Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (14 page)

In early April, Eremenko planned a new offensive, this time in conjunction with the 2nd Ukrainian Front. The last commander of First Panzer Army, General of Panzer Troops Walther Nehring, had 20 badly depleted divisions manning nearly 200km, and 300 panzers supported by 280 aircraft (both respectable numbers for the last month of the war). Against him Eremenko fielded 40 rifle divisions (also weakened), a similar number of AFVs, but 6,000 guns and 435 aircraft. The assault began on 15 April, but again First Panzer defenses, many housed in pre-war Czech fortifications that had worried Hitler in 1938, remained steadfast. Nehring’s men held on to Opava on the Czech-Polish border until 24 April. When the 60th Army took that town the road was open to the center of the Moravian industrial basin around Ostrava. With the 2nd Ukrainian Front coming up from the direction of Brno (Stavka had planned a sizeable encirclement battle involving the two fronts near Olomouc), First Panzer had to escape to the west. But Nehring had one last ace up his sleeve: near the Napoleonic battlefield of Austerlitz, the 8th and 16th Panzer Divisions and 6th Guards Tank Army fought one of the last armored battles of the war. First Panzer Army was caught between Soviet and American forces racing to see which would liberate Prague, one of the opening moves of the superpower conflict that would soon develop between the two nations. Squeezed on all sides, the panzer army continued to fight near Prague until 9 May, after the Second World War was technically over.
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General of Panzer Troops Walther Nehring

Nehring was born in East Prussia in 1892 and joined Infantry Regiment 152 in 1915. As a major in 1931, he was deputy to Colonel Guderian, chief of staff of General Lutz’s Inspectorate of Motorized Troops. By 1937, he commanded Panzer Regiment 5, and then served as chief of staff of Guderian’s XIX Corps in Poland and France. Between France and Barbarossa, Nehring was one of the few panzer generals to support the doubling of number of panzer divisions by halving the number of panzers in each: he believed in their original size, the divisions were too large and unwieldy. For Barbarossa Nehring received command of one of those new divisions, 18th Panzer, under Guderian as before.

Nehring stayed with Second Panzer Army through the battles of Minsk, Smolensk all the way to Moscow. After some defensive fighting near Sukhinichi in the winter, Nehring transferred to North Africa in March 1942. He took command of the Africa Corps (15th and 21st Panzer Divisions and the 90th Light Division) under Rommel’s Panzer Army Africa. There he helped win the magnificent cauldron battle at Gazala and contributed to the capture of Tobruk. He was wounded during an Allied air attack that August while driving towards Alam Halfa and medically evacuated back to Germany. Nehring returned to Africa in November, and commanded the ad hoc XC Corps defending Tunis. Believing the Germans could not defend Tunisia, he soon fell foul of both his political and military masters (Goebbels’ representative and Kesselring, respectively). He remained in North Africa less than one month.

Nehring was back on the Eastern Front by February 1943, to take command of the XXIV Panzer Corps under Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army. His corps was designated as a reserve of Operation Citadel’s southern pincer. It later participated in the defense of the Ukraine, including the critical battle against the Soviet bridgehead over the Dnepr at Burkin and Kanev in September. The XXIV Panzer played key roles in the defensive battles of both First and Fourth Panzer Armies during the winter of 1943–44. He evidently returned to the good graces of his superiors, receiving the Oak Leaves in February 1944. A month later, Nehring’s XXIV Panzer was part of the First Panzer’s pocket that ‘wandered’ from Cherkassy–Korsun to relative freedom. During the summer of that year, Nehring served a month–long tour of duty as acting commander of the Fourth Panzer Army.

Back at XXIV Panzer in late summer, Nehring guided that formation westward through Poland as part of Army Group Vistula. By early 1945, his corps drifted toward Silesia, where it avoided destruction and joined up with Panzer Corps Grossdeutschland. Nehring ended the war commanding the First Panzer Army near Prague for six weeks. One would have to judge Nehring as a good tactical-level panzer general, but whose main claim to fame was his career-long association with Guderian. He died in 1983.

