Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  Guderian and the High Command insisted Army Group North be authorized to break out and rejoin Army Group Center. The distance was still short enough, and the terrain sufficiently broken, that lack of armor was less of a handicap than had been the case elsewhere in such operations. As further incentive, a high proportion of the Army Group’s units and men came from the Reich’s eastern provinces and would be fighting for their homes and families. Hitler vetoed every proposal. In September, 15 Soviet armies, 1.5 million men and over 3,000 tanks and assault guns, struck Army Group North all along its line. Schörner, transferred in July to the Baltic and initially committed personally to holding on, nevertheless knew a lost hand when dealt one. He flew to Hitler’s headquarters and in an eloquent quarter of an hour convinced Hitler to allow a retreat. Abandoning Estonia, the army group pulled back into Courland.

  On October 5, seven Soviet armies rolled over a 3rd Panzer Army again reduced to one of its titular divisions, driving its remnants westward and reaching the Baltic coast four days later. A series of frontal attacks in the next few weeks drove Army Group North inextricably into the Courland peninsula. They also forced using the available armor in detachments, dooming any unauthorized breakthrough before it started. The eventually renamed Army Group Courland had the 12th and 14th Panzer Divisions and enough assault guns and tank destroyers to field initially around 250 AFVs on a good maintenance day. By November 1, 14th Panzer Division was down to 21 runners. Twelfth Panzer reported 19. A half million soldiers and civilians were trapped against the Baltic Sea. They had no real hope of rescue, even should Hitler change his position that where the German soldier planted his boots, there he remained. Alive or dead made no difference.

  Of no less consequence, the panzer divisions vainly expended in the north were unavailable to reinforce a southern sector whose long-expected turn finally came on July 13. Harpe had taken over from Model in command of Army Group North Ukraine. Since Army Group Center’s collapse, seven of his panzer divisions had been ordered north. There remained 1st, 8th, 16th, and 17th Panzer, 20th Panzer Grenadier, and SS Viking: three each in reserve of 1st and 4th Panzer Armies as a counterattack force with a total of around 500 deployable AFVs. First Ukrainian Front, the immediate opposition, had 1,000,000 men, over 2,200 tanks and assault guns, and enough artillery to deploy 400 pieces per mile in the sectors chosen for the initial breakthrough.

  The massive discrepancies in force and fighting power negated the concept of a zone defense. Harpe’s armored reserves disappeared in days, absorbed before the full Russian strength developed. Over 40,000 Germans were cut off around Brody. This time there were no miracle escapes. The German commanders on the ground reacted slowly; only fragments were able to fight their way through to panzer battle groups barely able to hold the line, much less counterattack with any effect. By July 18, 4th Panzer Army was down to 20 tanks and around 160 assault guns—the latter, as in the northern sector, fully absorbed in keeping the hard-pressed infantry formations from being entirely scattered by what seemed endless numbers of T-34s. The battalions had been renamed brigades, but initially without any increase in strength.3 Batteries and individual crews ran up their scores into three figures. But the front kept moving back.

  Even against determined resistance, the Russians moved fast. Lublin fell on July 24 after a breakthrough attempt by 17th Panzer Division failed—though nobody in authority seemed to ask what the prospects for success were in the first place for a worn-down division pitted against an entire army. Against Hitler’s orders, Harpe ordered a general retreat to the Vistula. The key regional transport and communications center of Lvov fell on July 27. On July 29, a Soviet tank army crossed the Vistula in force at Sandomierz. By the end of the month the Army Group’s front was over 120 miles farther west, into Galicia and the Carpathian foothills. Its losses approached 100,000, but its line was intact, the worst of the gaps plugged, and Harpe expressed a hope of hanging on until reinforcements arrived from somewhere—anywhere.

  Instead the High Command ordered a full- scale counterattack against the Sandomierz bridgehead. The job was given to Balck, who took over 4th Panzer Army on August 5 for an attack that began on August 10—another example of what had become a pattern of expecting senior panzer officers to substitute energy and willpower for the careful planning required of the weaker party. The III Panzer Corps achieved initial success through surprise, but was stopped within a few days. A second local counterattack by four panzer divisions on August 28 was canceled after three days; a third was called off when Balck and his staff failed to bring the exhausted panzers on line in time.

