German Orders of Battle and the second summer offensive in Russia

German Orders of Battle before the summer offensive in Russia (Operation Blue) of June 24, 1942.

Here to the previous part: German Orders of Battle May 1942 and Operation Blue.

The German Orders of Battle and distribution of the divisions from the Wehrmacht and subordinated units of allies shortly before the summer offensive in Russia (Operation Blue, starting June 28, 1942) and the tank inventory from the beginning of the year with known numbers of tank models in the summer of 1942.

Operation Blue

Schematic layout of the German Wehrmacht from June 24th, 1942

Army Group South:

Army Group Center:

Army Group North:

subordinated to OKW (Headquarter of the Wehrmacht):

Army Group D, Commander of the West:

Commander Southeast:

Africa:

Reserve Army and Commander of the army armament:

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Overview of fully established and operational divisions of the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe and allied units under operational control:

Tank = armored division; mot.Inf = motorized infantry; Inf = Infantry; Mt = mountain division; Sec = security division; AF = Air Force (Luftwaffe) divisions (Air landing, Paratroopers, Luftwaffe Field); Allied = allied units

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Approximate organization strength of the major types of the German Army divisions in 1942:

Germany Army Unit Organization 1942-45

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Tank strength

Inventory of armored fighting vehicles on January 1, 1942:

Known quantities of tanks along the whole Eastern Front at the beginning of the summer offensive (June) and in Africa (July):

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The Second German Summer Offensive in Russia

The major defeats suffered by the Soviet Union in the early stages of the German summer offensive were caused by Stalin’s misjudgment of German intentions.
While Soviet intelligence had correctly recognized that the main offensive would be in the south toward the Caucasus and would probably be followed by an attempt to cut off the rail link to Murmansk and then only operations against Moscow and Leningrad would follow the main blow, Stalin prevailed with his opposite assumption.

To make matters worse for the Red Army and easier for the Wehrmacht, a grossly incompetent military leadership led the Russians into a major disaster in May. Marshal Timoshenko launched an ill-conceived offensive to take Kharkov, which in a sense played into the hands of the Germans, who were already planning to eliminate the Izium front bulge further south.
Unable to direct the offensive properly, Timoshenko was unable to break it off quickly enough, and the German spearheads advanced into the rear of his attack as well as into the Izium front bulge.
The result was one of the greatest German victories and one of the most terrible Russian defeats of the war: by the end of May, about 100,000 Red Army soldiers had lost their lives and over 200,000 had been taken prisoner. In addition, about 1,300 tanks and 2,000 guns of the Soviets were destroyed or captured. The Germans had thus reached their starting position for the main offensive, while the Soviets had suffered heavy losses.

Further south, the Germans wanted to clear the Kerch Peninsula at the eastern end of Crimea of Soviet troops before launching another attack on Sevastopol.
At the eastern end of Crimea, the Soviet Army had a significant superiority in troops and weapons, and the terrain offered the Germans little evasion for flank attacks.
However, the incompetence of Soviet commanders Dmitriy T. Kozlov and Lev Z. Mekhlis, as well as massive air support that Hitler pushed through against the opposition of the Luftwaffe staff, evened out the situation.

Through a series of massive attacks by von Manstein’s 11th Army, the Soviet Crimean front was annihilated between May 8 and 20. A push on the southern flank broke through the front lines, and the Soviet front commander never regained full control of the situation. Most of the soldiers of the twenty-one Soviet divisions were killed or became prisoners. Just one-third of the 300,000 Soviet soldiers escaped across the Kerch Strait into the North Caucasus, only to rejoin the fighting there later.

The very risky operation in the eastern Crimea went smoothly for the German troops, but the subsequent attack on the large fortress of Sevastopol lasted not the eleven days actually planned, but thirty days. This is a particularly striking difference from the fall of Tobruk, which took place around the same time in just two days.

The attackers had to muster one of the most formidable artillery engagements ever seen during a siege. In addition to the usual heavy artillery of the German army, howitzers of over 35 cm caliber and huge mortars of between 40 and 60 cm caliber were used, including the ‘Thor’. As if all this were not enough, an 80-cm rail gun with 7-ton grenades was also brought in to support the destruction of the fortress.

