Slitherine

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In late 1942, various German units along the Russian Front prepared routine after-action reports summarizing their experiences. These reports dealt primarily with activities along the defensive fronts of Army Groups Center and North. The confusion and turmoil in the south prevented a careful assessment of those battles until the spring of 1943. Army Group North prepared the most detailed critique of German defensive methods. On 20 September 1942, Army Group North tasked its subordinate units to prepare reports on "Experiences From Fighting on a Fixed Front" and listed sixteen major discussion topics. These items included the accuracy of German Army doctrinal manuals, methods for organizing defensive positions, location and use of major weapons, intelligence indicators of impending enemy attacks, and general training suggestions. By and large, units endorsed the basic applicability of existing doctrinal publications. "Our manuals," wrote the 21st Infantry Division's operations officer, "have generally proven themselves with respect to the selection and construction of positions." However, several units complained that the German field manuals did not address the peculiar problems inherent in defending excessively wide sectors with inadequate forces. These reports noted that doctrinal guidance was deficient in explaining how standard Elastic Defense methods should be adapted to these all-too-common circumstances. The Eighteenth Army, for example, took the most extreme line in its report to Army Group North: "The principles of our field manuals ... have only limited validity in the East because in practice they are seldom possible. In the same vein, several units were cautiously critical of Hitler's obsessive insistence on holding even the forwardmost trenchlines. According to one divisional report, this practice robbed the German defenses of essential depth. With so many troops and heavy weapons committed within the forward main line of resistance, only the slenderest of local reserves remained to occupy positions in depth. When enemy break-ins occurred, this immediately thrust much of the responsibility for resistance in depth on the few troops manning German command posts, artillery positions, and rear services strongpoints. Consequently, as the complaints revealed, the entire German defensive concept seemed to have degenerated to the costly retention of the main line of resistance at the expense of a legitimate defense in depth. Another criticism of German doctrinal manuals cited the lack of advice on how to defend under special conditions, such as in swamps and forests, or during periods of limited visibility. The 22d Fusilier Regiment insisted that battles fought under these circumstances required special techniques beyond those given in the German Army's training manuals. The 58th Infantry Division confirmed this, citing as an example the erroneous tendency of some leaders to deploy defensive forces along the edge of wooded areas. Once the Soviets discovered this habit, it was simple for Red Army artillery to paste the occupied woodlines since they made such well-defined targets. Experienced German commanders placed their troops in camouflaged positions forward of the woods or else had them dig in at some irregular distance 25 to 100 meters inside the treeline. (This latter method was preferred: enemy troops attacking the woods could not place accurate small-arms or indirect fire on the entrenched defenders until the enemy had advanced through the German artillery barrage and entered into the defenders' close-in killing zones. Yet the thin wooded apron forward of the defensive positions was too shallow to shelter any large body of enemy troops.) Such techniques demonstrated not only the extent to which German tactics were tailored to minimize casualties, but also the continuing desire of German commanders to avoid tactical schemes that placed unnecessary psychological strain on their soldiers. The Russian climate, periodic supply shortages, close combat antitank methods, and lack of rest--not to mention the enemy's apparent numerical superiority and reputed savagery--all imposed heavy demands on German morale and discipline. Therefore, after-action reports were full of suggestions for avoiding the wasteful depletion of German moral energies. For example, since the defense of an entire sector might well depend on the skill and aggressiveness of local reserves, many units emphasized the desirability of selecting the best leaders and most reliable men for reserve roles. Ideally, these local shock troops were kept razor sharp by constant train by training and alarm drills and were spared excessive fatigue details such as trench construction. Another psychological ploy suggested by General Heinrici, the Fourth Army commander, was the blind firing of German artillery at presumed Red Army attack concentrations just prior to enemy assaults. Such fire, whatever its real effect on the Russians, was of inestimable value in "giving at a minimum a moral boost to our infantry in the moment of danger." Other units emphasized the extreme importance of regular training on such particularly fearsome subjects as hand-to-hand fighting and being overrun by enemy tanks. Most important to defensive morale, reported the 1st Infantry Division, was that "each soldier in the defense must be convinced of the superiority of his own training and his own weapons. Except for Hitler's command interference and crippling no-retreat strategy, the most contentious doctrinal issue to emerge during 1942 and early 1943 concerned the proper defensive role of German armor. Prewar German manuals had consigned the panzers to a counterattack role commensurate with their "inherently offensive nature." While none would deny that panzers made ideal mobile reserves and counterattack forces, a considerable doctrinal din arose about the apportionment and control of those