Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt

Conclusions

From September 1939 until November 1941, the German use of combined arms tactics – melding armour, artillery, air power and other branches in order to produce a superior synergy of combat power at a schwerpunkt or decisive point, never failed. Even the failure at Moscow in November 1941 was due more to German logistical deficiencies and adverse terrain/weather considerations than any defects in German doctrine or methods. In many respects, Operation Typhoon was an aberration, where wishful thinking by the OKH led the panzer armies into a no-win situation. Yet when the German logistic situation and the weather improved in the spring of 1942, the Wehrmacht demonstrated again that it could use its combined arms tactics to pierce Soviet defensive lines at chosen points and encircle its opponents. Soviet operational-level use of tank forces was sub-par for most of 1941–42, negating much of the advantage offered by their numerical superiority. Despite the purported economic weakness of Germany in a protracted war of attrition, German armoured units retained their ability to conduct successful offensive operations until Operation Wintergewitter failed to break through the Soviet ring encircling AOK 6 at Stalingrad. Although there had been occasional failures by individual panzer divisions to achieve their objectives in May–July 1942, the German panzer-led schwerpunkt could generally penetrate or bypass Soviet linear defensive positions until Wintergewitter. As far as operational-level armoured warfare was concerned, the Germans lost the war in the East when their panzer–Luftwaffe combined arms teams lost the assured ability to penetrate Soviet defensive lines and, conversely, the Red Army gained the ability to break through German defenses with their tank corps.

In the German Panzerwaffe, Fascist attitudes toward war were evident in the lionizing of Ritterkreuz war heroes and embellishing tanks with names such as the Tiger and the Panther – which has helped to perpetuate Nazi mythology to this day. While the Germans were masters at using symbology to bolster morale on the Eastern Front, senior panzer commanders had little regard for the industrial basis behind their combat power. If they had, they would have been aware that Hitler reduced ammunition production in July 1941 and terminated the production of tungsten-core armour-piercing rounds in June 1942 and argued that they couldn’t compete with the Red Army with this kind of decision-making.

In contrast, the Red Army’s inherent Marxist–Leninist attitude to war was evident in the total mobilization philosophy of all state resources, and the recognition that the production/labor front was just as important as the war front. Soviet tanks had no fancy names, just numbers. In the end, the Red Army’s sober, material-oriented mindset proved of more value when the chips were down in 1941 as well as when Soviet industry could finally provide the means in 1942–43 to drive out the hated invaders.

Red Army tankers demonstrated increasing competence in tactical infantry support missions throughout 1941–42, but were singularly ineffective at using their armour to conduct independent Deep Battle operations. Even once the Red Army gained a significant numerical superiority in mid-1942 with its tank corps and tank armies, it lacked the ability to penetrate German defensive lines in any real depth. At Kharkov, Rzhev, Bryansk and Leningrad, Soviet tank attacks failed to crack the German defenses and suffered ruinous losses in the process. It was not until Operation Uranus offered the Red Army an opportunity to pit its armour against less-capable Romanian forces that Soviet tank units demonstrated an ability to conduct Deep Battle operations. Thus, irrespective of other strategic factors, the dynamic of armoured warfare on the Eastern Front was characterized by German superiority until November 1942, at which point the balance began to shift irrevocably toward the Red Army’s tank forces.

While it was theoretically true that the Red Army could win a war of attrition with the Wehrmacht, that does not mean that it could win a lopsided war of attrition where the Germans inflicted 7–1 or more casualties in personnel and tanks. A succession of costly failures such as Kharkov, the Crimea and the Don Bend crippled the Red Army’s best armoured forces for months and provided the Wehrmacht with an opportunity to reach the Volga and the Caucasus. At the heart of the Red Army’s lop-sided tank losses was an amateurish and selfdestructive style of decision imposed by Stalin from the top down. Generals such as Timoshenko, Budyonny, Konev and even Zhukov often abandoned military common sense in order to appease Stalin’s incessant demands to attack in impulsive half-baked offensives. Without logistics, armoured operations could not be sustained and without training, armoured units performed poorly in combat and fell apart – this was the root cause of the Red Army’s dysfunctional armoured operations of 1941–42.

In order to win, the Red Army needed to relearn operational maneuver art and combined arms warfare, as well as gaining a cadre of tactically-astute junior and mid-level leaders, but this did not occur until eighteen months into the war. Until the Red Army learned these lessons, it could not win, it could just avoid losing. In November 1942 there was a subtle shift in the Red Army, as months of military disasters finally caused Stalin to reduce some of his interference in military operations and allow the quiet professionals such as Vasilevsky, Vatutin and Rokossovsky to prepare proper offensives such as Uranus and Little Saturn. Nevertheless, the use of Soviet armour at the operational level remained impulsive and Zhukov and other commanders repeatedly made the same mistake of committing their armoured exploitation forces before a true breakthrough had been achieved. Both sides grappled with the problems of armoured logistics throughout the war and neither ever completely mastered the ability to sustain mobile operations for extended periods. Just as the German failure to sustain their armoured spearheads in late 1941 led to the failure of Barbarossa, the Soviet inability to sustain their tank corps in 1942 prevented Operation Little Saturn from becoming an immediate death-blow to Heeresgruppe Don.