CHAPTER FIVE

DEATH RIDE

WERE THE GERMANS defeated in Operation Barbarossa and the Battle for Moscow, or were the Russians victorious? The best answer to both is yes. The Soviet Union and the Red Army fought back from the beginning, mobilizing resources and developing skills to save their capital, frustrate the invasion, capture the initiative, demonstrate blitzkrieg’s limits, and begin the still- continuing process of discrediting the myth of an inherently superior German way of war. That is no mean list of accomplishments in six months against any opponent, much less the Wehrmacht.

I

THE LONG LIST of specific German mistakes can be conveniently grouped under two headings: comprehensive overextension and comprehensive underestimation. Both reflected the general sense of emergency that had informed Hitler’s Reich from the first days of its existence. Time was always Adolf Hitler’s chief enemy. He was convinced that only he could create the Thousand-Year Reich of his visions, and to that end was willing to run the most extreme risks.

Hitler’s generals, especially the panzer generals, shared that risk-taking mind-set and accepted the apocalyptic visions accompanying it. That congruence shaped Barbarossa’s racist, genocidal nature. From the campaign’s beginning, terror and murder followed in the wake of the panzers. That was worse than a crime. It was a mistake antagonizing broad spectrums of a population that could have been mobilized to work for and with the conquerors, and in some cases act against the Soviet system. To behave differently would have required Nazis to be something other than Nazis—and, perhaps, generals to be something other than generals, at least when confronting Slavic/Jewish Bolsheviks.

The army would have been constrained to recast its institutional mentality. However intense the antagonism between the Führer and his commanders may have become in later years, in 1941 they possessed a common vision in which choices and priorities were unnecessary. Germany’s weaknesses in numbers, equipment, and logistics were sufficiently daunting that reasonably prudent military planners would have advised against the entire campaign to the point of resigning. But partly through their own history, and partly through years of exposure to National Socialism, Germany’s soldiers had come to believe in the “Triumph of the Will.”

It is an overlooked paradox that the failure to reach Moscow may have averted a German catastrophe. Stalin proposed to continue fighting even if Moscow fell, calling on resources from the Urals and Siberia. Aside from that, capturing the city with the resources available—if it could be done at all—would have involved heavy losses, losses that would fall disproportionately on the mobile troops who would be first in and expected to do much of the heavy work. Comparisons with Verdun once again circulated in the armored force. And should the swastika fly over the Kremlin, Army Group Center would be forward-loaded at the far end of a long salient vulnerable to systematic counterattacks, containing a tenuous supply line exposed to constant harassment from a developing partisan movement. Operation Typhoon’s outcome preserved the cadres—or the skeletons—of the panzers to anchor the defense during the winter and prepare for another try in the spring.

They did both well. In January 1942, 18th Panzer Division used its last dozen tanks as the core of a 50-mile thrust into Soviet-occupied territory to rescue an infantry division that had been surrounded for a month. In 6th Panzer Division, Erhard Raus pragmatically employed a series of local counterattacks as tactical training exercises for replacements. Was this heroic professionalism or wishful thinking? Or more like magical thinking, the kind of insanity defined as doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results? In 1807 and again in 1918 the Prussian/German army had responded to defeat with comprehensive self-examination. In 1939 Hitler’s army had responded to victory by an internally initiated tune-up. Nothing remotely similar happened during the winter of 1941-42. Especially for the panzers, whatever energy remained after replacing losses was devoted to improving existing systems.

That situation invites explanation in terms of desperation. As late as the end of February, total tank strength was down to around 150—for the entire Eastern Front. It was not a figure encouraging detached speculation on better ways of war. But even at this relatively early stage, a process of selection was taking place in the regiments and divisions. Eighth Panzer Division’s CO Erich Brandenberger was an old gunner, as calm in demeanor as he was quick to react to emergencies. Heinrich Eberbach took over 4th Panzer—no surprise after his success in making the most of small numbers on the road to Tula. Hans Hube’s loss of an arm in the Great War had not kept him from rising to command of the 16th Motorized Division, staying with it when it was converted to tanks, and building a reputation as a brilliant tactician. Hermann Balck, marked as a comer for his work in France, had been on staff duty during Barbarossa, but would make his mark beginning in May commanding 11th Panzer Division.

One cannot speak of a common personality type in officers who came from everywhere in the prewar army. Some were religious; some were skeptics; some were casually Gottglaubig—the Nazi term for nondenominational. Some were deliberately muddy-boots; others took conscious pains with their grooming. What these officers and their contemporaries similarly marked out for high command was pragmatism. They were hands-on problem-solvers who maximized the material they were given and did their best in the situations they confronted. “I’ll try, sir” was not an acceptable response in the panzer force that emerged from the rubble of Barbarossa. There was no try—only do, or do not.