Chapter 3

Second Panzer Army

Ironically, the panzer army with the greatest promise at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa ended the war with the most meager history of the four. The Second went from being first among equals in 1941 to barely identifiable on a map in 1945. During Barbarossa, with panzer legend Guderian at its head, Second Panzer raced past Minsk and Smolensk to the Yelnia bridgehead, barely 300km from Moscow. It then swung south to help create the Kiev Kessel and then returned north for the final, failed assault on Stalin’s capital.

In early December 1941, Second Panzer went over to the defensive, Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge cashiered Guderian and the army settled down to a year and a half of essentially static defensive and anti-partisan operations. It would no longer be a weapon of operational significance to the Ostheer. From early 1942 on, it would be a panzer army in name only. As a final insult to its former glory, Schnelle Heinz’s old outfit sat out Operation Citadel in favor of the Ninth Army. Its headquarters deployed to the Balkans during the summer of 1943 to lead more anti-partisan duty there. By spring 1945, it defended the Third Reich’s last major natural oil fields in Hungary and ended the war fighting near Vienna.

As part of Army Group Center, Second and Third Panzer Armies were paired to create Barbarossa’s main effort. Their mission was to drive from south and north of the Bialystok salient and destroy the dangerously exposed Western Front and any follow-on Soviet defenders trying to hold the relatively high ground along the ‘traditional’ Warsaw-Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow invasion route. The Luftwaffe’s premier CAS formation, von Richthofen’s VIII Fliegerkorps, flew overhead. Field Marshal von Bock intended for them to act in concert with the Fourth and Ninth (and later, Second) Armies to create massive encirclement battles along the way. Once Smolensk had fallen, the German high command would decide where the two panzer armies would go during Barbarossa’s next phase. Capturing Moscow itself was not an explicit goal of the Barbarossa campaign, except in the minds of a few generals. For Hitler and consistent with centuries of German military thought, Moscow was merely a reason for enemy armies to concentrate, thence to be destroyed in a panzer-led Vernichtungsschlacht.

For Guderian’s men the campaign began at 0315 hours on Sunday, 22 June, after a half hour of artillery preparation. There was little finesse in their opening moves, they simply plunged into the center of Major General AA Korobkov’s 4th Army. Except for the fortress Brest, Red Army units on the frontier did not put up much of a fight. Second Panzer men used existing bridges as well as inflatable rafts, assault boats and eighty ‘submarine’ tanks of 1st Battalion, Panzer Regiment 18 of the 18th Panzer Division to swarm across the Bug River. German construction engineers built additional bridges by 0500 hours. The dearth of defensive fire caused the Germans to have a false impression of their own strengths and of enemy weaknesses. By 1500 hours, first the 3rd, then the 4th Panzer Division had slashed through the Soviet defenses and were heading east unhindered along the Panzerstrasse toward Bobruisk. By the second day of the campaign a dangerous trend developed as Guderian had already outrun his logistics and already required aerial resupply.
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Along much of the defensive line, commander of the Soviet Western Front, Colonel General DG Pavlov issued nonsense orders to imaginary units in accordance with unrealistic pre-war ‘Red Folder’ orders. His mission was to first halt Guderian then counterattack into the Reich. But he did manage to launch a counterattack against Guderian that first day with the 478 tanks of the 14th Mechanized Corps. Within 48 hours this formation lost nearly 50 percent of its tanks and by the 26th, its operational rate stood below one-tenth of that. Guderian’s panzers brushed aside the threat and plunged ever eastward. With the help ofPolish peasants guiding the way, the 3rd Panzer bypassed Red Army defenses near Kobryn and on the 23rd captured the 4th Army headquarters. Because of the sand and marshland to either side of Second Panzer’s axis of advance, German vehicles had largely to remain on the road. The division had advanced 150km by 24 June, but the tail end of its rear services still had not left occupied Poland. Division commander and future field marshal, Walther
Model, escaped death that day when Soviet artillery destroyed his eight-wheeled armored car (killing its crew) moments after Model had dismounted.
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Soviet pioneers did a good job of demolishing bridges along the Panzerstrasse, but this did not significantly slow Guderian. While XXIV Panzer Corps continued east, XLVII Panzer angled northeast as part of Second Panzer’s encircling force. At one point, the 17th Panzer Division stood so far in front of the bulk of his forces, it became encircled near Slonim on Guderian’s left and needed to be rescued by its sister formation, 18th Panzer. In turn, the 29th Motorized had to keep the road open between both divisions and the panzer army’s rear echelons. Four days into Barbarossa, XXIV Panzer Corps was through the flaming town of Slutsk, 300km deep in the USSR. On that same day, in order to appease Hitler, OKH ordered von Bock to close the proposed Kessel with inner (infantry armies at Bialystok) and outer pincers around Minsk (panzer armies). The army group commander disagreed since he wanted to continue toward Moscow, but nevertheless passed these orders down the chain of command. To the north, for the next two days, Hoth duly maneuvered his panzer army toward the Belorussian capital, entering it on the 28th. With Guderian racing east according to his own whims, not enough Second Panzer units came up to meet Hoth. For more than 24 hours, Soviet units escaped the trap until the 18th Panzer finally closed on Minsk from the south on the 29th.
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As he had on more than on occasion during the French campaign, Guderian allowed his personal desires to override his professional duty. Nevertheless, the Ostheer had reason to be satisfied after the blitzkrieg had completely dismantled the Western Front’s defensive structure in a matter of days.

