Duffy Christopher. Red Storm On The Reich (ENG)

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Companies of Tiger tanks stood outside the Panzer divisions,

but usually worked in close association with them. In addition,

commanders of corps and armies held batteries of Jagdpanzers

and assault guns, and battalions and sometimes regiments of

tanks at their personal disposal quite outside the structure of

the Panzer divisions.

Notes on Some Key Weapons

Tanks

The one tank to derive in basic design from the start of the war

was the Mark IV. Originally conceived as an infantry-support

tank, it was completely outclassed by the T-34 in tank-to-tank

combat. The stubby 75-mm gun was replaced by a long-bar-

relled high-velocity version in 1942, and the armour was sup-

plemented by various add-ons, but the Mark IV was under-

gunned and inadequately protected by the standards of 1945:

Mark IVJ

Weight: 25 tons

Armament: one 75-mm gun, two machine-guns

Armour: 20-80 mm

The best all-round German tank, the Panther (Mark V) was

inspired by the T-34, with its low silhouette, well-sloped armour

and wide tracks. The Panther came into large-scale production

early in 1943, and was equipped from the beginning with a

long 75-mm gun which had great penetrating power. The Pan-

ther was speedy and manoeuvrable, though more complicated

and less reliable than the T-34:

Panther (Mark VF)

Weight: 45.5 tons

Armament: one 75-mm gun, two machine-guns

Armour: 50-100 mm

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359

The Tiger was designed to mount the 88-mm gun, which had

begun its career as an anti-aircraft weapon, and then proved

remarkably effective against tanks. However, the Tigers never

properly repaid the Germans for their investment in weight of

armour, and even the top of the range, the T-VI King Tiger,

was unable to withstand the 122-mm gun of the IS-2, or the

devastating ISU-152 152-mm-tracked howitzer:

Tiger-VIE

Weight: 57 tons

Armament: one 88-mm gun, two machine-guns

Armour: 80-100 mm

Tiger-VIB (King Tiger)

Weight: 68 tons

Armament: one 88-mm gun, two machine-guns

Armour: 80-180 mm

Tracked Artillery, Assault Guns and Tank-hunters

By 1945 the Germans had produced a great profusion of types

of tracked ordnance, ranging in type from conventional self-

propelled artillery to specialised assault guns and anti-tank

weapons—the rather makeshift Panzerjägers and the purpose-

built and enclosed Jagdpanzers. These vehicles were cheaper

to produce than conventional tanks, for they had no revolving

turrets, and the gun projected straight from the front of the

hull. In February 1945 one of the tank platoon commanders of

the 4th Panzer Division, Sergeant-Major Bix, was initially dis-

gusted to be issued with a Jagdpanther Pak 43/3 ( a model of

Jagdpanzer) instead of the promised Panther tank:

It was a hull without a traversing turret—you had to move

the machine bodily in order to aim, and you exposed yourself

somewhat in the process. On the other hand, it was a steel

colossus, very low-lying, and it had a first-class 88-mm gun

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

360

with enormous penetrating power, fabulous range and mar-

vellous accuracy. We rapidly got over the Jagdpanther's un-

familiarity and threw ourselves into developing its good

points. We very soon had an opportunity to display them to

good advantage.

This proved to be in an action near Preussisch-Stargard on the

morning of 25 February. Bix knocked out fifteen Russian tanks

in three separate actions, and was making for the rear with two

rounds left when he got stuck in the mud under the gun of a

sixteenth tank. He was inching his Jagdpanther around in an

attempt to bring his armament to bear, whereas the Russian

turret was pointing in his direction. The enemy failed to open

fire, and it became evident that the Soviet machine was slanting

backwards into its own patch of mud, with the result that the

gun could not be depressed sufficiently to hit the Germans.

The tracks of the two vehicles churned away until Bix brought

his machine around and had the Russians at his mercy:

All of a sudden the hatch flew open, and two hands ex-

tended and waved. Did the crew wish to surrender, or were

they trying to fool us? By that time we were prepared for

anything. No, I couldn't take the risk. To be absolutely cer-

tain, we shot our last but one round into the panel covering

the running gear. The crew bailed out—one, two, three, four.