Another thing the new generation of panzer leaders had in common was a level of bravery and charisma not seen among senior Prussian/ German officers since the Napoleonic Wars. Omer Bartov has made a strong case for the increasing “demodernization” of the German army in the Soviet Union. Its simplified version describes a situation in which material and numerical inferiority, and the resulting high casualties, led to the erosion of primary-group identification and an emphasis on National Socialist ideology as a primary element of morale and fighting power. One might suggest that a tank crew is an automatically self-renewing primary group, as is to a lesser degree the men riding in the same half-track or truck. In the panzers, however, regiment and division commanders to a significant extent also facilitated primary groups by personal leadership.

Post-Barbarossa, an infantry colonel appearing in the front line was likely to generate a reaction similar to the one made famous by American cartoonist Bill Mauldin: “Sir, do ya hafta draw fire while you’re inspi rin’ us?” His panzer counterpart, in a radio-equipped tank or half-track, usually with one or two more as escort, could have a decisive effect on events at the sharp end—and had a solid chance of surviving till next time. Such behavior had little to do with ideology, and not much more with “warrior spirit,” but had much to do with mutual expectations. It was what one did when it had to be done. Even for generals it was often a matter of leading as though one’s life depended on it—as it often did literally. And there are few greater boosters of combat morale than the effective presence at a hot spot of someone who seems to know what he is doing and what to do next. In 6th Panzer Division, a familiar catchphrase was “Raus zieht heraus”—“Raus’ll get us out of this.” Hans Hube’s nickname was simply “the man”—not “the old man” but “the man.”

The ethos had serious drawbacks. It led to a focus on “hitting the next target,” a privileging of action at the expense of reflection at all levels and in all aspects of war-making. That pattern was, if not always exacerbated, too often not balanced by the staffs. The abolition of the Great General Staff by the Versailles Treaty combined with the rapid expansion of the army under Hitler conspired to create a chronic shortage of qualified staff officers, and encouraged the development of new ones to meet staff requirements of the new formations. What was important was solving the immediate problems of organizing and training new divisions, and providing equipment and doctrine for new branches—like the panzers.

It is not necessary to reference Nazi anti-intellectualism to understand that considering ramifications and implications was not a quality particularly valued in the post-Barbarossa armored force. It is ironic to think that Versailles, so often excoriated for failing to sustain German rearmament, may have had a decisive “stealth success” in removing a potentially significant counterpoint to the army’s tunnel vision.

The panzer spirit also spread through promotion. Guderian’s advocacy of a flexible, mobile defense against the Soviet winter offensive might be sound in principle, but arguably lay outside the panzers’ current capacities. His successor was corps commander Rudolf Schmidt, whose nickname “Panzerschmidt” suggests determination rather than finesse. Schmidt based his tactics on strong points established in villages that were magnets for Russians no less cold than their opponents, and defended until relieved by battle groups built around whatever was available and could be scrounged. Walther Model commanded a corps during Typhoon, and in January 1942 brought his uncompromising mind-set and a belief in the defensive potential of small armored battle groups to 9th Army. Many other panzer generals would follow the same path.

Reconfiguring the panzers’ command profile would have meant little if the armored force was not restored materially. That was the main challenge during the winter and early spring of 1942. Overall losses during Barbarossa amounted to more than 1,100,000 men, and there was no way they could be entirely replaced before resumed operations enlarged the gap. Halder calculated the resulting loss of combat effectiveness as from half to two-thirds in the infantry. The mobile divisions were better off in personnel terms, but not by much, especially given the loss in specialists incurred by such measures as using dismounted tankers as infantry during the desperate winter months. More than 4,200 tanks had been destroyed or damaged during Barbarossa. There was no way an overextended industrial network and an overburdened repair system could compensate. As late as March, the gap between tables of organization and tanks in unit service was more than 2,000. The corresponding shortfall in trucks was 35,000. A quarter-million horses were dead, a loss no less serious to an army still largely muscle-powered and likely to remain so given an increasingly untenable gap between the Reich’s oil resources and the Wehrmacht’s needs.

Hitler had planned on using new production to expand the army to 30 panzer divisions. The best the overstrained factories and replacement systems could deliver was four: three built around existing army regiments and one formed by converting the 1st Cavalry Division. Grossdeutschland was upgraded to a motorized division, with selected recruits and a guarantee of the latest equipment as it became available. Authorizing tank battalions for the four SS motorized divisions absorbed still more production. Some effort was made to replace quantity by quality. The two light companies of each tank battalion were authorized 17 J or L versions of the Panzer IIIs with the long-barreled 50mm gun. An increasing number of the medium company’s 17 Mark IVs were Fs and Gs, with a 75mm high-velocity gun that was the first clear match for the T-34 to appear in the armored force. These up-gunned tanks were issued to replace losses, so throughout 1942 panzer battalions would operate with mixed establishments of shorts and longs.

