Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (7 page)

Facing the Stalin Line fieldworks during the first week of July, the Panzertruppen in the lead spearheads had to make a decision: break on through or wait for the marching infantry? Logistic support had already become problematic to the point where Ju–52 aircraft had to fly fuel and ammunition to forward units. Von Kleist opted to go it alone, assaulted through the defenses and pushed east. Some units overcame the obstacles quickly, while others, such as the 14th Panzer required five days. Once they were through, Kirponos had little in the way of mobile reserves with which to dispute the panzer army’s advance: the strength of his mechanized corps stood as follows: 4th – 40 percent; 9th and 19th – 30 percent; 8th and 15th – 15 percent and 22nd – 10 percent.
First Panzer Army slipped south and made for Berdichev and Zithomir without concern for its flanks. But casualties were heavy once the town came under attack: 11th Panzer suffered 2,000 dead and wounded in fighting around Berdichev, which fell on 7 July. That same day, Zhukov ordered Kirponos to send the fresh 16th Mechanized Corps (plus scraps of the 4th and 15th Mechanized) to counterattack and regain the town. Von Kleist’s men were ready for them and the human–wave attacks launched by the Red Army infantry. Three days later, Zithomir fell as well.
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As it had at Dubno weeks earlier, the Soviets’ determination to counterattack whenever and wherever possible took its toll on the German advance. In the case of Berdichev, the defensive battle there meant von Kleist’s two panzer corps in that area could not link up with the Seventeenth Army and create an encirclement battle at Vinnitsa. Only a small portion of the panzer army made it to this city and the disappointing number of Red Army assets neutralized there angered Hitler. Meanwhile, III Panzer Corps had made a straight line toward Kiev. Its orders on 9 July read: ‘Occupy Kiev as a deep bridgehead east of the Dnepr as the basis of continued operations east of the river.’ On the following day, 13th Panzer reached and crossed the Irpen River (to the city’s west) and hung on to a small bridgehead while it waited for the rest of General of Cavalry Eberhard von Mackensen’s corps (14th Panzer and 25th Motorized). The suddenness of the panzers’ arrival surprised the unprepared defenders, led by Marshal SM Budenny’s Commissar, NS Khrushchev. At this point, the Soviet 5th Army, basically between the Rokitno Marshes and III Panzer Corps, received orders from Kirponos to attack southward into the panzer corps’ rear, near Broniki and Cheritsa. Von Mackensen’s Irpen position stood at the end of a 120km-long gap between it and the Sixth Army’s infantry, doing all they could to close the distance. Both of the Army group’s motorized SS divisions pulled duty keeping the lengthy supply line open for nearly a week.
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The 25th Motorized arrived at the Irpen bridgehead on 19 July, while the Sixth Army fought its way forward to fend off 5th Army attacks along the Zithomir corridor and relieve III Panzer. The commander of the Sixth, von Reichenau, wanted to keep III Panzer in order to deal with the 5th Army more thoroughly. Both Hitler and von Rundstedt turned down this bad idea; they had bigger plans for First Panzer Army. Despite Kirponos’ repeated attempts to destroy, halt or simply blunt von Kleist’s advance, the panzer army would not be denied and now planned to wheel south to create Army Group South’s first major encirclement. Zhukov later wrote that by being involved in so many costly frontal attacks, von Rundstedt’s panzers had not been used to their full potential as operational breakthrough weapons. But on the other hand, by mid-July the Southwest Front no longer possessed any motorized
forces, and henceforth relied purely on artillery and the Dnepr to defend the Ukraine.
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Between 5–7 July, Hitler and Halder decided to execute an encirclement battle west of the Dnepr River. Two days later, von Rundstedt received orders to create a Kessel using his panzer forces in conjunction with Seventeenth Army infantry marching generally along the southern Bug River from Vinnitsa. When III Panzer Corps halted in front of Kiev yet did not attack, Kirponos thought he had been successful. He did not understand the significance of the fact that von Kleist’s men turned south once they reached their pivot point of Belaya Zerkov. By 13 July, the Southwest Front’s intelligence officer, Colonel Bondarev, noticed the maneuver, but Kirponos still did not see the battle of annihilation developing. Toward the third week of July, XLVIII Panzer headed southeast directly on Uman, while XIV Panzer had extricated itself from the fighting near Fastov and covered the panzer army’s left flank along the Dnepr. Von Mackensen turned the investment of Kiev over to Sixth Army and followed the other two panzer corps.
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The earlier missed opportunity at Vinnitsa only meant another, larger one, at Uman.