Alles in Ordnung! Splendid! Our last shot hit the Russian tank

full on, and it immediately took fire. (Schäufler, 1979, 48,

51-52)

Aircraft

Like many machines in the history of aviation, the Ju-87 (Stuka)

dive-bomber proved surprisingly adept at new work, in this

case as a tank-busting aircraft (Ju-87-G) armed with two 37-mm

cannons. It was the weapon of Colonel Rudel's ground-attack

wing, which was transferred from Hungary to the Oder at the

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

361

culminating point of the Vistula-Oder Operation, and helped

to stop the Russian drive on Berlin (see p. 118). Air support

also proved very valuable in the fighting in East Pomerania and

West Prussia, where the Luftwaffe alone had destroyed 120

tanks by 5 March.

Command and Control

It was perhaps too convenient for German veterans to blame

the Führer for every misfortune which overtook Germany in

the early months of 1945.

Certainly, it is difficult to find excuses for the way Hitler

insisted on the kind of thin but rigid forward defence which

left the Germans so vulnerable in Poland. He was also surely

misguided to intervene as directly as he did as low as the di-

visional level of combat, in virtue of his decree of 21 January

1945 (see p. 38). Stalin was Olympian and detached in com-

parison.

However, someone will have to make deep investigations of

the economy of the Reich before we can state outright that Hitler

was altogether wrong to put so much effort into safeguarding

the Hungarian oilfields. He was possibly correct in the long

term when he insisted that Hossbach's Fourth Army must hold

its salient deep inside East Prussia, for this may have been one

of the considerations which induced STAVKA to turn the 2nd

Belorussian Front away from its original axis across the lower

Vistula, and so weakened the offensive on the Berlin axis.

On the matter of intelligence, Hitler was much nearer the

mark than his professional advisers when he put the average

strength of the Russian divisions at a paltry 7,000 troops each

(when it was actually lower still). The trouble was that neither

he nor Colonel Gehlen of the 'Foreign Armies East' branch of

the OKH had any idea of the great number of such divisions

which had been assembled for the offensive in Poland.

German military intelligence likewise failed to communicate

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

362

useful and up-to-date evaluations of the Russian military lead-

ership. After Königsberg had fallen, the Russians were aston-

ished to find that the German generals were almost totally

ignorant of the new generation of Soviet commanders. Names

like Konev, Zhukov, Rokossovskii and Vasilevskii conveyed no

meaning to them:

They exchanged glances but said nothing. After a mo-

ment's silence General Lasch said somewhat bashfully that

he had not heard of Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasilevskii

before his name was mentioned in the ultimatum to the Kön-

igsberg garrison. This meant that hardly any of the German

generals had access to the information collected by the Reich's

intelligence services, since we had no doubt that dossiers on

Soviet commanders were filled with such details. (Bagram-

yan, in Erickson, 1987, 243)

Another curious failing of German staff work was in the

matter of maps, which were generally inferior to those of the

Soviets. German officers on the Bight of Danzig were puzzled

to find that the Hela peninsula was called by the unfamiliar old

name of the 'Putziger Nehrung':

The explanation is simple. The maps were Published by the

Cartographical Section of the Royal Prussian Survey of the Year

1911, and printed in 1914. We had to be on the watch for the

subsequent changes in topography, especially as they af-

fected the towns. It was noticeable that Gotenhafen was

called 'Gdingen,' and was depicted as a sea resort, not a

harbour. (Husemann, 1971-73, II, 431-32)

Finally, it is legitimate to ask whether at the level of army

and below the tradition of Auftragstaktik, or 'mission-directed

command' (see p. 55), which had served Germany so well, did

not finally become a recipe for general disintegration, however

well suited it was for guiding cut-off groups. Hitler and

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363

the OKH had fallen all too easily into the habit of retrieving

generals and staffs from the wreck of one army or another and

reassigning them to the command of entirely separate armies,

with results which could be extremely disruptive (Plato, 1978,

406). There were divisions which did not have their components

together for months on end (Neidhardt, 1981, 375), and SS

Colonel (Standartenführer) Harzer cursed the near-paralysis

which overtook his 4th SS Police Panzer-Grenadier Division in

Pomerania in late February. It took four days instead of five

hours to move the division from Konitz to Rummelsburg, 'and

we squandered further precious time there, for most of the tank

and mechanised units stood under the command of infantry-

trained officers, who did not always employ them properly in

the tactical sense and were not alive to their potential' (Huse-

mann, 1971-73, II, 487).

Mobile Warfare

The Nature of German Blitzkrieg

The development of German mechanised warfare did not differ

in kind from that of the Soviets. Indeed, German and Soviet

officers and technicians cooperated directly in exercises and

weapons development at Kazan, in southern Russia, from 1928

until Hitler put a stop to the practice in 1933.

The German version of blitzkrieg, like the Soviet, emerged

naturally from concepts of mobility and inter-arms cooperation,

in this case the notion of Combined Arms Warfare (Gefecht der

verbundenen Waffen) which was advocated with great passion

by Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt, the head of the Truppen-

amt (a substitute General Staff) in the 1920s. Significantly, the

driving force behind the establishment of the Panzer arm was

not a former officer of tanks but Heinz Guderian, whose spe-

cialities had been in light infantry, radio, motor transport, and

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

364

the teaching of tactics and military history (see p. 46). Major

Guderian did not see the inside of a tank until 1929, but in that

year he formulated his concept of the Panzer division as a

balanced force of tanks, infantry and supporting arms. Gud-

erian caught the attention of Hitler, who assumed supreme

power in 1933, and the first three such Panzer divisions were

set on foot in 1935. In 1938 three more divisions came into being

(the total finally reached twenty-one designated Panzer divi-

sions and fourteen equivalents) and Guderian was made chief

of mobile troops. He commanded less authority than the title

might suggest, for he faced opposition from conservative circles

in the Wehrmacht, and, more seriously still, he was unable to

persuade Hitler that the new style of mechanised warfare de-

manded a large commitment of resources. For the Führer the

Panzer forces represented an attractively economical means of

snatching at victory in a short war.

The horse remained the motive power of the great majority

of the German forces. In 1945 the Panzer and Panzer-Grenadier

divisions accounted for only about one of out ten divisions on

the Eastern Front, and the Panzer divisions themselves had just

one-thirteenth of their troops actually in the tank forces. Blitz-

krieg warfare was much more than just an affair of tanks, as

has been stressed repeatedly, but by 1945 the Germans had

reached a point where their tank forces could scarcely be con-

sidered as the kernel of their armoured formations. The Soviet

superiority in numbers of tanks was now on the order of 6:1,

and, as a rule of thumb, one German Panzer division was pitted

against the equivalent of one Soviet tank army.

Strategic and Operational Mobility

In his memoirs, General Chuikov was dismissive of Colonel-

General Guderian's proposal to strip the theatres of war in the

Balkans, Italy, Norway and the Baltic so as to create a force to

throw against the flank of the Russian armies on the Berlin axis:

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

365

It was totally unrealistic, because it could not be imple-

mented at short notice and would have required roads, trains

and ships. It should be remembered that at the time the Allied

air forces had complete air supremacy, flying freely through-

out the length and breadth of Germany. Such troop move-

ments as did get under way, according to Guderian,

'proceeded very slowly, and the enemy air supremacy com-

pletely paralysed not only troop transportation, but also the

will of the Command.' (Chuikov, 1978, 163)

The shortage of petrol restricted the use which could be made

of roads for approach marches, and not just by the tanks, with

the limited duration of their tracks, but by all kinds of vehicles.

This limitation impeded the buildup of forces for Operation

Sonnenwende towards the middle of February. Again it was

principally to regain the full use of the perpendicular railway

between Lusatia, Lower Silesia and Upper Silesia that the Ger-

mans thought it worth their while to undertake their offensive

at Lauban at the beginning of March.

Lateral, movement behind the Eastern Front was a truly des-

perate affair, in which the pace was dictated by the Russians.

As Goebbels explained, 'We have to shuffle our units about to

the hot spots like a fire brigade in order to plug the holes as

best we can, suffering severely in the process' (Goebbels, 1977,

32).

There was no guarantee that the tanks would be able to

detrain before they reached the scene of the fighting. On the

snowy 6 March the 4th Panzer Division was dispatched from

Bütow in the direction of Neustadt in West Prussia, and

we travelled . . . into the milky unknown with mixed feel-

ings. The situation was unclear. We knew absolutely nothing

about the enemy. There was no more aerial reconnaissance,

and not even any kind of short-range reconnaissance by our

recce detachments, because we did not have the requisite

fuel. For this reason all the crews were ordered to occupy

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

366

their tanks during the rail journey, with guns cleared for

action, since we might have to go into combat directly from

the train. All the radios were on 'receive,' but strict radio

silence had been ordered. . . . Our goods train groped its

way slowly northwards, sometimes only at a walking pace.

Not a living soul was to be seen left or right of the track. Our

train, all bristling with weapons, slid through the snowstorm

almost like a ghost. We had placed the locomotive in the

middle. The tanks stood on open flat cars and each machine

had been assigned its own arc of observation and fire. Im-

provised ranks were ready on every car to help us to go

straight into action in the open field. (Schäufler, 1979, 59)

On 17 January the nightmare had become reality for the tanks

of the Grossdeutschland Panzer Corps, when they were com-

pelled to detrain near Lodz in the face of Zhukov's armoured

columns (see p. 80).

The Commitment of the Panzer Reserves

Long before the Vistula-Oder Operation opened, the com-

mander of Army Group A, Colonel-General Harpe, and his

chief of staff Lieutenant-General von Xylander, had given care-

ful consideration as to how to deploy their scanty operational

reserves, the XXIV and XL Panzer Corps (Weisungen für die

Vorbereitung der Abwehrschlacht zwischen Beskiden und Warschau,

26 November 1944). They recognised that within the limits im-

posed by a shortage of fuel, and the superiority of the Russian

air forces, it was still possible to retain these formations just far

enough back to preserve freedom of manoeuvre, holding them

safely out of reach of the enemy's initial bombardment. Even

these slender margins, however, were sacrificed to the de-

mands of Hitler, who insisted that the two corps must be em-

placed close behind the tactical zone of defence.

Possibly such matters of detail—which come down to a mat-

ter of kilometres—were irrelevant in view of the weight and

APPENDIX: THE GERMAN STYLE

367

speed of the Russian attacks. It is in fact difficult to conceive

what sort of measures might have stopped the Soviets once

they had the bit between their teeth. The Grossdeutschland

Panzer Corps was scattered to the winds when it sought to

deploy across the Russian axis. Perhaps the powerful Sixth SS

Panzer Army itself would have done little better, even if Hitler

had launched it head-on against the Russians in Poland instead

of sending it to Hungary. What finally halted the Soviets on

the Oder was not a brilliant manoeuvre, but the cumulative

effect of logistic difficulties, frontal barriers, and the buildup of

unengaged forces on the Pomeranian flank.

Defensive Tactics in the Field

The old Reichswehr had studied the technique of the delaying

action in the 1920s, but the Germans in Russia neglected this

way of fighting until they were forced to relearn it during the

retreat after the battle of Kursk in 1943. The Germans now fell

back by bounds, sending the infantry and soft-skinned vehicles

on ahead, and extending their tanks, assault guns and 88-mm

guns in a screen which, they hoped, would knock out enough

Russian tanks to win them the time to withdraw to their next

position.

When they faced superior forces, the classic method of un-

supported German infantry had been to lie low, let the Russian

tanks roll over their trenches and foxholes, and then emerge

to engage the enemy infantry coming up behind. This heroic

tactic proved inadequate at the outset of the Vistula-Oder Op-

eration in the middle of January 1945, for the initial artillery

strike was crushing, and the Russians swamped the shattered

defenders with their 'forward battalions.'

The German infantrymen began to fight back much more

effectively once the battle reached their own country. They were

helped by the thaws which set in from early February, and

which canalised the Soviet armoured thrusts along the roads.

No longer were the Germans contesting the open country of

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368