Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (13 page)

Hube divided his army into northern and southern halves that would negotiate the Zbruch River crossings one at a time. They could escape through
a 15km gap that the sixty tanks of 4th Tank Army could not keep closed. The north group first crossed the Zbruch, then the Seret, while the southern group followed perhaps two days behind. Together, von Manstein and Hube had achieved operational and tactical surprise.
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Zhukov soon realized his mistake and started shifting forces to the threatened area. First, he ordered the pocket crushed by 31 March. When his troops could not accomplish that, on 2 April he called on First Panzer to surrender. At the time, the panzer army had only 24 operational panzers (1st, 17th, 19th, 20th Panzer Divisions and the SS Das Reich had none!), 86 anemic battalions of infantry, 106 PAKs and 75 light and 35 heavy artillery batteries. In the meantime, a massive blizzard hit the area that actually helped the Germans. While Luftwaffe Ju–52 pilots braved the weather, Red Army Air Force CAS and reconnaissance aircraft were grounded. Zhukov renewed his attacks when weather improved on the 3rd. German defenders of the north group at Chortkhov rejected assaults by two tank corps the next day. The gravest danger to First Panzer passed on 4 April, despite its being almost completely surrounded. With Corps Groups Chevallerie and Breith protecting the army’s north and south flanks and with a robust rearguard, Hube’s command made its way west. On the 6th, it linked up with II SS Panzer Corps lead elements at Buchach. The escape was a qualified success, but there was no way that Hitler would consider a retreat of 100–150km a victory. For example, the 5 divisions of III Panzer could muster only 7,227 men in total. Frustrated with von Manstein’s personality and techniques, he sacked the field marshal and renamed Army Group South, Army Group North Ukraine. A grateful Fuhrer flew Hube to Berchtesgaden on 20 April to promote him to colonel general and add diamonds to his Knights Cross. Regrettably, the panzer general died the next day on his way back to the front when his plane crashed into the Alps.
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Framing defensive operations in terms of operational level warfare is difficult. During this period, First Panzer (along with the rest of Army Group South, lost all of the Ukraine and conducted offensive maneuvers with formations no larger than a corps. Von Mackensen and Hube and their men expended great energy in escaping from two deadly traps and merely remaining on the battlefield. At no point during the second half of 1943 nor the first quarter of 1944 did they have the luxury of time and resources to act in the operational realm as a real panzer army.

Advanced elements of 1st Tank Army reached the Carpathian foothills by 17 April, but fighting died down that spring, and both sides resorted to loudspeaker duels and other harassment. German soldiers received a new anti-tank weapon, the Panzerfaust, while Soviet raids became so bold the Germans had
to chain down their machine-guns in their fighting positions to prevent them from being ‘stolen’. In front of L’vov, the First Panzer Army laid 160,000 antipersonnel and 200,000 anti-tank mines in an intricate and well-coordinated defense. World attention increasingly turned to Italy, northwestern France and the crushing of Army Group Center. However, neither D-Day nor the botched assassination attempt against Hitler made much of an impression on the Landsers. The USSR was now strong enough to execute consecutive and cascading offensives along the entire front. Marshal Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, the largest combat organization in the Red Army, launched an assault against First and Fourth Panzer Armies that would take the Soviets through L’vov to the Vistula River in Sandomirez, Poland. He had approximately 1 million men in 80 divisions organized into 10 armies supported by over 1,600 AFVs, 14,000 guns and mortars plus 2,800 aircraft. They faced 900,000 Germans, 900 AFVs, 6,000 guns and 700 aircraft arrayed in 3 defensive lines. So far as First Panzer was concerned, Konev planned to cut it off from its sister panzer army and drive it into the Carpathian Mountains.
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Colonel General Erhard Raus commanded First Panzer when Konev’s 38th and 60th Armies assaulted on 14 July. Raus, his chief of staff and operations officer (Ia in German notation) believed they had deciphered the secrets to Soviet success:

• Annihilation of forward German troops along the main battle line by concentrated artillery fire;

• Neutralization or destruction of German artillery via heavy counterbattery fire and continuous air attacks;

• Elimination of German command and staff by air attack and surprise artillery fire on command posts up to army level;

• Harassing of reserves in their assembly areas by artillery and air attacks;

• Disruption of communication routes to the front which delayed the movement of reserves and cut off the flow of supplies;

• All of these preconditions led directly to massed armored thrusts in depth which enabled the Soviets to obtain freedom of maneuver.