First Panzer Army plunged south, leaving Kiev behind with the corps–sized Group Schwedler maintaining its rearward communications. Von Kleist had effectively split the 6th and 26th Armies: the latter drifted east and eventually over the Dnepr, while the former joined the 12th Army in a chaotic retreat from Vinnitsa (although they left behind much of their heavy equipment). Of course the panzers moved faster than the Red infantry, but the Landsers of Seventeenth Army also performed prodigious feats of marching, which put the defenders in serious jeopardy. At hill 251 just north of Uman, Soviet resistance stopped Captain Pricken’s 1st Battalion, Panzer Regiment 15. Regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel Riebel pulled his panzer next to Pricken’s and yelled, ‘Shoot, shoot!’ The captain answered, ‘I only have a toy gun (Gummikanone)!’ Riebel replied, ‘That doesn’t mean shit (Scheissegal), shoot!’ The entire regiment then took hill 251, destroying thirty tanks in the process, as the commanding general, Major General Ludwig Cruwell, looked on. Kirponos ordered a counterattack by units outside the developing pocket. Accordingly, elements of the 26th Army still on the west bank of the Dnepr moved against XIV Panzer Corps near Vasilkov and Tarashcha. To meet the threat, the Germans changed facing 90 degrees from south to east. Additionally, on 21 July, 13th Panzer had to come to their rescue from the north. On the same day, the 11th Panzer Division reached the town of Uman, while 16th Panzer occupied Monastyrishche, which only 24 hours earlier had been the headquarters of Budenny’s Southwestern Direction.
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Very heavy rain fell from 22–29 July, just when von Rundstedt’s men tried to close the trap. Only tracked vehicles and native panje wagons could move: bridges were essential for crossing rivers, fording them were out of the question. The Soviets made frantic attempts to escape, predictably to the northeast through the XLVIII Panzer Corps. Until 27 July, the 16th Panzer and 16th Motorized fought for their lives near Monastyrishche against the last vestiges of the 4th Mechanized Corps and elsewhere on the XLVIII sector, the town of Novo Arckangelsk changed hands many times. On the 25th, corps commander von Wietersheim inserted the Leibstandarte between 11th and 16th Panzer Divisions, stabilizing the situation. Despite the downpours, Seventeenth Army infantry marched to the rendezvou point, now established at Pervomaisk. On 3 August, 16th Panzer crossed the 100m wooden bridge over the Bug there, linking up with the Hungarian Fast Corps, assigned to the Seventeenth Army. At Uman, Army Group South captured 103,000 POWs (including commanding generals of 6th and 12th Armies and 13th Rifle Corps) belonging to twenty-five divisions, plus 317 tanks, 858 artillery pieces and 242 anti–tank and anti-aircraft guns. But not much of the First Panzer would be there to clean up the mess. Two days later, the bulk of von Kleist’s army headed east to his next objective, the great bend of the Dnepr.
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With only one panzer army, von Rundstedt had difficulty creating the encirclements required of the Vernichtungssclacht philosophy. In fact, as originally conceived, von Kleist would have cast his net much wider and attempted a much larger Kessel in the area of Kirovograd. However, von Brauchitsch preferred a smaller, ‘safer’ pocket at Uman. In view of the facts that one arm of the encirclement consisted solely of marching infantry and that the Soviets resisted so hard, this compromise solution was perhaps the best the Germans could have hoped for. Now the panzer army headed for the Ukrainian resource areas that were among Barbarossa’s main objectives, plus the Dnepr crossings essential for the continuance ofoperations to the east. This coincided with Stavka’s decision on 10 August to abandon the west bank of the mighty river. At Uman, von Rundstedt had split the Southwestern from the Southern Front, so there was not much else the Soviets could do. That same day, Army Group South issued Order #5, which laid out German plans to capture the very same ground Stalin was giving up. One bright spot in the First Panzer Army’s logistic picture was the fact that German rail traffic now reached almost as far as Pervomaisk. At the end of July, von Kleist’s operational rate stood at 70 to 80 percent for the 9th, 13th and 14th Panzer Divisions, but only 40 percent for the 11th and 16th Panzer. Ideally he would have taken a pause to refresh and repair his panzers, but there was no slack in Barbarossa’s timetable for such a luxury.
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Panzerwaffe
Ethos and Attitudes

The Third Reich excelled in psychological warfare, even against its own people. The black uniform and insignia of the fabled 5th Hussar Regiment only represented the beginning. Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels’ publicity machine furthered the ideal by prominently featuring the panzers at Nazi Party rallies and in his newsreels. Even before Poland and despite its small size, the Panzerwaffe took its place at the top of the army. As a new branch of service, it did not have the traditions of say, the infantry or even the cavalry, from which came 40 per cent of the first panzer officers. Leaders like Guderian could invent ‘new’ traditions, creating a ‘weapon of opportunism’ that would win Hitler’s upcoming war.