Most panzer and motorized divisions were assigned an antiaircraft battalion with eight 88mm towed guns and a couple dozen 20mms. In recognition of the Red Air Force’s exponentially improving ground-attack capacity, the new addition was also a welcome upgrade of the divisions’ antitank capability. The motorized divisions received an even larger direct force multiplier: an organic tank battalion. That gave them a ratio of six to one in infantry and armor, compared to the panzer divisions’ four to two. Given the high casualties the motorized infantry had suffered in 1941, and given the Reich’s limited ability to replace tank losses, the upgrading was more or less a distinction without a difference. It was also a way of increasing the number of tank-equipped divisions without the problems inevitably accompanying new organizations.

The revamped structure of the motorized divisions was also a recognition that the hard-hammered marching infantry—some divisions were two-thirds short of authorized strength as late as May—were going to require mobile backup, “corset stays,” even in what passed for quiet sectors. The status of the motorized infantry was acknowledged when, in October 1942, they were redesignated as grenadiers. In March 1943 they became panzer grenadiers. In June the motorized divisions were retitled panzer grenadiers as well.

The honorifics would gladly have been exchanged for a few dozen more half-tracks: a battalion’s worth of those valuable vehicles was the best most mobile divisions could expect. Firepower was nevertheless increased, with the commander’s track in each platoon sporting a 37mm gun, which was still useful in many ways. Other half-tracks carried a variety of increasingly heavy guns and mortars on improvised mounts. The 50mm antitank gun became a battalion weapon, and panzer grenadier battalions also had as many as eight infantry guns for direct support—substituting for towed field artillery too often bogged down, out of contact, or out of range.

The resulting amalgam of weapons and vehicles continues to delight war-gamers and order-of-battle hobbyists. In fact, the plethora of crew-served heavy weapons reflected the continuing shortage—or better said, absence—of tanks and assault guns. Another indication of the patchwork nature of the armored force’s reconstruction is that the tank battalions for the motorized/panzer grenadier divisions were transferred from the panzer divisions: another institutionalized dispersion of a scarce and wasting asset.

The battle group system remained basic to the employment of the mobile troops, but experience produced modifications. Regiments evolved toward task force headquarters, with battalions becoming increasingly autonomous, transferred among them as needed for building blocks. In the offense or for counterattacks, battle groups were usually built around the tank battalions, the half-tracked rifle battalion, and the reconnaissance battalion. On the defensive the panzer grenadier regiments did the heavy work with the tanks in reserve—if they were available—for gap-plugging and counterattacks. Improvements in forward fire control in principle allowed the panzers’ artillery to be centralized at divisional level, its fire allocated where most needed or most promising. In fact, battalions were often attached to battle groups for the sake of quick reaction.

The Eastern Front’s major contribution to tactics was added emphasis on speed. The ability to form, commit, and restructure battle groups to match changing situations was often the major German force multiplier against a materially and numerically superior enemy that, even as its flexibility improved, was still structured around orders from above. The success of these formations, time and again, against all odds and obstacles, in turn fostered a sense of operational superiority that inevitably manifested itself in racial as well as military contexts. The results could range from triumph to disaster—but at division level and below the disasters, tended to be dismissed as the chance of war rather than signs of a fundamental shift in the balance of fighting power.

The developed battle group system was also a tactical response to a Soviet strategy that during the winter of 1941-42 sought to decide the war by breaking the German defenses along the entire front. Stalin and his key military advisors agreed that it was best done by hammering as hard as possible in as many sectors as possible, on the principle that something had to give somewhere. The plan had a political dimension as well: to restore domestic morale still far too labile for Stalin’s peace of mind by providing at least small-scale victories.

A more prudent approach might have involved structuring military objectives to buy time: time for promised American assistance to arrive; time to restabilize an industrial base physically transferred east of the Urals; and above all, time to shake down a still- rebuilding Red Army as yet unable to translate strategic planning into operational and tactical success. Instead, recovered from the shocks of December, the Germans proved well able to parry, block, and then halt a series of ambitious offensives from Leningrad to Rzhev-Vyazma and south to Orel and Kursk.

Those successes were primarily achieved by the well- applied economy-of-force tactics indicated above: mutually supporting strong points backed by relatively small armored battle groups. They validated infantry officers’ assertions that with minimal direct infusions of the right kind of support, they could take care of both themselves and the Russians. Beginning in 1942, the Army Weapons Office began mounting captured Soviet 76mm and German 75mm high-velocity guns on Panzer II chassis. These 10.5-ton Marder tank destroyers, though open-topped and lightly armored, were potent killers of T-34s. They went first to the infantry. So did most of the increasing number of independent assault-gun battalions formed during 1942 whose low-slung Sturmgeschütz IIIs were armed with short and long 75mm guns in combinations depending on availability. A mobile division lucky enough to have one of these battalions attached for a time usually employed it with the panzer grenadiers, where its flexible firepower was no less welcome than among ordinary Landser.