forces. On one side stood the panzer officers themselves. Since the 1930s, Guderian and the other high priests of armored warfare had taught their flock a simple, unremitting catechism: panzers should be employed only en masse and should never be split up or parceled out in infantry support roles. The rectitude of this view had been demonstrated most clearly in the 1940 campaign in France. There, the numerically superior French and British armor had been foolishly deployed in "penny packets" and had justly gone down to fiery perdition at the hands of the German armored forces. By late 1942, the need to employ armor en masse had become an absolute article of faith among the armored forces. As a corollary to this, German armor commanders were reluctant to see their panzers placed under even the temporary command of nonarmor officers for fear that they might commit some sacrilege by splitting up the tanks into support roles. Discussing the proper task organization of reserves for counterattacks, for example, General Heinrich Eberbach of the 4th Panzer Division made his own feelings clear in a memorandum on 30 September 1942: "Do not subordinate a tank battalion to an infantry regiment; rather attach to it [tank battalion] an infantry battalion, an engineer company, an artillery detachment, and a self-propelled antitank company, and give to this battle group a clear mission. General Hermann Hoth, whose Fourth Panzer Army was ripped apart by the Soviet November 1942 counteroffensive, had also argued against assigning small panzer detachments to infantry forces. In a 21 September 1942 memorandum to the Army High Command, Hoth declaimed that "the Panzer Arm achieves its success by massing [italics in original]." While conceding that small groups of tanks had played a major role in salvaging the German position during the winter of 1941-42, Hoth stated that "this should not therefore lead to single tanks as a universal solution [for strengthening defensive resistance]...." On the contrary, argued Hoth, examples in the late summer of 1942 showed that real defensive success came from "the determined will-to-attack of infantry and panzer divisions." Against "the fallacious call of the infantry divisions for 'solitary panzers,'" Hoth spluttered that such dispersion of tanks not only would compromise the armored troops as a decisive battlefield force, but also would fatally corrupt the infantry forces' "will to attack" by making them unduly dependent on armored support. In opposition to this chorus stood those German officers--primarily, but not exclusively, infantrymen--whose troops were actually holding the forward defensive lines. These officers had no argument with the massing of tanks in theory but cited several cogent reasons why German defensive interests could be better served in practice by a greater dispersion of the limited armored resources. In countless battles against Russian attacks, these officers had developed a doctrinal creed of their own, namely, that under the prevailing conditions of weakness and constraint, the best way to defeat a Soviet penetration was by immediate counterattack. While not new, this conviction grew stronger as defensive experience accumulated. On 14 October 1942, General Heinrici wrote that immediate counterattack, led by energetic leaders and striking the enemy's troops while they were still disorganized, could achieve "full success in every case. This sentiment was echoed by many units who regarded speed far more important than numerical strength or firepower in dislodging Russian forces. To implement their counterattacks as quickly as possible, these frontline commanders were therefore willing to sacrifice even mass in order to hit penetrating Soviets before they could consolidate. What the infantry commanders preferred was that tanks in company or platoon strength be doled out to support their own tactical reserves. With this low-level task organizing, panzers would have to be placed under the command of local infantry commanders. Furthermore, in exceptional cases (as it was for the hard-pressed 336th Infantry Division on the Chir River in December 1942), German infantrymen would also want some tanks placed at their disposal to act as mobile antitank guns in support of their static positions. As expected, German panzer officers vigorously denounced all these ideas. This dispute was so heated because there was little possibility for compromise. Given the width of the Russian Front and the scarcity of German panzer forces, it was impossible to provide concentrated armored reserves to all sectors--the only solution that might have satisfied everybody. If, as the panzer commanders desired, the German armor was kept concentrated in rearward assembly areas, then the tank forces could not arrive at the scene of local crises until hours--or even days--after the Soviet penetrations had occurred. Infantry commanders considered such belated assistance to be of little value. They reckoned that such delays would allow the Russians time either to expand their penetrations, causing the possible collapse or annihilation of the defensive line altogether, or else to have so fortified their newly won ground as to make its recovery extremely costly. Also, the infantrymen were not impressed by the occasional successes of concentrated armor in annihilating Russian breakthrough forces. They knew that these victorious panzer battles--such as those of Balck's 11th Panzer Division on the Chir River--too often came only after the forward German infantry had been all but wiped out. Cynical German infantrymen might have noted that, while the panzer officers toasted their glorious victories, the infantrymen were the ones consigned to burying their excessively numerous dead. On the other hand, if the German tanks were parceled out by platoons to support every infantry battalion or regiment whose sector was threatened by attack, it would be impossible to reassemble the panzers in time