

  The tragic events in Warsaw, the Wehrmacht’s savage suppression of the rising and the destruction of the city on Hitler’s orders, have understandably overshadowed this event. Soviet accounts are, equally understandably, silent on the subject. German records were lost or scattered. An outstanding piece of archival investigation, one of many by the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt’s Karl-Heinz Frieser, makes the case against categorizing the event as just another rear-guard fight, another meaningless tactical victory for the panzers. In its aftermath, Soviet planning for the central sector shifted, returning to the proven pattern of coordinated frontal attacks.

  This was done against Zukhov’s vehement urging to maintain the strategic/operational initiative by driving past Warsaw, toward the Baltic through East Prussia—not least in order to bring the war home to what Russia had long understood as Germany’s heartland. This bold stroke just might have finished the war in the east six months earlier. As it was, 30 German divisions were gone: 400,000 men—over 250,000 of those simply listed as “missing.” Army Group Center had time to stabilize its front—but that front now lay in Poland. And this comprehensive disaster invited others. Army Group North had been not merely outflanked but virtually isolated. Hitler insisted on holding a “Baltic Fortress” under attack by elements of four Soviet fronts, including numbers of new JS-IIs.

  Army Group North had a veteran Tiger battalion, the 502nd. Its 30 tanks wreaked company-scale havoc wherever they appeared. In one fight, the first-ever encounter of Tigers and Stalins, the 2nd Company accounted for fifty JS-IIIs and T-34s without a single loss. On another occasion, three Tigers knocked out 18 Soviet AFVs in one long summer evening. But the 502nd could not be everywhere at once. The army group’s 200 assault guns were needed to shore up the infantry. Demodernization had progressed so far that in some sectors, Landser took the chance of letting tanks roll over them in order to use satchel charges against their sides and decks—“poor man’s war” with a vengeance.

  The result was predictable. On July 31, Red Army vanguards reached the Baltic Sea, the first stage of what became a 75-mile gap between Army Grou
ps North and Center. The German response was also predictable: turn to the panzers. Third Panzer Army received an armored transfusion. Reinhardt had taken over the army group on August 16 when Model was transferred to the Western Front. Reinhardt’s replacement was Raus, no less capable a panzer general. Instead of bits and pieces, he had six divisions, including Grossdeutschland, newly arrived from Romania, plus an improvised task force with 60 tanks. Each one would be needed: as at Stalingrad, Army Group North was too overextended to do more than hold its ground as opposed to participating in a breakout.

  What Raus did not possess was a viable plan. Hoping to catch the Russians off balance, the High Command sent in the panzers on such a broad front that mutual support was impossible. Raus and his staff officers were unable to drive forward an advance that opened no more than a narrow, fragile corridor to the trapped army group before grinding to a halt. Then instead of using the hard-won passageway as an escape hatch, Hitler funneled reinforcements through it—including a panzer division whose forlorn- hope assignment demonstrated Hitler’s determination to hold the Baltic to the end. And 3rd Panzer Army’s headquarters was eventually established in Willkischken, just on the Prussian side of the 1939 border with Poland. The Reich was steadily and inexorably receding.