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

Preface

It was hot and dry, as I stood in the turret of ‘Godzilla-II’ and scanned across the flat horizon with my binoculars, looking for any indications of the adversary – but there were none. My tank company had been out on manoeuvres for a week in the desert and our battalion commander – who rarely graced us with his presence in the field – had ordered us to spend a day conducting company-size tactical drills. One particular favourite of his was the so-called ‘thirteen-on-one’ scenario, in which one tank from the company would assume a hull-down defensive position and the other thirteen tanks would then manoeuvre to engage and destroy the one hidden tank. We were informed that the mission had to be conducted with urgency and that we would be provided no air, artillery or infantry support, nor could we try to bypass the defending tank. This was the kind of mental inflexibility that usually leads to disaster. When I tried to point out that this kind of tank-pure assault across flat desert terrain had not worked in the Western Desert in 1941–42 or on the steppes of Russia in 1941–43, all common sense was dismissed with a curt, ‘Do as you are ordered’.

So we spent the day fruitlessly attacking that single tank, over and over again. We had to cross over 3 kilometres of flat ground that lacked anything more than the occasional tumbleweed. Standard overwatch tactics – which were actually frowned upon by our battalion commander as ‘slowing down’ the operational tempo – were useless, since there was no cover at all. At first we tried a ‘tank charge’ with all three platoons moving as rapidly as possible, almost on line – but the MILES lights were blinking on all thirteen tanks after just 1,500 metres – indicating that all were notionally destroyed. We never even saw the hull-down tank until it was too late. Then we tried a variety of different methods, but there really was nowhere to manoeuvre and the adversary – whom I knew to be a very experienced combat veteran – could see every move we made. I knew he was chain-smoking cigarettes in his turret, peering through his primary daylight sight and laughing at the stupidity of it all. We even tried dismounting with a few troops and low-crawling with an AT-4 light anti-tank weapon, but we were spotted and the adversary fired upon us with his .50 calibre machinegun. Eventually, on around the fourth try, we got a bit luckier and found a few spots that were almost dead space; we deliberately sacrificed two tank platoons in order to draw fire off to one flank and one tank out of thirteen survived long enough to spot the black smoke of the adversary’s diesel engine – every time he pulled up to fire there was a puff of smoke that gave away his position – but it could only be seen from about 400 metres. The last tank was able to close and engage the adversary when he moved up to fire. Our chain of command seemed unconcerned that we had suffered something like 400 per cent losses in order to knock out one adversary tank, but were more upset that we had taken so many hours to accomplish this seemingly simple task. They would have made fine commanders in the Red Army. Not one of these men actually spent any time in a tank or bothered to look at the terrain. Nor did they seem aware – despite their West Point credentials – that von Clausewitz had written that everything in war is simple, but actually accomplishing it is not.

When I read about single German Panther or Tiger tanks in 1943–44 engaging masses of T-34 tanks and destroying a dozen of them, I think back to my own experiments with armoured mass versus armoured firepower. Modern armour aficionados – few of whom ever served on tanks – tend to ascribe this kind of achievement to the innate superiority of German tanks over Soviet models, without considering that any hidden, hull-down tank has a huge advantage against tanks moving across the open. Other folks, perhaps taken in by lingering Nazi-era propaganda, tend to regard the Third Reich and its weaponry with a certain romanticism that blinds them to its numerous faults. For years, German veterans have harped on the notion of the Soviet ‘Steamroller’, achieving victory only by dint of massive numbers, but my experiences with tanks taught me that mass is ephemeral and that victory is achieved not by dint of numbers, but by bold and effective use of combined arms tactics. This was proven again in the Golan in 1973 and Iraq in 1991, where masses of Syrian and Iraqi tanks proved completely at a loss against better-led Israeli and Coalition tanks.

In 1941–42, the German panzer forces were victorious because they successfully used combined arms tactics and the Red Army tankers did not. Instead, in the first two years of the war on the Eastern Front Red Army tankers relied primarily upon mass and suffered defeat after lop-sided defeat. Red Army tank commanders were hounded by political commissars and Stavka representatives to attack prematurely and under unfavourable conditions, often ignoring doctrine and military common sense. The results were predictable – heavy losses and frustration. However, in November 1942 the balance of armoured warfare on the Eastern Front began to change as the Red Army improved its methods, and these changes accelerated in 1943. The badly-depleted Wehrmacht had fewer and fewer resources to conduct true combined arms tactics and was less able to achieve its missions, while the Red Army leadership became less focussed on mass and more on adopting the kind of combined arms tactics that had worked so well for their adversary at the outset of the war.