to deal with any massive Soviet breakthrough requiring a massed German response. The 17th Panzer Division's General von Senger, whose experiences on the southern front in the winter of 1942-43 qualified him to speak with authority, wrote pointedly of his own adherence to the defensive "principle that the armor [be] kept together in defense but [bel used offensively at the right moment. Commanders less familiar with armored tactics, and those who were conscious only of the endless front, thinly occupied and under threat from the enemy's armor, would under these conditions have been tempted to fritter away their own armor." Defending the primacy of the armored forces, Senger added: "Thus the armored divisions, originally organized as purely offensive formations, had become [by early 1943] the most effective in defensive operations. In further rebuttal, panzer officers cited their own recent experiences and indicated that dividing armor in the furtherance of limited-objective counterattacks resulted in disproportionately high tank losses. Therefore, General Eberbach suggested that the infantry be made to repulse "small break-ins" with available forces, saving the massed panzers for those penetrations that exceeded five kilometers in depth. When actually committed, opined Eberbach, the panzer commander should take control of all available assets and should return control of the embattled sector to the infantry commander only when the tanks withdrew. Justifying this judicious use of panzers, Eberbach noted that "the life of a tank crewman is not more valuable than the life of an infantryman." However, he explained, the careful commitment of armor was in the ultimate interest of both the armored and infantry forces since, otherwise, the finite German armored forces would soon be completely extinguished and no longer of any use to anyone. Both sides in this dispute were completely correct. Every German commander, regardless of branch, wanted to see his own forces used in accordance with their peculiar strengths. No panzer leader wanted to see his precious tanks sacrificed a few at a time in what were, after all, only local emergencies. Nor did any infantry officer wish to see his own men massacred in living up to Hitler's "hold-at-all-costs, recover-all-lost-ground" policies when the assistance of a few tanks could cut his casualties dramatically. Despite a flurry of bureaucratic activity and memorandum writing, no compromise was reached on this issue. A draft "Instructional Pamphlet on the Use of Panzers in the Defense," which circulated in both the Ninth and Fourth Armies, attempted to resolve some of the outstanding sources of armor-infantry friction. Except for a suggestion that tanks never be employed in less than company strength, however, this pamphlet failed to come to grips with the broader issues.
Certainly no compromise was apparent at the Panzer Training School in, Wiinsdorf, where a February 1943 "Instructional Pamphlet on Cooperation Between Panzers and Infantry in the Defense" sounded a particularly militant note. This tract, for example, announced the following principles for employing tanks in the defense: · Tanks should only be employed in counterattacks and never as part of the stationary defense. · Tanks should be held sufficiently far behind the front so they can respond to enemy penetrations across a wide sector of responsibility. · Tanks should always be emploved en masse: the commitment of individual tanks alone is forbidden. · The smallest unit for immediate counterattacks with infantry support is the tank battalion (minimum of forty panzers).
A similar pamphlet for higher-ranking leaders added that panzers should remain under the control of either division or independent task force commanders, suggesting archly that tank "attachment to subordinate [infantry] leaders can only be allowed for limited periods and for limited missions. As both of these pamphlets originated at the Wünsdorf tank school, their distribution was limited primarily to panzer officers. To a great extent, therefore, these tracts merely told German armor officers what they wanted to hear. Neither publication received general dissemination throughout the German Army, and neither had any real doctrinal impact. This confused doctrinal chorus reflected the German Army's situation on the Eastern Front. By late spring of 1943, German defensive doctrine on the Russian Front had become a patchwork of makeshift compromises. The Elastic Defense remained the basic doctrinal framework, which had been established in prewar manuals. However, this doctrine was being increasingly distorted by several factors. The Germans lacked adequate forces to man their extended fronts with a deeply echeloned defensive network, and German divisions had been forced to use a variety of tactical half measures. Adolf Hitler had further muddled German doctrine by issuing confusing directives. Though at times the Führer had benignly endorsed the general theory of elastic defense in depth, in practice he had thundered angrily against weak-willed commanders who allowed the enemy to penetrate beyond the foremost trenchline. The upshot of these problems had been to focus German defensive efforts on the holding of a rigid linear defense. In short, the elastic defense in depth as practiced by the Germans in early 1943 had, due to Hitler's orders, lost most of its elasticity and, due to the lack of German manpower, had abandoned most of its depth as well. Still, German units did their best to adapt themselves to these straitened circumstances. They could not do so, however, without occasional strain and squabble as the arguments over the defensive use of German armor illustrated.

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Originally posted by Stirling:
Hello,
I could send you the whole "study". As it weighs about 450KB, I'll just ask for your permission to send it in...
Stirling

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