  The Red Army no longer buckled when faced with the unexpected—particularly on the defensive. Flexibility was still not a major characteristic of Soviet armored formations, but solidity is also a military virtue. The Soviet tankers who held their ground around Sandomierz were motivated by more than fear of NKVD firing squads. They knew that support was on hand, and that support would arrive in a force the Germans could no longer match.

  At company and batallion levels, Red Army tankers were taking the measure of their German opponents. The 501st Heavy Tank Battalion was the first to take Tiger Bs into action on August 11. In three days, 14 of 30 were lost to an approximately equal number of T-34s and JS-IIs. The Soviets shifted quickly from attack formations to ambush positions, taking full advantage of the Stalins’ cross-country capacity to strike the Tigers’ vulnerable sides and rears. The 122mm guns cracked open the Tiger B like a coconut. And when they evaluated the three undamaged tanks they captured, Red Army experts were unimpressed by its technology.

  By the end of August, North Ukraine’s front was relatively quiet—less from anything Harpe and his commanders did than because of the Soviet decision to reinforce a more spectacular victory to the south. Schörner had used the time after the abortive Russian spring offensive and before his transfer to replace equipment and train men. Army Group South Ukraine’s divisions were at full operational strength; its front was stable. The army group’s chief of staff even boasted that troops could be made available to other fronts if necessary.

  In the first three weeks of July, South Ukraine paid an initial installment on the bluster with five panzer divisions and two battalions of assault guns. The Romanian government and high command, already badly shaken, was anything but reassured. Nor was Schörner’s replacement a particularly inspired—or inspiring—choice. At best, Johannes Friessner was what Napoleon called “a good ordinary general,” with no experience of the kind of war waged in the open ground of the southeast. The first thing he learned was that his staff considered the available reserves—two panzer and a panzer grenadier division—insufficient to block a Soviet offensive. The second thing he learned was that Hitler would allow no front adjustments. The third was that his staff was right.

  Second and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were commanded by two of the best Russian wartime marshals: Rodion Malinovsky and Fyodor Tolbukhin. Stavka had rebuilt their combined force to over 900,000 men and 1,400 AFVs. Eighteen hundred planes guaranteed near-supremacy in the air. The hammer fell on August 20 in the Pruth valley. The sector was held by a mix of German infantry and Romanians already looking over their shoulders. Successful local counterattacks by panzer battle groups could do nothing to restore a situation that, by August 24, saw Russian spearheads meet near Leovo and cut off the German 6th Army. A Bagration-scale disaster was in sight, and Friessner was not the man to convince the Romanians otherwise. On August 23, Romanian King Michael dismissed Prime Minister Ion Antonescu. Within days the new government took Romania out of the war, then in again—against Hungary and Germany. Bulgaria, which had supported the Axis without declaring war on the USSR, declared war on Germany three days after Tolbukhin’s tankers crossed its border on August 5.

  For a while everybody was shooting at everybody else. The Luftwaffe bombed Bucharest. The Romanians took about 50,000 German prisoners. The Russians finished off 6th Army for the second time during the war and drove toward Hungary and the B
alkans. Not only did 600,000 men and 26 divisions suddenly find themselves on enemy territory; as Red Army spearheads entered Yugoslavia, the entire German force in the southern Balkans was threatened with envelopment.

  The transformation of occupied Yugoslavia from a strategic backwater to the key to the Eastern Front’s right half, the successful evacuation of Greece and Albania, and the stabilization—again temporary—of what remained of the Reich’s Balkan sector, is a story of its own. It has little to do with the panzers. Apart from a few pawn pieces like the self-propelled antitank guns organic to some infantry divisions and a few of the ubiquitous assault guns, a vital sector fought a vital campaign on a technical level little advanced from that of 1918. The 2nd Panzer Army, sent south in August 1943 and commanded eventually by an artilleryman, spent most of its time disarming Italians and fighting partisans with no tanks at all under command. It was a far cry from the days of 1940-41 for those of Guderian’s former staff officers who remained at their posts.