The Red Army was not the only one able to restore itself under emergency conditions. With winter turning to spring, the Germans in Russia emerged as a combination of an ideologically motivated citizen army and a seasoned professional fighting force. The months in Russia had pitilessly exposed weak human and material links. New weapons still existed mostly on drawing boards, but officers and men knew how to use what they had to best advantage. A counterattack in late April relieved 100,000 men cut off in the Demyansk Pocket since January. Infantry, artillery, and pioneers, with substantial support from the Romanians, began the final attack on the Crimean peninsula on May 8. Most of the mobile divisions had been refitted. Some especially hard-tried ones like the 6th and 7th Panzer Divisions were sent all the way to France. The rest remained in Russia but out of the line for a few weeks. They would be ready by the time the rasputitsa, the spring thaw, ended.

II

ON APRIL 5, 1942, Hitler issued Directive 41, outlining the operational plan for the summer of 1942. Its focus would be in the south: a major drive toward the Caucasus to destroy Soviet forces in the region and seize the oil fields vital to both Soviet and German war-making. A secondary objective was Stalingrad—not for its own sake, but to cut the Volga River, isolate the Russians south of the industrial city, and cover the main assault’s flank.

Compared to Barbarossa, the offensive’s scale was reduced but its aims were no less ambitious. It would be launched on a 500-mile front. If it gained the set objectives it would create a salient of more than 1,300 miles—something like the distance from New York City to the middle of Kansas. Road and rail networks would grow thinner as the Germans advanced. Scheduling the main attack for the end of June left at best four or five months before rain and snow put an end to major mobile operations. Even if the offensive succeeded there was no guarantee that the Soviet Union would collapse or cease fighting de facto. It had other domestic sources of oil. It also had the support of the US and Britain, who were committed to keeping Russia in the war at all costs.

In grand-strategic terms the operation nevertheless made more sense to Hitler—and to his senior commanders—than any other option. It offered the opportunity to consolidate the Reich’s military and economic position against the establishment of a second front in Europe—something Hitler considered possible in 1943. It projected extending the land war into Asia Minor and beyond, where the immediate pickings and possibilities seemed somewhat easier. And it offered a second chance for the reinvigorated German army to do what it so far had done best: win a mobile campaign in a limited time. That meant using the panzers. Again they would be at the apex of an inverted pyramid—this time one with direct global implications.

Operation Blue, in sharp contrast to Barbarossa, was designed as not a single entity, but a series of interlocking, mutually supporting attacks succeeding each other in a tightly structured timetable. In part that reflected the need to shift limited air assets from one sector to another as a force multiplier. It reflected as well the changing dynamics of the ground forces’ order of battle. The winter campaign indicated that however much the infantry might recover from its December nadir, it could not expect to secure even shut-down fronts with its own resources. No fewer than ten panzer divisions were assigned to Army Groups North and Center. That left only nine panzer divisions available for Operation Blue. The order of battle also included a half dozen motorized divisions, but behind them the picture grew darker. Two-thirds of the infantry divisions projected for the offensive were either newly reconstructed or still in the process. They had time neither to rest the old hands nor to integrate their replacements, thousands of whom would be fresh from basic training. Their projected effectiveness was substantially less than their forebears of 1941.

The slack must be taken up by the panzers. In December 1941, a newly organized two-battalion Panzer Regiment 201, had been sent to the Leningrad sector. Its hundred-odd Panzer IIIs and IVs achieved the kind of disproportionate successes that reminded the generals why massed armor was a good idea. In February, each panzer division assigned to Blue was ordered to be reinforced with a third tank battalion. By May, however, it was clear the only way that was possible was by transferring them from other divisions. The same was true for the motorized divisions’ tank battalions. When the shuffling and redesig nating was finished, seven of the ten divisions in the “inactive” sectors had only a single tank battalion. In other words they were battle groups in all but name. Even more than Barbarossa, Blue was all or nothing—especially for the panzers.

One report submitted in May gave the offensive six months to seize the oil fields, otherwise, not only must offensive operations cease; the Eastern Front itself could not be sustained. Such prognostications left little room at command levels for public questioning. A good many two-o’-clock-in-the-morning doubts were nevertheless resolved when, on May 12, the Soviet Southwestern Front launched a spoiling offensive around Kharkov. Intended to disrupt German plans and regain the initiative, the attack’s 650,000 men and 1,200 tanks were stopped within a week. By May 28 a counterattack built around 1st Panzer Army accounted for 240,000 prisoners, more than 1,200 tanks, and 2,000 guns. To Hitler and the High Command it seemed just like old times. Ivan was still Ivan. Closer to the front, perspectives were different. Eberhard von Mackensen had impeccable military bloodlines. His father was August von Mackensen, one of the more successful German field commanders of World War I. He had commanded III Panzer Corps since the invasion, and had made a reputation as the best horse in 1st Panzer Army’s stable: quick-thinking and hard-driving. The Russians, he reported, had grown “more fanatical, more ruthless, and more solid.” Victory had been won only by an all-out effort—plus a fair bit of luck. A corps commander’s observations changed no one’s mind.

On June 28, Army Group South tore the front wide open. Its CO was Fedor von Bock, getting a second chance by accident. Reichenau had replaced Rundstedt in Deceember 1941 and died from a heart attack six weeks later. Command in Russia involved unprecedented levels of physical, intellectual, and emotional strain. Bock suffered from stomach trouble—hardly surprising under the circumstances—but a few weeks’ down time restored him sufficiently to take over an appointment for which no other clearly more suitable candidate was available. Six months later he had 68 divisions, 750 tanks, and more than 1,200 aircraft including, predictably, VIII Air Corps, with its obsolescent but devastating Stukas and the ME 109s that covered them. But Bock’s expectations rested with the one-two punch of Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army and the widely traveled 4th Panzer Army, which had moved from Leningrad to Moscow and now to the south under Hoth, transferred from his anomalous infantry command.

Bock’s order of battle included around two dozen divisions from the Reich’s allies and clients. These were the fruit of a winter’s diplomatic arm-twisting. Mostly Romanian and Italian, these formations were nowhere nearly as well equipped, trained, commanded, or motivated as their German counterparts. Hopes for significant material support from the Reich had proved futile. Their projected roles in Blue were correspondingly limited: flank guards, screening, and occupying low-risk sectors of the line. Their numerical role in the operation nevertheless highlighted the weakness of the German assault force relative to its mission—and implied trouble should things not work as programmed.

If Hitler’s directive was ambitious, the High Command’s plan was audacious to the point of recklessness. Reduced to its essentials—arguably oversimplified—Blue would begin in the north, with 4th Panzer Army leading a thrust toward the Don River and the rail hub and industrial center of Voronezh, then turning south to trap and finish off the Rotarmisten driven east by 1st Panzer Army and its accompanying infantry. Meanwhile, the 6th Army would advance to the Volga and Stalingrad while the 1st Panzer Army struck down the Volga to Baku and the Caucasus.

As early as July it was clear that a single headquarters could not manage the force, time, and space factors. Army Group South became Army Group B on July 7, taking over 4th Panzer Army. A newly created Army Group A assumed responsibility for Kleist’s panzers. In its initial stages, Operation Blue nevertheless bade fair to replicate the summer of 1941. German mechanized spearheads rolled across the steppes under an air umbrella the Red Air Force, still repairing its loss of trained pilots, could not penetrate. By July 4, Hoth’s vanguards were across the Don and at the outskirts of Voronezh. The LX Panzer Corps, pulling the rest of 6th Army behind it, linked up from the left with 4th Panzer Army on July 2, trapping one more Soviet army in a pocket.

The Red Army was still a heavy, blunt instrument, but not the bludgeon of 1941. The tank brigades formed from the detritus of 1941 were being combined into corps with the approximate armored strength of a panzer division. Beginning in October, they would be joined by newly created mechanized corps: panzer grenadiers without the half-tracks. Stalin and the High Command responded to Blue by launching a series of offensives against Army Groups North and Center, and by committing a high proportion of their increasing reserve forces to successive offensives around Voronezh.

These were not mere counterattacks, but parts of a systematic effort to regain the strategic initiative secured in December. Bock urged taking the fight to the Russians where they stood. Hitler and the High Command instead ordered Hoth south. Führer Directive 45 dispatched it toward Rostov, to cooperate with Kleist in encircling Soviet forces in the region and opening the way to the Caucasus. The infantry divisions and Allied formations left to Army Group B were ordered to capture Stalingrad and secure Army Group A’s flank and rear. Bock was summarily dismissed, this time permanently.

Directive 45 reflected the consensus of Hitler and the High Command that keeping to time justified overriding the judgment of the commander on the ground. Robert M. Citino correctly interprets this decision as a long step away from a Prussian/German tradition of validating subordinates’ initiatives. On the other hand, a case could be made—and was widely debated between the wars—that the Battle of the Marne in 1914 had been lost because of the German High Command’s unwillingness or inability to control the movements of the army’s right wing. Then, communications and maneuverability were alike severely limited. Now, radios and aircraft enabled constant contact among headquarters. And on the ground, the panzers could implement any sequence of decisions—even when, like this one, the result was a military snipe hunt.

