Hitler's Panzers (34 page)

Here too the German line bent but did not break. It is no disrespect to the infantry that did most of the fighting and bore the heaviest losses to say that the backbone and muscle of the Rzhev salient’s initial defense was provided by the panzers—and not least by the two corps headquarters that controlled the battle: Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s XXXIX Panzer on the east and Josef Harpe’s LXI Panzer on the west. Von Arnim’s career would be truncated by his next assignment to a collapsing North African front. Harpe would rise—briefly—to army group command, and sustain a dual reputation as a master of the well-timed armored riposte and one of the panzer generals openly sympathetic to National Socialism.

With his reputation, perhaps his position, and possibly his neck at stake, Zukhov brought the offensive’s senior commanders together on November 28 for counseling and admonition. The attack resumed with renewed vigor the next day, featuring everything from tank attacks to cavalry charges. The weather grew more bitter in the first days of December. This year the Germans were well supplied with winter clothing, and had learned how to use trees and drifts to keep from freezing. The Landser held. When they could no longer hold, they pulled back. One battle group broke out with fewer than 100 men and three tanks: the last of what had been a reinforced panzer grenadier battalion. Its parent, 5th Panzer Division, was down by more than 1,600 men and 30 tanks. In Harpe’s western sector, T-34s with “tank marines” mounted on the vehicles brought 1st Panzer Division to the breaking point before 12th Panzer Division arrived from army reserve. First Panzer Division was one of the divisions stripped to a single tank battalion earlier in the year. One of its companies accounted for more than 40 Soviet tanks in four days. Only two of its Mark IIIs remained operable at the finish.

Men, tanks, and ammunition: the Soviets seemed to have limitless supplies of each, and committed them regardless of losses everywhere along the German reinforcements arrived in driblets. Most of the antiaircraft guns were being used as ground support, and the Sturmoviks had a correspondingly free hand. By battery and battalion, sometimes singly, the assault guns were essential wherever the panzers were unavailable. StuGs were the rallying points for battle groups cobbled together from whatever rear echelon troops were at hand, around the survivors of an infantry or panzer grenadier battalion. In turn they formed the nuclei of counterattacks that kept the Russians off balance, unable to break through where they broke in.

With the salient beginning to stabilize, Zukhov prepared for another major effort on December 7 and 8—only to be forestalled by a German counterattack launched one day earlier. Elements of Grossdeutschland and 1st Panzer Division struck the Russian front in Harpe’s sector. Nineteenth and 20th Panzer Divisions hit the flank from the south, from outside the salient. By December 9 they had succeeded in cutting off a mechanized corps and most of a rifle corps—between 40,000 and 50,000 men. It was an order of magnitude short of Minsk, Smolensk, or Kiev. Compared to what was happening around Stalingrad, it was a victory to be celebrated.

From close up, the differences between 1941 and 1942 were even more pronounced. The pocket’s front was being held not by infantry, but by panzer and panzer grenadier battle groups forming small strong points around the perimeter, linking up where possible, and pushing forward in fighting that was slow enough and costly enough to replicate in the open what had earlier happened in Stalingrad. It was not a tankers’ battle in the previously understood sense: 19th and 20th Panzer Divisions were even under command of an infantry corps. On December 16, the Russians succeeded in breaking out as organized formations, albeit with losses exceeding 75 percent.

Harpe’s effort to mount a major counterattack to the northeast was stopped by a Russian defense that wore down the battalion-strength battle groups that were all Grossdeutschland and the 1st, 12th, and 20th Panzer Divisions were able to muster after days of close-quarters attri tional fighting. In the end, however, it was the Red Army that stood down. Soviet casualties were more than 200,000 men, half of them dead. More than 1,800 of the 2,000 tanks committed had been lost. Grimly, the Germans reported fewer than 5,000 prisoners: quarter was neither asked nor given in most times and places in the Rzhev Salient.