At the beginning of Barbarossa, as had been the case during the western campaign, panzer armies had been tied to specific infantry armies, supposedly to ease command and control and logistics matters during an operation’s breakthrough stage. This was not meant to be a permanent arrangement. So on the 28th, von Bock considered that Guderian had achieved ‘operational freedom’ and cut Second Panzer loose from von Kluge’s Fourth Army. Guderian, who had been chafing under the plodding infantry army commander, must have breathed a sigh of relief. However, almost simultaneously, after a headlong rush, the 3rd Panzer Division slowed down when it encountered a destroyed bridge over the Beresina River. The Soviets had hoped to recreate a coherent defense along that line. Model had to wait for heavy artillery to come forward and assist the assault pioneers. At this point, he fought a two-day set-piece battle against the 20th Army at Bobruisk in which leader losses were especially high: the general was almost wounded again, as was a major standing right next to him. Aided by aerial reconnaissance, on the last day of June, 4th Panzer, on the right flank of General of Panzer Troops Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg’s
corps, took an important railroad bridge at Svisloch by coup, opening the way for Guderian once again.
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Von Bock had given Hoth ‘operational freedom’ on the second day of Barbarossa, already releasing him from Ninth Army control. Now that Guderian had the same privileges, he flew to Hoth’s headquarters on 30 June. The ostensible reason for their meeting was to coordinate how they would negotiate the Berezina River obstacle. However, the meeting took on the aspect of a conspiracy when, on their own initiative, the two agreed to renew eastward movement and to not brook any delays in their advance imposed by higher headquarters. The next day, fighting in the various Minsk pockets officially ended. Army Group Center, behind the two panzer armies, had bagged 342,000 POWs, killed an estimated 200,000 men, eliminated 32 Soviet divisions and 6 brigades, destroyed 3,332 tanks and 1,809 guns at a cost of about 5,000 German dead and 18,000 wounded. After barely two weeks, the Ostheer had won its first great victory and the Red Army defense of the critical Moscow axis lay in shambles. The panzer armies had done the heavy lifting.
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They had proved their value in the first major panzer operation since France the year before.

Nothing in the Nazi–Soviet War came easy, however. Despite the mass surrender, the Red Army contested every step. A Grossdeutschland soldier recalled an engagement near Stolpce, on 5 July: