Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron by Robert Kirchubel Page B

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. Initiallyhis 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

    Second Panzer Army

    Third Panzer Army

    Fourth Panzer Army

Notes
    Introduction
1. One panzer division had more radios ( c . 500) than the entire German Army in 1914, Walther Nehring, Die Geschichte der deutsche Panzerwaffe , Propyläen Verlag, 1969, Appendix 6.
2. Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany , Cornell University, 2006, p. 160. The Germans ‘glorified surprise’, John