Raus and his staff created the following solutions:

• Withdraw from front lines immediately prior to artillery preparation (a technique learned during the First World War);

• An elastic defense, deeply echeloned;

• Temporary retirement followed by an immediate counterattack on carefully chosen battlefields;

• Protected communications and reserve assembly areas and routes;
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• All of these measures pointed to a new respect for the Soviets.

The tricky parts were discerning the timing of the Soviet attack and ordering corresponding German withdrawals and reserve movement. The commanding general and his chief of staff paid particular attention to reconnaissance and radio intercepts (the latter provided 70 percent of German intelligence). Konev hit where Raus expected, but, by German calculations, two days late. Red artillery hit fairly harmlessly on evacuated front-line positions, while both command posts and reserve forces avoided serious damage. Therefore, initial counterattacks by Breith’s 1st and 8th Panzer Divisions plus the SS 14th Division Galacian blunted the 38th Army, while the 60th enjoyed modest success. Red Army Air Force CAS, including 2,000 sorties against the 8th Panzer on 15 July alone, gave the frontovicki renewed freedom of maneuver. The fighting surged across recent battlefields of 1914 (history’s last great cavalry charge at Jaroslawice), 1916 (the Bruislov Offensive) and 1941 (Barbarossa). By the 17th, Konev threw 3rd Guards Tank Army into the fray to exploit 60th Army’s success, forcing the Germans back to the ‘Prinz Eugen’ intermediate position. The withdrawal of most of First Panzer caused the encirclement of the bulk of eight German divisions under XIII Corps that remained on the original line centered on the town of Brody. That same day, army group ordered XIII Corps to escape, but the commander, General of Infantry Arthur Hauffe, had not made adequate preparations to get away and so lost valuable time. Around the same time, the only mechanized formation capable of truly liberating the garrison, the II SS Panzer Corps, departed for the D-Day fighting in France. Led by his ‘best unit’, Korpsabteilung C (remnants of 183rd, 217th and 339th Infantry Divisions plus five captured Soviet tanks), the breakout finally began at 0330 hours on 20 July. Of 30,000 Germans originally encircled, only about 5,000 eventually made it to XLVIII Panzer Corps outposts by the 23rd. Hauffe was not among the survivors.
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Konev hoped to take L’vov from the march, but Raus managed to rush three divisions into the city. By 24 July, the city was surrounded except for one open segment to the southwest. By this time the 38th and 60th Armies had arrived and took much of the burden off the tankers. By evening of the 26th, the Germans had had enough street-to-street fighting and began to withdraw. The Soviets occupied the city on the next day, by which time advanced mechanized forces had also taken Przemysl on the panzer army’s main supply route, almost another 100km west. One divisional history records that on 3 August ‘all hell broke loose’. By now Konev’s massive front was too spread out on too many divergent axes, so Stavka split the group in two and gave the new 4th Ukrainian Front the mission of dealing with First Panzer Army. Raus remembered the defensive value of the upper Dniester and the Carpathians from his experiences during the First World War. He petitioned Hitler to withdraw from the tenuous
foothill line to the mountain ridges, only to be refused. Raus’ entire southern flank became jeopardized when the Hungarian First Army unilaterally retreated from the Pruth River valley. Only when it was almost too late, the Fuhrer relented and the First Panzer plus the Hungarian 1st Army pulled back to the relative safety of the Beskides and Carpathian Mountains.
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On 17 August, with one hour’s notice, Raus flew off to take over Third Panzer, so two days later First Panzer got yet another commander, Colonel General Gotthard Heinrici. An infantry division commander during the Polish campaign, Heinrici had risen to positions of increasing responsibility, making a reputation as a ‘defensive specialist’ along the way. His combined German-Hungarian command, Armeegruppe Heinrici, was ‘relatively unmolested’ along most of its 350km length during August and September of 1944. Fighting and surviving at altitude had its costs: maintaining logistics was difficult, radios did not work well in the peaks and valleys, telephone lines were long and vulnerable and howitzers (able to elevate their guns to 45 degrees) were at a premium. The main danger came from the army group’s deep rear, where the Soviets had made conquering the Balkans look easy against the German Sixth and Eighth Armies. They were poorly served by a motley collection of allied armies that increasingly chose to defect to the Soviet Union rather than die for Hitler. The stand-off between First