With losses rapidly mounting, especially in the best divisions, the Soviet High Command, the Stavka, insisted space must temporarily be exchanged for time. Stalin finally authorized retreat on July 6, and the Soviets in front of Army Group A gave ground. Rostov fell on July 24 in a virtuoso cape-and-sword tactical performance by Mackensen and III Panzer Corps, executed at an overall cost of fewer than 1,500 casualties. There was no pocket, no gigantic new bag of prisoners and weapons. The new string of defeats and the abandonment of more of the industrial facilities created at such high human cost nevertheless generated a crisis in public morale serious enough for Stalin to issue Order 227 on July 28. It called for an end to retreat and demanded that every foot of Soviet soil be defended. Penalties ranged from service in a penal battalion to summary execution: a quarter-million Red Army soldiers were sentenced to death for failure to obey

On July 19, Stalin put Stalingrad on a war footing; on July 21, Stavka established a Stalingrad Front. Its three armies were a mixture of green troops and formations already hard hammered. But Order 227 was a reminder that there was nowhere to go. Stalingrad’s citizens responded not only by digging trenches and filling sandbags, but by reporting to work and finishing their shifts.

The German High Command responded by reassigning Hoth’s army to Army Group B and ordering it to attack Stalingrad from the south. The back-and-forth odyssey of Panzer Army 4 resembled the Kiev maneuver of 1941 in wearing down men and tanks. It was also a sign that Stalingrad was beginning to loom larger in German thinking than originally intended. No less significant was the fact that Directive 45 gave the Caucasus operation a separate code name. Calling it Edelweiss meant that Army Groups A and B were in effect now pursuing two objectives simultaneously rather than sequentially, as in Blue’s original conception. This was no simple manifestation of Hitler’s unfocused, dilettantish interference in command decisions. The High Command as well as the Führer were in the process of convincing themselves that for the Caucasus to fall, Stalingrad must be captured, not merely blockaded and screened. Hitler’s concept was based on pursuit; Halder was thinking in terms of a battle. The underlying gulf between the presumptions was bridged by the assumption that the panzers would make prioritizing—creating a Schwerpunkt—unnecessary.

Success in that unspoken mission would in good part depend on the kind of command initiative that had just cost Bock his job. Army Group A was under Field Marshal Wilhelm List. Not a tanker by experience or ascription, he had worked with the panzers in France, commanded an armor- heavy army in the Balkan campaign, and was a reasonable choice to oversee the drive for the Caucasus. Kleist was expected to do the heavy work with three panzer and two motorized divisions plus, for what it might prove worth, the “Fast Division” of the Slovak army: about the same numbers he took into Greece against far less formidable opposition. The Germans were reckoning heavily on being received as liberators by the Caucasian people, and reckoning even more heavily on intelligence estimates that described Soviet forces in the region as on the edge of collapse. Instead, during August, resistance stiffened all along the line of advance. The 1st Panzer Army took Maikop on August 9, but the progress was slowed by the Red Army, by temperatures regularly exceeding 100 degrees, and by roadless, trackless, mountainous terrain unlike anything the panzers had experienced.

“Jungle-like thicket with no visibility,” reported Hitler’s aide Army Major Gerhard Engel. Kitchens could not be moved forward; wounded could not be moved back. Even the mountain troops, the German army’s other elite force, made slow progress. Hitler fired List on September 9 and began directing Army Group A himself—his greatest departure from procedure to date. By the end of September, Soviet resistance—in particular air attacks enabled by the increasing withdrawal of German fighters to Stalingrad—combined with dust, broken terrain, fuel shortages, and unreplaced losses in men and tanks, brought 1st Panzer Army to a halt well away from the oil fields of Grozny and Baku, the original objective of Operation Blue. In the rear, Maikop’s refining facilities had been well demolished, and the bureaucratic inefficiency endemic in the Third Reich handicapped their reconstruction. Specifically the technical experts declared that the equipment designated for the Caucasus would be better employed in Romania—or even the Vienna region.

