According to Tom Jentz’s book, *Germany’s Panther Tank*, no less than 60 Panthers were shipped to the Leningrad front in November 1943 to serve as immobile pillboxes. Thirty apiece were given to the 9th and 10th Luftwaffe Field Divisions, and of these, ten per division were to be utilized as a reaction force, and they were left mobile; the rest were dug in. I/Pz. Rgt. 29 provided 60 volunteers to help man the runners; the extra crew members for the runners, and the crews for the pillboxes, were to be provided by the Luftwaffe personnel. On December 26th, III. SS-Panzer …
Albert Speer’s appointment as Minister of Armaments in February 1942 brought no immediate, revolutionary change to Germany’s war industry. But Speer had Hitler’s confidence, as much as anyone could ever possess it. He was an optimist at a time when that was a declining quality at high Reich levels. He concentrated on short-term fixes: rationalizing administration, improving use of material, addressing immediate crises. And he faced a major one in tank production.
For all Kleist’s other legitimate complaints about his supreme commander, it was untrue that German equipment was inferior, except in sheer numbers. Guderian, who wrote the 1936 work Achtung-Panzer!, believed that two different types of tank were necessary in any attack, one to deal with tanks and the other with infantry. The five-man Panzer Mark III, produced from 1936, was used against other tanks, but its 37mm gun was not powerful enough against the British Matilda tanks in Africa, so Rommel used 88mm anti-aircraft guns against them there instead. In 1940 Hitler ordered the production of a 50mm, 350hp Mark III, which the manufacturers watered down to a 47mm gun. These, as well as Sturmgeschütze (self-propelled assault guns), were used in Operation Barbarossa, along with the far less powerful Panzer Marks I and II. Up to 1944, around 6,000 Mark IIIs were produced by different manufacturers. Twelve thousand Mark IVs were built with 76mm guns, which the Soviets thought ‘good for bad European weather, not for bad Russian weather’. In 1942 the Germans started producing Mark VI (Tiger) and then in 1943 Mark V (Panther) tanks.
Shortly after first light on 15 September 1916, a new chapter in warfare opened when the tanks went into action. Of 150 Mark I tanks, only 59 were in France when Haig made the decision to employ them, and of these only 49 actually reached the front. Plagued by mechanical problems abetted by nervous crewmen, only 35 tanks reached the line of departure; 31 crossed the German trenches, and only nine surmounted all problems and pushed on ahead of the infantry.
As so often, the US army led the way to the next major development, the armoured personnel carrier (APC), which initially consisted of an armoured box mounted on tracks, carrying an infantry squad of twelve men. A far-seeing operational requirement was issued in September 1945, and the outcome, the M75 APC, entered service in 1951, setting a trend which has continued to this day.
Subsequent development followed two main strands. The first was for a so-called ‘battle taxi’ whose prime role was to move the infantry about the battlefield, giving them protection and speed of movement, and delivering them to a point near the objective from which they could then advance on foot into the assault. For such a requirement the infantry inside the vehicle needed only to be able to see out in order to orientate themselves and to be able to disembark rapidly.
Outside Leningrad, the German troops still clinging to their defences closest to the city were in desperate danger. Hitler finally relented early on 20 January and authorised their withdrawal. In some cases, the withdrawal threatened to become a rout. The Soviet offensive continued on 21 January with major attacks towards Krasnogvardeisk and Luga. Küchler desperately demanded that he be allowed to pull back to the Panther Line, but Hitler insisted on a fighting withdrawal – otherwise, he argued, the Red Army would arrive at the defensive line with sufficient strength to force its way through. In vain, Küchler pointed out …
For all the advances made against the Germans in the west between D-Day on 6 June 1944 and the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945, postponed by the disaster at Arnhem in mid-September and the Ardennes counter-offensive in the winter, it was on the Eastern Front that the war against Germany was won. Between Operation Barbarossa and December 1944, the Germans lost 2.4 million men killed there, against 202,000 fighting the Western allies. The cost of inflicting such casualties was uneven: between D-Day and VE Day (Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945), the Russians suffered more than 2 million casualties, three times that of the British, Americans, Canadians, and French fighting forces put together. It is worth considering whether democracies could ever have tolerated that level of sacrifice or whether – as seems likely – it required the whole horrific apparatus of the NKVD and domestic terror to keep the Soviet Union in the war.
In the late 1950s the Bundesheer started to consider the design of its first Cold War infantry fighting vehicle, and, not surprisingly, it began by analysing the experiences of the Second World War Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. These studies convinced the Germans that they needed a vehicle from which the infantry could fire their weapons, enabling them to fight their way on to the objective, thus protecting the infantry during the final – and very vulnerable – assault phase. The result was the Marder, the first prototypes of which ran in 1961, although there was then a very careful, albeit somewhat prolonged, series of trials before it entered service in 1971.
Operation Frühlingserwachen (Spring Awakening) was the final showcase and last stand of the panzers. Six Waffen SS divisions were committed. Sixth SS Panzer Army had I SS Panzer Corps with Leibstandarte and Hitler Jugend: parent and child. The II SS Panzer Corps included Das Reich and Hohenstaufen, old and new avatars of Himmler’s personal army. Gille’s corps was initially assigned to Balck’s 6th Army, alongside III Panzer Corps with two of the army’s originals: 1st and 3rd Panzer Divisions. Put together, it added up to around 600 AFVs, the best available. Leibstandarte still boasted its battalion of 36 Tiger Bs. Hitler Jugend had an attached battalion of 31 Jagdpanzer IVs and 11 Jagdpanther.
The Battle of the Bulge was the end of panzer operations in the West. Afterward it became, in Manteuffel’s words, “a corporal’s war—a multitude of piecemeal fights.” It was not much of an exaggeration. Operation North Wind was originally intended to support the Ardennes offensive. Launched into Alsace in January, well after Watch on the Rhine had failed, North Wind burned out four more mechanized divisions to no purpose on any level, strategic, operational, or tactical. The American spearheads that pushed toward the Rhine in February and the British and Canadians that struggled through the Reichswald to their north encountered …