Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (37 page)

The last crumbs of the once-proud Fourth Panzer Army occupied relatively strong (for April 1945) positions in three successive lines: 1. The Neisse itself; 2. The Peitz-Weisswasser complex, which included numerous open-pit coal mines; and 3. The upper Spree River. Koniev had no established bridgeheads over the Neisse so would have to create them on day one. That day came on 16 April, when over 7,700 guns opened fire at 0615 hours along a 400km front. By evening the Soviets had numerous crossing sites up and down the river, many up to 10km deep. What was left of the Luftwaffe went up against the Red Army Air Force, and promptly went down in glorious defeat. Graeser counterattacked with what panzer reserves he did possess, 20th Panzer (including twenty-five Panthers), the new Bohemia Panzergrenadier Division and even a force of captured T–34s, under LVII Panzer Corps. Hitler held out hope that 1st Ukrainian was running out of steam. Knowing that Fourth Panzer had no reserves left, Koniev threw in his exploitation force of two tank armies. With Stalin urging them on, Koniev’s men took terrible casualties. Between Fourth Panzer’s defensive lines swirling battles took place as Koniev shifted his main effort from 4th Guards Tank to 3rd Guards Tank Armies (combined strength
of 963 AFVs). The Germans falsely assumed the enemy would need existing Spree bridges, not knowing they had saved their heavy bridging equipment for just that purpose. Telling them to avoid well-defended urban areas such as at Cottbus, held by V Corps, soon Koniev’s men crossed the Spree at Spremburg and Bautzen. Fighting was particularly intense on the Dresden axis near the southern bridgeheads beyond Gorlitz, where the Germans counterattacked with some success. ‘Fortress Dresden’, already thrashed by the Royal Air Force, fell without a fight on 24 April. By the third week of April, all major Fourth Panzer points of resistance had been overcome as Soviet and American soldiers met on the 25th. On that same date, Graeser’s command had been broken into two, widely separated pieces: an encirclement including elements of Ninth Army northwest of Cottbus and another near the Saxon capital. A small counterattack near Dresden by 20th Panzer and SS Frundsberg (and even the Luftwaffe’s Herman Goring Panzer Division) only delayed the inevitable.
⁸²
By early May, all eyes were on Berlin and other sectors, such as that occupied by Fourth Panzer Army no longer counted for much. Fourth Panzer Army, perhaps the most storied of the four, a veteran of Barbarossa, Blau, Stalingrad, Backhand Blow, Citadel, the long retreat and on the fringe of the Battle of Berlin, fizzled out in the rolling countryside of Saxony.

Chapter 6

Conclusions

The fates of the four panzer armies described here largely mirrored that of the German Reich. In the early stages of the war, fighting in France, Yugoslavia and during Operation Barbarossa, they carried all before them. Neither terrain, weather, sanguine German logistical planning nor the enemy could seriously slow the panzer armies. These slashing formations, their clever commanders and dedicated Panzertruppen seemingly could not be stopped. The panzer armies made things happen, they created undreamed of opportunities for the German high command by laying Dunkirk (1940), Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov (1941), Stalingrad and the Caucasus Mountains (1942) at Hitler’s feet.
¹
However, with its small size and paucity of strategic thinkers, Germany could not exploit the openings that these moves presented. As Hitler surrendered the strategic initiative, the panzer armies became just like any other army in the German arsenal.

This trend began around Moscow, especially in regards to the Second and Third Panzer Armies. In June of 1941, Germany attacked all along the massive Soviet frontier, but it could only sustain that level of activity for five months. The First and Fourth Panzer Armies enjoyed a renaissance of operational significance in 1942. But by this stage in the war, Germany could only impose its will over the southern half of the front. By 1943, only Fourth Panzer enjoyed anything close to the freedom of maneuver that panzer armies had come to expect, and then in a sector covering a mere few hundred square kilometers and for one short week. From mid–July of that year until VE Day, all four panzer armies would reel back like an exhausted boxer, retreating into his corner under a hail of blows from his opponent who could smell victory at any moment. The Second Panzer Army disappeared to near obscurity in the Balkans. In 1944, the First (March–April) and Third (June–July) were fortunate to avoid total destruction. Ironically, the panzer army closest to the central theater during the last few months of the war, the Fourth, survived largely intact.

By the middle stages of Operation Blau, infantry armies, the Sixth in particular, were commanded by panzer generals (Paulus in this case) and often had as many panzer divisions under command as did the panzer armies themselves. The same happened during Operation Citadel, when an infantry army, the Ninth (although commanded by a panzer general, Model), had the
second most-powerful panzer force in the Ostheer. Germany never regained the strategic, or even operational, initiative for the remainder of the Nazi–Soviet War
²
. For the last two years of the Second World War, panzers hardly operated together in units larger than a panzer corps, and on only a handful of occasions, with two panzer corps fighting together. By that stage of the war, the Red Army’s tank and ‘all arms’ guards armies behaved more like the panzer armies of yore, than even the actual panzer armies did at the end of the war.

The reasons for this juxtaposition are not material; it is common knowledge that the Panzerwaffe fought outnumbered yet prevailed with inferior weapons and numbers starting in May 1940. In the later stages of the war, once Germany finally adopted the semblance of a total-war economy, its industry produced prodigious numbers of AFVs (and fighter aircraft and flak guns and . . .) which allowed the Wehrmacht to deploy a massive armored arsenal. Unfortunately for them, numbers of panzers did not equal the campaign-winning concentration that carried Germany to victory after victory until Stalingrad. Panzers and assault guns were spread over the continent of Europe in huge amounts, fighting on every front. But they were employed in small, tactical groups like divisions and brigades and, as often as not, danced to the tune of the Allies, in the case of this book, the Red Army.

The temptation to break up the panzer armies and use them as tactical weapons in pin-prick operations had always been there. Within weeks of Barbarossatag, Army Group South received pressure to divide First Panzer, but von Rundstedt steadfastly refused. By late summer, Third Panzer was being split into corps and the decline of the panzer armies began down the slippery slope. During Operation Blau, there were two panzer armies worthy of the name, during Citadel one, and from August 1943 onwards, none. By Stalin’s 1941 general winter offensive, reacting to this and that crisis, Hitler, the OKW and OKH, army group commanders and others had seemingly unlearned the lessons about the power of concentrated armor. Of course at that moment, they no longer possessed a mass of panzers, but that fact does not diminish my argument. With the Red Army killing the Ostheer via both their own application of concentration and the death by a thousand cuts techniques, panzer formations became just so many bandages. In other words, like the French and Soviets earlier in the war, the Germans succumbed to treating the immediate symptoms,
not
the root problems themselves.

The fact that the panzers armies spent the bulk of the war on the defensive and reacting to Soviet moves should in no way detract from their earlier accomplishments. Their feats during 1941–42 will remain legendary in the annals of military history. In a well-known anecdote, during a 1944 visit to the Soviet Union, French General Charles De Gaulle toured the Stalingrad battlefield. Initially
his comments about ‘magnificent soldiers’ were wishfully misinterpreted by his hosts as praise for the victors. Upon further clarification, it was explained that he was referring to the fact that a medium-sized country like Germany had made it so far against such improbable odds. Credit for whatever successes Germany did enjoy on the battlefields of Europe goes both to the performances and endurance of the long-suffering Landsers and to the headline–grabbing panzers.

Appendix I

Panzer Army Commanders

Appendix II

Panzer Army Orders of Battle