  Romania’s change of sides left Army Group South Ukraine no option but to save what could be saved and fall back on the Carpathians. The new line was formed by divisions officially designated as “remnants.” They included 13th and 20th Panzer, who covered the retreat until they had almost nothing left. By August 29, 20th Panzer Division was down to 1,300 men and no tanks: a “panzer battle group” by designation and courtesy. A similar fate overtook most of the assault gun battalions: guns lost, vehicles destroyed, survivors escaping on foot in small groups.

  Favorable terrain, Soviet overextension, and increased commitment by a Hungarian army fighting on its doorstep with German guns at its back, enabled the establishment of something like a stable front covering Budapest and the oil fields of Lake Balaton, which were now more vital than ever with their Romanian counterparts gone. Initially it seemed more of a speed bump than a battle line. On October 6, Malinovsky broke through a Hungarian sector on a 60-mile front around Debrecen. That was only 130 miles from Budapest, most of it open ground: the only question apparently was which of the front’s elements would arrive first.

  The Germans had stationed large forces in Hungary since March. When Regent Miklós Horthy attempted negotiations with Stalin, he was deposed on October 16 and replaced by a fascist puppet government. In the aftermath of the coup, the German High Command had been moving reserves into Hungary for a counterattack of its own. Operation Gypsy Baron, a nice reference to the Strauss operetta, was ambitiously expected to recover the Carpathian passes. Instead its forces were thrown in to block the Red Army: 227 tanks and assault guns, German and Hungarian, against almost 800. In a near-classic encounter battle, the 1st, 13th, and 23rd Panzer Divisions up and encircled part of the Soviet vanguard. But taking a page from their enemies’ playbook, the Russians managed to break out despite losing over half their armor.

  Malinovsky proposed to regroup and rebuild his tired front. Stalin ordered him forward. The offensive resumed on October 29. When it stalled, Stavka authorized heavy reinforcements, including 200 tanks, and ordered Tolbukhin to close up on Malinovsky’s right. Through November and into December, the Russians fought their way forward on both sides of Budapest, cutting the rail line to Vienna on December 23 and beginning the siege of a city neither German nor Hungarian generals believed could be defended.

  The panzers’ direct role in this process was limited. They had shot their bolt at Debrecen. Battle groups of a thousand men and a few dozen AFVs were merely drops of water on a hot stove. The men and the tanks that could have made up some of the autumn’s losses had instead been sent west to the Ardennes. In the face of Hitler’s insistence that Budapest be held to a finish, panzer commanders on the spot risked no more than minor movements.

  VI

  THERE WAS A sidebar to the campaigns of 1944. On September 10 the 1st Byelorussian Front, resupplied and reinforced, mounted a major offensive north of Warsaw, aimed northwest at the Narew River. It was stopped by Viking and Totenkopf, who thereby played a crucial role in the Warsaw Uprising’s defeat; but on October 10 it resumed, extended on the left by the 3rd Byelorussian Front. By October 21, the Red Army had captured an undamaged bridge across the Angerapp River, in the heart of East Prussia. Nothing seemed to stand in the way of the T-34s until Friedrich Hossbach was given most of the armor in the sector and ordered to counterattack.

  This was the same Hossbach who, as Hitler’s adjutant in 1937, kept the records that became the Hossbach Memorandum. An infantryman by branch, he had commanded 4th Army since mid-July. Now he had a worn-down 5th Panzer Division, the similarly attenuated Hermann Göring, and the newly organized Führer Grenadier Brigade. Together they amounted to around 100 tanks and assault guns. Not much seems to have been expected, but Hossbach was able to hit both flanks of the breakthrough simultaneously. Fifth Panzer went in from the north on October 21 with 22 tanks. Two days later they made contact with the Führer Grenadiers advancing from the south. The Soviets panicked, abandoning tanks and equipment in a rush to the rear the Germans lacked the strength to stop. Third Byelorussian Front, shut down for the winter. So did the campaign against East Prussia. But the future prospects of Army Group Center, were inescapably grim.

  Just how grim was suggested at the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf—the site of the Angerapp crossing of October 21. Elements of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps held the bridgehead against counterattacks for about four hours, then withdrew. When German troops entered two days later, they found a scene that German propaganda described as a massacre, with hundreds of civilians raped, shot, and butchered. The actual events remain subjects of debate, with allegations of photos doctored, corpses brought in from elsewhere, numbers exaggerated. One recent scholarly investigation reports fewer than 30 verifiable murders, with lesser atrocities on the same limited scale.

  These numbers have in turn been challenged. What is certain is that Goebbels and East Prussian Gauleiter Eric Koch used Nemmersdorf to inspire a spirit of resistance locally and nationally. What is also certain is that the Landser, foot- marchers or panzermen, had a winter to think about the story—and perhaps to remember other villages at other times, when the situation had been reversed. The victory rings on a Tiger’s gun barrel might move steadily toward the muzzle. An assault gun battalion might note its thousandth confirmed kill. But when Ivan came again, the fight would be to the finish.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FINALE

  AS HITLER’S VISION of kicking in Russia’s front door drowned in blood on the Eastern Front, France increasingly became a rest-and-recuperation zone for burned-out frontline units. Even the West’s supreme commander as of March 1942, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, had received his appointment after being removed from his army group in Russia. A few weeks in France to absorb equipment and replacements, to forget the war as much as possible, was a dream that ran a close third to a long furlough or a million-mark wound. Simultaneously the “hero-thieves” of the replacement service staged comb-out after comb-out in the formations that watched the coasts. In 1942 and 1943, just about anyone who wanted to fight, who was able to fight, or who could conceivably be made to fight, was transferred eastward. Their replacements were the lame and the halt, the elderly and the invalid, whole battalions recruited from Russia’s Asian communities or from prisoners of war.

  I

  IN THOSE CONTEXTS, might the US-initiated projects for a full-scale landing in the spring of 1943 have caught the Wehrmacht at its lowest ebb? For a good part of 1943, High Command West had fewer combat-ready divisions than it possessed in 1942. It was absorbed in implementing Hitler’s September 1942 order to increase the coastal defenses by no fewer than 15,000 strong points. The archives include far more correspondence on details of the Führer’s blockhouse projects than on proposals for repelling a full-scale cross-channel invasion. The Allies’ Mediterranean initiatives drew attention southward. During 1943, the Germans in the West had so many immediate priorities that concern for a D-Day-type operation moved toward the bottom of the list by de
fault.

  But it did not disappear. The case for a 1943 invasion of northeastern Europe appears plausible only because of distractions themselves largely the product of Anglo-American initiatives in the Mediterranean. Almost from its creation, High Command West was convinced the Allies would eventually strike northwestern Europe in force. The only question was when and where the blow would fall. Without Operation Torch and its aftermaths, the Germans would have been free to concentrate on preparing for a major landing mounted from Britain. And D-Day was an operation that could only be undertaken once.

  Britain’s moral and material capital was nearly exhausted, its fighting manpower so limited that the army sent to Northwestern Europe had to cannibalize itself, breaking up entire divisions to keep the rest operational. Failure, to say nothing of disaster, would have had incal culably negative consequences for the war effort of the island kingdom. The US was powerful enough to bear and recover from the material consequences of defeat on Europe’s beaches. The psychological impact was a different story entirely. June 1944 in England invites comparison in US military history with July 1863 in Pennsylvania. Both occasions generated a sense of participation in something Hegel might have called a world-historical event. Seen in this light, the cross-channel invasion was more than a military operation—too much more to risk its launching in anything but the most favorable circumstances possible.

  As High Command West coped with the challenges generated by the Russian and Mediterranean theaters, the Atlantic Wall began taking on a life of its own. By mid-1943, particularly around the major ports, the Wall looked authentic, with trenches, ditches, and minefields, machine-gun nests, concrete strong points, and heavy artillery emplaced in what even to men who knew better seemed impregnable bunkers. The commanders on the spot, however, were not exactly sure what to do with it.