In the blitzkrieg the old military concept of the elite, no different from that of Napoleon’s Old Guard, was wedded to the internal combustion engine, the radio and airplane. Following leaders not easily scared and trained to resist fear, the panzer troopers fought inside their armored boxes, with a new-found unity of a tank crew, a variation on that basic military building block, the small group who will share any fate. This comradeship was a two-way street: from the men up and from their commanders down. The Panzerwaffe had a special code of communication based on intellect, training and language that made, in Kenneth Macksey’s words, ‘something apart from the rest of the German Armed Forces and superior to most opponents . . . that remains to this day almost irresistible’.

Defeating Britain and France in western Europe signaled the arrival of the military era sometimes known as the age of velocity. Panzer leaders operated within the Boyd Loop in a fraction of the time required by their enemies. Their objective was not ‘command paralysis’ touted by interwar British theorists: it was nothing less than the enemy’s total destruction. So it was during Barbarossa; the early victories in the USSR, spearheaded by the panzer armies, have no equal in military history. By December 1941, the panzer troops had been betrayed when Germany’s small size and dysfunctional strategic leadership collided with a titanic enemy under even more ruthless national rulers. Velocity became less important, and once the world–wide war turned from one based on maneuver to one based on attrition, the Third Reich could not win. Even without the benefit of hindsight, by the end of Stalingrad, most German soldiers must have seen that the war could have but one ending, not favorable for Germany. The panzer troops, like most of the Wehrmacht, somehow continued to resist like the good soldiers they were. Their loyalty to the small group – their crew – and a mystical faith in their Fuhrer kept them fighting.

Following Uman, First Panzer spread out across the entire lower Dnepr, losing all cohesion and mass; there were simply too many assigned tasks for its relatively small size. Reinforcement by the Hungarians (three brigades totaling 24,000 men supported by 81 indigenous ‘Toldi’ tanks) and the Italian
Expeditionary Corps in Russia (CISR: 62,000 men in three divisions with one battalion of L6/40 light tanks), hardly compensated for its expansive area of responsibility. Luftflotte Four commander, General Alexander Lohr, divided his force into two groups, with ‘Close Combat Leader South’ supporting von Kleist with I/StG 77, II/JG 3 and III/JG 52. III Panzer reached Kremenchug during the first week of August (13th and 14th Panzer), and Dnepropetrovsk the next week (SS Viking). Von Mackensen was to gain bridgeheads across the Dnepr and hold them until Seventeenth Army units arrived. Close to the end of the month, 9th Panzer Division captured an intact bridge at Zaporozhe. XIV Panzer’s objective was the resource-rich area near Krivoi Rog, which it captured on 14 August with most of its industrial capacity intact. After freeing itself from Uman, XLVIII Panzer’s 16th Panzer Division (only 23 of 140 panzers operational) headed for the port city of Nikolaev. Once it arrived to take possession of the empty city on the 18th, the position of Red Army units facing the Eleventh Army and the Romanians became untenable. At the far southeastern extent of the panzer army, SS Leibstandarte reached Kherson at the mouth of the Dnepr on 20 August. One might assume that denying the Soviets any opportunity to cross the massive river would lead directly to another battle of annihilation, but von Rundstedt could not make the necessary blocking positions. Despite Fliegerkorps V achieving forty–two hits on Dnepr bridges, the Soviets repaired the damage quickly and continued their retreat eastward. Combined with a rare example of Stalin permitting a common-sense withdrawal, Hitler’s insistence on occupying locales such as Nikolaev (instead of clearing the Dnepr bend) meant that many enemy formations escaped destruction. These Ukranian cities were going to fall to the Germans anyway, so eschewing maneuvers that would lead to annihilation can only be explained for reasons of short–sighted prestige, not long-term military logic. Additionally, von Kleist’s dispersal, plus his low fuel and ammunition stocks, all conspired to deprive First Panzer Army’s post–Uman pursuit of much of its effect. In any event, as Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus later wrote, securing Kiev and the Dnepr crossings ‘proved to be very prolonged and costly’.
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