One possibility remained. In the nineteenth century the Russian government had constructed the Georgian and Ossetian military roads through the Caucasus: still solid highways and ideal axes of blitzkrieg. It took a month for Kleist to concentrate and redistribute what remained of his striking power—by now half-strength and less in men and tanks. On October 25 the 2nd Romanian Guard Division broke open the Soviet front. The next night, 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions, Mackensen’s III Panzer Corps, broke out and started south. Outrunning Soviets who had never experienced a real German lightning attack, 23rd Panzer closed the Ossetian Road on November 1. To the south, 13th Panzer Division was 10 miles away from the Georgian Road. The next day it cut that distance to five miles; by November 3 to a mile and a half. Soviet resistance centered on the city of Ordzhonikidze. The 13th Panzer Division’s infantrymen attacked on foot, into the teeth of a network of trenches, bunkers, and pillboxes matching anything in Stalingrad itself. A temporarily attached assault-gun battery supporting the riflemen accounted for twenty T-34s. On October 20 the division had 130 tanks. A month later it was down to 27. Division and corps had nothing left to stop the Soviet attack on December 6 that tore into the 13th Division’s flanks while a blizzard kept the Luftwaffe grounded. On December 9, what remained of 13th Panzer broke the encirclement and fought its way home. They took their wounded with them—in the first trucks out. They were not a broken gaggle of stragglers. They were the 13th Panzer Division, and Ivan knew it.

Robert M. Citino’s image of “a hard-driving panzer corps stopped, but still churning its legs” cannot be bettered. This was as far as the Germans got in Russia, and no less than Rommel’s contemporary position in North Africa. Does the question arise as to what Kleist and Mackensen might have done with another two or three divisions? The question is even more apt because Mackensen’s 16th Motorized Division had been detached to screen the widening gap between Army Groups A and B. In an exercise in irrelevance spectacular even by German standards for the time and place, it drove eastward onto the Kalmuck Steppe at right angles to the rest of 1st Panzer Army, getting to within 20 miles of the Caspian Sea before reality in the form of the Soviet counteroffensive intervened.

One more worn-down division was unlikely to have carried III Panzer Corps through the Russians to the far side of the Caucasus and the Turkish frontier. Had 4th Panzer Army been deployed alongside Kleist instead of fed into the Stalingrad blowtorch, the panzers would probably have run out of fuel 300 miles earlier. Had the Caucasus offensive been given logistical priority, the chances for a massively decisive Soviet counterattack against the correspondingly weakened German positions around Stalingrad would have suddenly improved. But had the 16th Motorized been in its doctrinal place, directly supporting the 13th and 23rd Panzer Divisions . . . who knows?

III

SINCE BARBAROSSA’S INCEPTION, the panzers had been considered and used as facilitators, enablers: the military magic that rendered irrelevant historic considerations of prudence and feasibility. Previously the dissonances between mission and material were arguably bridgeable by skill, spirit, and soldier’s luck. In the fall of 1942, Germany’s mobile forces were set tasks that denied illusions. Had 4th Panzer Army been started for Stalingrad in the first place, instead of sent south, its chances for catching the Soviets off guard and getting into the city would have been solid. Sixth Army by itself was unable to move that fast—in good part due to constant fuel shortages. And by the time Hoth’s panzers returned, Stalingrad was in the process of becoming a formidable fortress and a fulcrum for counterattacks that delayed 6th Army even more.

As Franz Halder confronted that fact in the second half of July, he seems to have confronted—finally—three more. Soviet forces had grown beyond Germany’s capacity to destroy them, unless the Soviets repeated mistakes it was clear they were learning to avoid. Hitler’s decision to pursue simultaneous operations in extrinsic directions had overstrained German forces beyond the capacity of any qualitative superiority to compensate. And both Hitler’s confidence in his ability as an operational military leader and his contempt and loathing for a High Command and an officer corps he saw lacking vision and will had grown beyond Halder’s capacity to sway them in any systematic or predictable fashion.

Halder may have decided that the war was lost, and provoked his dismissal in September as an attempt to avoid his share of responsibility. His successor, Kurt Zeitzler, was more in the model of a troop staff officer than a traditional Generalstabler (general staffer), and deliberately sought closer contact with Hitler to improve the synergies of policy, planning, and command.

For both Zeitzler and Hitler that meant, in practice, finishing off Stalingrad. Sixth Army had two panzer and two motorized divisions. It took until August 7 to top up their vehicle tanks and fuel trucks. The Fourth Panzer Army, even lower on the fuel chain, moved forward by battle groups. Both armies met determined resistance in terrain handicapping the small-unit maneuvers that gave the panzers an edge over their numerically and materially superior foes. The VIII Air Corps provided its usual effective support—but its aircraft were also responsible for covering 1st Panzer Army. Nevertheless the little flags in the headquarters of both sides kept moving in the same direction: eastward, toward the Volga and Stalingrad.