Panzer and 4th Ukrainian Front along the mountain passes seemed quiet by comparison. The main excitement came from elements of the Slovak army plotting with Stalin to abandon the Axis, join up with partisans and attack Heinrici’s rear areas. One Slovak division eventually did change sides, the SS disarmed the rest and by October the uncoordinated coup had run its course. The Dukla Pass, on the Slovak-Polish border was a prize coveted by both sides. Starting on 7 September, the 1st Guards Army attacked and gained 80km on that day, but Heinrici’s men absorbed the shock, for a while even encircling the Soviets. They likewise trapped the 1st Guards Cavalry Corps (38th Army) for ten days during the second half of September. The trusty 1st and 8th Panzer Divisions, some Tiger tanks and other units fought spirited battles there over the summer. Heinrici held the pass until Hitler removed a panzer division overwatching the position, allowing the Soviets and their new Czech allies to take the corridor on 6 October. However, simple possession of that terrain feature did not mean the 4th Ukrainian would have the mountains’ defenses handed to them without a fight.
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Winter set in to make already miserable conditions worse. The ‘Free Slovakia’ movement died from the internal strife that beset similar associations whenever Western- and Communist-backed personalities and ideas jockeyed for power. Casualties inflicted by First Panzer on Colonel General IE Petrov’s 4th Ukrainian Front amounted to 80,000 men (one–quarter of those deaths) and
442 tanks destroyed. The Soviets slogged and fought up the northeastern slopes of the two mountain ranges and gained 20km in three weeks. In September, the correlation of forces was: First Panzer – 11 infantry divisions, 2 Jager divisions and 1 panzer division assisted by 2 Sturmgeschutze brigades; Red Army - 30 rifle divisions, 3 tank corps, 1 guards cavalry corps and 1 Czech corps plus 1 tank brigade. The Soviet superiority was 4–5:1 in men and materiel. The 4th Ukrainian Front did enjoy some success on its eastern flank, taking Mukachevo on 27 October and Uzhorod on the 28th. On 1 November, First Panzer passed down Hitler’s latest orders to its troop units: defend Slovakia ‘to the last man’. With Petrov’s recent victories, the Soviets put much of the Carpathians at their backs and had the Hungarian plain to their front. By the second half of November, the Fuhrer’s demands became even more unrealistic. With that, his right falling back, Heinrici gave up any pretenses of holding the mountain line. His vulnerable ‘balcony’ jutted dangerously far to the east of the rest of the German lines. Hitler realized this and on 25 November approved withdrawal to the ‘Gisela’ winter positions. At the time a battle of Stalingrad-like ferocity engulfed Budapest, and Petrov’s mission was to push First Panzer into Czechoslovakia and away from Hungary where it might contribute to the German effort to hold the Magyar capital. Heinrici’s men gave up ground but slowly, and by the beginning of 1945 still held the ‘Karola’ positions along the Ondava and Topola Rivers.
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During the first weeks of January, First Panzer fell back to the Tatyse River, but by the 18th and 20th had lost Kosice and Presov respectively so continued west down the Vah River valley. As the Battle of Budapest wound down and the battle for Germany began in earnest, Heinrici occupied an area of little interest to either side. Another exposed ‘balcony’ developed as huge armies passed to his north and south. By the end of the month First Panzer retreated to the High Tatra, the latest of Heinrici’s mountain strongholds. On 6 February, the panzer army boundary shifted left to include the LIX Corps as far north as Pless (near Auschwitz). Throughout the month, Heinrici pulled back to keep generally even with armies to either flank. At the same time, Petrov submitted plans to rush the remaining 300km to Prague, with his initial objectives being the industrial region stretching from Ostrava in Czechoslovakia to Ratibor in eastern Poland. This represented the First Panzer’s furthest extent, a well-prepared defense in very favorable terrain. Petrov attacked and between 10-17 March, 4th Ukrainian Front averaged at best 2km per day. Near Ratibor, LIX Corps held for one day before being overwhelmed, while the weakened 8th and 16th Panzer Divisions also managed a brief defense. Petrov’s assault lines could create no opening through which to push his exploitation force, 5th Guards Mechanized Corps. In frustration, Stavka replaced Petrov
with the more-experienced Eremenko. Under the new commander the Soviets tried again beginning on 24 March. However, the unwritten laws about combat in built-up areas still applied: it most generally favors the defender. In a dozen days the ‘new and improved’ 4th Ukrainian gained about 30km, not much better than it had earlier in March under Petrov.
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