The entire operation thus began under an artillery barrage so fierce it was reminiscent of World War I, and included an amphibious assault across Severnaya Bay, the inlet north of the city.
In a fierce, grueling battle, the Germans and their allies cut their way through the fortifications, captured the city, and seized the peninsula that juts westward south of Sevastopol.
On July 5, Manstein was able to hold a victory parade after taking the major fortress and some 90,000 prisoners. Although only a small part of the garrison, including most of the specialists, were evacuated by air and submarines, the entire operation cost the Germans and their allies very heavy casualties-probably nearly 100,000 men – and much time.
Soviet commander Oktyabsky was among the evacuees, but his soldiers had made the Germans pay a heavy price.

As the huge siege guns were loaded for the long journey to the front outside Leningrad and the surviving soldiers of the victorious army rested a bit before heading north as well, the great offensive in the south got rolling.

The German plan for the offensive in the south called for a series of distinct phases. First, an attack in the direction of Voronezh, then a swing south down the Don to meet the spearheads of an attack from the direction of Belgorod.
This in turn was to be followed by another attack southward down the Don. The theory was that in this way all Soviet forces west of the Don would be destroyed. The main mass of the German army would then move south into the Caucasus.

Since there were not enough troops to cover the Don front, which was about 450 miles (750 kilometers) long and would remain unsecured as the German units moved south, the allies were to provide the necessary units.
In the fall of 1942, 24 Romanian, 10 Italian, and 10 Hungarian divisions were in the east, the bulk of them in three armies on the Don, with the Italian 8th Army separating the Hungarian 2nd in the north and the Romanian 3rd in the south so that these quarreling allies would not clash much rather than fight the Russians.
At the last moment, a German officer crashed behind the Soviet front with important documents about the planned offensive, but Stalin thought these maps and papers were a fake.

On June 28, the Germans struck toward Voronezh, broke through Soviet defenses, formed a bridgehead across the Don River, captured the city, and then moved south.
The attack farther south also pushed through quickly, joining the spearhead from the north, but the result was not what was expected at Fuehrer headquarters. The Russians had not fought as fiercely as in the months before, and had retreated. True, some Soviet units were trapped, but this was out of all proportion to the pocket battles of 1941.

The same thing happened in the next blow. The German tanks from the north advanced on Millerovo, a town between the Don and Donets rivers, which was also the target of an attack from the west, but again the converging spearheads trapped only a smaller number of Red Army troops.

And when the German units – except for the 6th Army, which was still moving east – rushed toward Rostov and the lower Don in a third massive pincer operation, they found the bulk of the Soviet forces gone and the bridges blown up.

The major changes in the operations of 1942 compared with those of the summer and fall of 1941 were manifold. Not only had the Red Army leadership learned a great deal in the hard school of battle, and the Germans had not been able to make up their losses from the previous year.
Much more important was the changed leadership style of Hitler and Stalin. Both stills changed supreme commanders, Stalin even more frequently than Hitler, but there was one major difference. Hitler, who had become accustomed to intervening more and more directly in the details of tactical operations during the winter crisis of 1941-42, continued this behavior.
In order to control the operation more directly, he moved in mid-July from his headquarters in East Prussia to a new headquarters near Vinnytsia in Ukraine, where the officers and secretaries could still smell the only makeshift buried corpses of Jews who had been murdered after working on the construction of the headquarters.

Stalin, on the other hand, was now more willing to listen to his military experts, especially on one crucial point. Shaposhnikov had been replaced as Chief of the General Staff by General (later Marshal) Vasilyevsky for reasons of actual health on June 26, two days before the start of the German offensive.
Seemingly at his insistence, troops in the southern part of the front were ordered on or about July 6 to retreat fighting rather than remain in place and hold their positions, which had led to encirclement and annihilation in 1941.

Although there was some evidence of internal problems in the Red Army and desperate measures were resorted to in order to maintain morale, cohesion, and discipline, the fact remains that Army units either withdrew cohesively or at least subsequently reassembled them.
By the end of July, the Germans had conquered a large and, in some cases, very rich territory, but the capture of only 100,000 to 200,000 prisoners in three pocket battles showed that the great victory Hitler proclaimed to his officers in Directive 45 of July 23, 1942, was in part illusory.
The Soviet Union had been dealt a blow, but the claim that the objectives of the summer offensive had been ‘largely achieved’ was to prove less and less true in the weeks that followed.

However, this euphoric view of developments was believed with full conviction at German headquarters – at least by Hitler himself. Based on this conviction, new operational orders were issued.
These stipulated that the planned operations were now to be carried out simultaneously rather than sequentially. All divisions of Manstein’s 11th Army, as well as the heavy siege artillery that had just been released for a new deployment after the capture of Sevastopol, were sent north to take Leningrad instead of being sent east to the North Caucasus as had once been envisioned.
Even more dramatically, the bulk of the forces of Army Groups A and B, originally intended to advance eastward to prepare for and cover a later offensive southward into the Caucasus, were now immediately sent southward, while only the German 6th Army marched eastward toward Stalingrad.