David Glantz correctly describes the original strategic plan for Mars as too ambitious and Zukhov as too stubbornly optimistic to modify it. Operationally and tactically, Rzhev was nevertheless a watershed. This was the last time in a major sector the Red Army made the adolescent mistakes characteristic of its post-Barbarossa reconstruction: poor tank-infantry-artillery cooperation; inflexibility at all command levels; a tendency to reinforce failure at the expense of exploiting success. In a comparative context Rzhev, seen from a Soviet perspective, resembles the French offensives of 1915 in the Champagne and the later stages of the Somme a year later: a study in learning curves, facing an instructor charging high tuition.

The German victory was also a product of the limited geographic scope of Operation Mars. The essential difference between Mars and Uranus, the reason the Soviets succeeded on one front and not the other, was that in the south the Red Army established in Uranus’s opening stage a force-to-space ratio in both halves of the breakthrough that the panzers could counter in neither. The German mobile forces immediately available lacked the mass to give weight to their impulsion, and were correspondingly swamped. At Rzhev the panzers were able to do what they did because the Soviet generals were obliging enough to commit their formations in action in limited sectors, as one might push candles into blowtorches, in a force-to-space ratio the Germans were just able to match.

Model, his subordinates—especially Harpe—and the mobile division commanders excelled at assembling, shifting, and committing both organized and ad hoc battle groups at key places and times. The initially limited, steadily eroding strength of the armored forces made that technique dependent on a battlefield small enough for the fire brigades to reach critical spots before the fires burst out of control. At Rzhev, the Germans were correspondingly able to assume control of the battle—albeit at a cost so heavy that the salient was abandoned in March.

In tactical terms Rzhev was characterized by the increasing long-term employment of panzer troops in the front lines. The panzer grenadiers in particular were the shock troops of the defense, time after time taking the brunt of Soviet attacks that had exhausted the undermanned and underequipped infantry formations. With only a battalion’s worth of tanks available, a panzer division’s counterattacks depended heavily on surprise and finesse while lacking the force to have more than a temporary effect. As had been the case in World War I, the Germans could no longer exploit their tactical successes.

Both of these developments moved the panzers away from their original roles. Both foreshadowed major revisions in the Germans’ theory and practice of armored war but, in the immediate context of events in the winter of 1942-43, Rzhev invited interpretation as the counterpoint to Manstein’s more visible, more spectacular riposte in the Don Basin. The conditions were different; the point was the same. A bear hunted long enough might increase his strength and improve his cunning. Killing him might be more difficult. But a bear remained a bear: a trophy waiting to be collected.

A HUNTER EXPECTING to take his trophy and live to admire it could nevertheless ill afford to lag behind his prey. If the second half of 1942 proved anything about the Eastern Front at the operational level, it was that the panzers were more than ever not merely the army’s core, but its hope. The Reich’s manpower resources continued to erode, making it impossible to keep the infantry divisions at anything like authorized strength. A new generation of personal weapons was coming off the drawing boards. Light machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers would enhance the infantry’s firepower and fighting power alike beginning in 1943. But at unit level the new hardware would at best be able to balance the lost men. In a wider context the Reich’s factories could not produce enough of it to replace existing weapons in anything but fits and starts. What had begun in the 1930s as a choice to enable forced-draft rearmament had become a necessity in the context of forced-draft war. The panzers must be the focal point of the army’s post-Stalingrad reconstruction.

Seven panzer and three motorized divisions—four if the 90th Light Africa Division were counted—had gone under in Stalingrad or surrendered in Tunisia. More than half the rest had been battered back to near-cadre status at Rzhev, on the south Russian steppes, or from Leningrad to points south. Reorganizing and reequipping them took most of a year. Even more than their predecessors, the revised tables of organization and equipment tended, in practice, to be approximations depending on what was available. The tank regiment was returned to its authorized two-battalion strength, each with four companies of 22 tanks—Panzer IVs in theory; in practice a mix of IIIs and IVs, depending on what was available. The antitank battalion was up-gunned to three batteries of open-topped, self-propelled Marders carrying the 75mm PAK 40, the definitive German antitank gun in the second half of the war, which inflicted much of the damage credited to the 88. The artillery regiment converted one of its battalions to self-propelled, full- tracked mounts: twelve 105mm howitzers and six 150mms. Both equipments were excellent. The lighter Wespe (Wasp), based on the still-useful Panzer II chassis, was a rough counterpart of the US M7 Priest. The 150mm Hummel (Bumblebee), with a chassis purpose-built from Panzer III and IV components, outmatched anything any other army’s self-propelled divisional artillery would see until well into the Cold War.

The panzer grenadier regiments received a company of 20mm antiaircraft guns on half-tracks, and a company with six 150mm infantry guns on 38(t) chassis. Despite open tops and relatively light armor, these were generally used as assault guns manqué, and were correspondingly welcome. While the number of half-tracks could still not be stretched beyond a single battalion, the available vehicles began sporting a bewildering variety of heavy weapons. Each of a mechanized battalion’s three rifle companies now had two 81mm mortars, two light infantry guns, and two 251 half-tracks with short 75mm pieces removed or salvaged from old Panzer IVs—all in addition to the 37mm guns on the platoon commander’s half-tracks. The fourth “heavy” company had a section of two towed light infantry guns—even on an armored battlefield these were still useful against obstacles and entrenchments, and usually better than nothing—a platoon of three towed 75mm antitank guns, and another platoon of six of the 75mm 251s.

That was a lot of large-caliber firepower for 800 men. Its increased hardware would, in the next year, increasingly move the panzer division’s mechanized battalion tactically apart from its three truck-riding counterparts, whose armament remained essentially unchanged, and into the panzer regiment’s orbit.

A related major change in that panzer divisions’ order of battle involved its “fast units.” The reconnaissance battalion was expected to scout for information as opposed to fighting for it. On the Russian front, however, the terrain, the weather, and the enemy made reconnaissance by armored cars difficult. The motorcycle battalions faced constant difficulties maintaining effective combat strength as their mounts proved vulnerable to mud, snow, and Russian fire. The panzer arm made two problems into a solution by amalgamating the organizations into a reconnaissance battalion: one company of armored cars and three rifle companies, sometimes on motorcycles, sometimes riding the Volk swagen counterparts of US jeeps, but whenever possible converted to the light SdKfz half-tracks, finally at the production and deployment stage.

Like their larger counterparts, these chassis were also fitted with heavy weapons. No fewer than 14 official variants of this useful light armored vehicle would be introduced in the course of the war, carrying everything from extra radio equipment to a 20mm cannon turret. The new-style reconnaissance battalion also had a support company including a pioneer platoon, three 75mm antitank guns and a couple of the ubiquitous light infantry guns, and—as they became available—no fewer than six of the 75mm L/24s originally mounted on Panzer IVs, now transferred to SdKfz 251 half-tracks. Small wonder that the new formation was increasingly considered—and used—as an additional panzer grenadier battalion, with scouting and screening capabilities.

The net result of the chopping and changing was to facilitate splitting the panzer division into armored/unarmored or tracked/wheeled categories. The tanks and half-tracks, the self-propelled artillery and antitank guns, and the pioneer company with SdKfz 251s could form a battle group that was able to operate independently of the motorized elements, kept up to strength by internal transfers, and available at short notice for the kinds of emergencies that were the norm at Rzhev and Stalingrad, or in the Don Basin. The corresponding risk involved enhanced entropy: further decentralization of the panzer arm in the face of steadily increasing Soviet fighting power.

The panzer grenadier divisions received little more during 1942 than their new titles. The infantry battalions had two 81mm mortars per rifle company, a heavy company with three 75mm antitank guns, and another with—eventually—four 120mm mortars. Copied from a particularly effective Soviet weapon, these were intended to provide organic close-support for panzer grenadier battalions that had done far more fighting in isolation than the original doctrine for motorized infantry had expected. The reconnaissance battalion was upgraded to panzer division standards, though with lower priority for the light half-tracks. The antitank battalion usually had two self-propelled batteries. All of the remaining artillery and heavy weapons were moved by truck, just as on September 1, 1939. Their independent offensive power, even with the tank battalion authorized the previous year, was not much greater—a fact highlighted by the introduction of the MG 42.