Of the five German armies available in the south, roughly speaking, one was sent to the Leningrad front, one to Stalingrad, and three (4th Panzer, 1st Panzer, and 17th) to objectives in the Caucasus area.
While the latter advanced in that direction and covered the greatest distances, the 6th Army was not only deprived of most of its tank support and left to its own devices, but also for a time without the minimum of supplies to move at all.

Hitler’s personal role in this eccentric conduct of operations, probably rooted in his simultaneous insistence on measures to cut off the Soviet Union from support from its Western allies, were the causes of this strange German troop deployment. Added to this were Hitler’s extraordinary reactions when things then quite obviously began to go wrong.

At first, in fact, it looked as if everything would quickly turn out in favor of the Germans and disastrously for the Soviet Union and its allies. By the end of July, the three armies advancing south and southeast had crossed the 150-miles(250-kilometer)-long lower Don River and at two points had severed the rail line connecting the North Caucasus with Stalingrad.

In the first two weeks of August, German troops, moving through some of the richest agricultural areas of the Soviet Union, captured the city of Krasnodar and occupied the first of the oil fields at Maikop, which was one of the main targets of the entire 1942 operation. The facilities had been destroyed by the Russians, but the Germans hoped to repair them while their troops advanced to the other oil fields. These were at Grozny, 200 miles (330 kilometers) to the east, and at Baku, another 300 miles (500 kilometers) away. But they were never to reach either of these targets.

As the Germans advanced across the plains of the North Caucasus and into the foothills, they were able to make dramatic advances because the Red Army was still retreating; but in the process, the balance began to shift.

On the German side, not only were they experiencing supply difficulties as units covered great distances from their bases in Ukraine, but the spearheads were weakening as they were fragmented by great distances.

By the end of August, German troops attempting to advance against the Soviet naval base at Novorossysk were 300 miles (500 kilometers) from those that had taken Mozdok on the road to Grozny. Between these two spearheads, others attempted to cross the Caucasus passes to capture Tuapse and Sukhumi on the Black Sea.

At each of these points, ever smaller and more exhausted German assault units met fierce resistance from a Red Army called by its leadership to desperate efforts to halt the German advance southward.

In the face of the German advance, the Soviet leadership strove to hold together its formations, which threatened to disintegrate as they fled. Since much of the reserves available to the STAVKA had been concentrated behind the central front defending Moscow, a large portion of the reinforcements were deployed to defend Stalingrad and played an important role in slowing the German advance in that direction.

In contrast, the transfer of units to the two main Soviet commands, the Black Sea Group to the west and the Transcaucasus Front to the east, which were attempting to halt the advance of German forces to the south, was difficult and protracted.
Although some reinforcements did get there, partly by rail and partly by sea, a significant portion came from the south, i.e., from the border with Turkey and from Iran, where Western lend-lease tanks and aircraft also arrived.

For some time, the Turkish government had been watching developments in the north with a mixture of concern and greed. There was obviously the possibility that, if the Soviet Union collapsed under German pressure, some of the areas in the Russian Caucasus with Turkish populations might fall to Turkey.
However, there was also the possibility that an expanding and aggressive Germany might then stand on Turkey’s northern as well as its European border and claim the right to advance through the country into Syria and Iraq, both of which were now under British control.

In June 1942, when Tobruk surrendered after a two-day siege and while the Germans were making their way into Sevastopol, it looked for a moment as if the Germans might also emerge on Turkey’s southern border.
This situation changed, however, in July and early August, when the British held their positions at El Alamein. Regardless of what else Turkey might do, it was certainly not about to join the Axis forces. Under these circumstances, the Soviet High Command ordered seven divisions and four brigades to withdraw northward from the Turkish border to oppose the Germans.

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References and literature

Der Grosse Atlas zum II. Weltkrieg (Peter Young)
Krieg der Panzer (Piekalkiewicz)
Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, Band 1-8 (Percy E. Schramm)
Kraftfahrzeuge und Panzer der Reichswehr, Wehrmacht und Bundeswehr (Werner Oswald)
Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two (P.Chamberlain, H.L.Doyle)
A World at Arms – A Global History of World War II (Gerhard L. Weinberg)

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