On August 21, German infantry crossed the Don. Two days later, 16th Panzer Division reached the Volga. On September 2, 4th Panzer Army made contact with 6th Army’s 21st Panzer Division 10 miles west of the city. Mission accomplished—at least the mission indicated in the original version of Operation Blue. The Volga was subject to interdiction. The Fourth Panzer and 6th Armies had established a continuous front before Stalingrad. The Luftwaffe seemed on the way to demolishing the city from above. The Soviets had successfully withdrawn into Stalingrad, but Weichs and 6th Arrmy commander Friedrich von Paulus, who had replaced Reichenau after the latter’s death, believed this was the beginning of the end of organized resistance. To Hitler and the High Command, finishing the job by continuing into the city was preferable to staying in place and resigning the initiative. The third possibility of enveloping the enemy, the option that had squared so many circles since September 1939, did not exist: there was no maneuvering room except across the Volga, and no way across the Volga except through Stalingrad. The operational choice was a stark either-or.

The panzer commanders were more concerned than their superiors about committing to a fight whose nature denied the combined arms coordination and freedom of movement that was the key to their way of war. Summary relief of one recalcitrant corps commander encouraged the rest. On September 14 the German drive to the Volga River began. The panzer and motorized divisions were in the first assault wave, taking increasing levels of responsibility as infantry divisions, already weakened, shrank even further. The nature of the fighting has been described too often to require summarizing here. Also familiar is Hitler’s order on October 6 that made Stalingrad’s complete occupation the primary mission of Army Group A.

That meant using the panzers to destruction. Fourteenth Panzer Division had five tanks left by mid-November; 16th Panzer had two dozen. Twenty-Fourth Panzer Division, the former cavalrymen, clawed its way to the Volga by the end of September and brought the Soviet landing stage under fire. It had 34 tanks on October 17. A month later, it was down to a dozen; at the end, it counted only a couple of tanks and a few hundred men.

One of the division’s reports expressed outraged common sense. Using panzers in urban combat was an emergency measure: “House rubble, bomb craters, narrow streets, minefields, barriers, and barricades greatly reduce mobility and ability to see . . .” Not having the armor protection of assault guns, tanks were best used to support infantry attacks as opposed to leading them, and were kept as a local reserve in defense. Regiments and battalions were not suitable for employment in cities. Platoons or sections, five tanks or fewer, were the standard. Even then second thoughts were appropriate—especially about committing tanks to work with infantry untrained in cooperating with them.

IV

ON AUGUST 26, Stalin bit a bullet of his own and appointed Zukhov his deputy supreme commander. Zukhov typified a new generation of Red Army generals: as fearless as they were pitiless, ready to do anything to crush the Germans, and not inhibited by threats from either front or rear. He shared his superior’s conviction that Stalingrad must be held—but in a strategic context. The summer of ripostes was over. Since September, Stavka, urged on by Zukhov, had been developing plans for a decisive winter campaign involving two major operations, each with two stages. Mars would be launched in mid-October against a seemingly vulnerable sector on the hitherto relatively quiet front of Army Group Center: a salient around the city of Rzhev. It would be followed in two or three weeks by Jupiter, an attack in the Bryansk sector to the south intended to link up with Mars and shatter Army Group Center. Uranus would begin in mid-November and involved committing large mobile forces north and south of Stalingrad, encircling and destroying enemy forces in the resulting pocket. Uranus was to be followed and extended by Saturn, a larger double envelopment that would finish off whatever remained of Army Group B and isolate Army Group A in the Caucasus.

Described for years in Soviet literature as no more than a diversion, Mars was in fact a complement to Uranus, a double penetration intended to put the Red Army on the high road to Berlin. It was to say the least an ambitious strategy for an army still on the road back from the seismic shocks of Barbarossa and Blue. Its prospects depended entirely on the ability of Stalingrad’s defenders to hold.

Hold the Soviets did, in an epic defense that reduced the city to a wilderness of rubble, smoke, and ash; a battle whose ferocity surpassed anything the Germans had ever experienced. As the mobile units were compelled to substitute courage for skill and lives for maneuver, colonels and majors led from the front, hoping inspiration would make up for lost mobility. Instead Stalingrad became the domain of the assault gun.

The modified Panzer IIIs had already proven their disproportionate worth time and again with Army Groups North and Center during the summer, in sectors that were “quiet” only by comparison. Volunteers cut off from a parent branch, whose guns were still horse- and tractor-drawn, shuffled as army troops from division to division, the Sturmgeschütz-Abteilungen developed a self-image as buccaneering adventurers, successors to the sixteenth century’s Landsknechts. Colorful unit insignia and colorful nicknames—“Buffalo,” “Greyhound,” “Tiger,” “Unicorn”—proclaimed an attitude that was eroding in other parts of the army. Their official uniform was standard field gray, but when on pass or furlough not a few of the gunners decked themselves out in panzer black. “L/24s or L/42s, shorthorns or longhorns, we were the fighting bulls!” reminisced one old-time assault gunner. “ ‘An Iron Cross or a wooden cross,’ we’d joke going into a fight,” recalled another. Bravado? Perhaps. But with tanks in short supply, assets to be husbanded for major emergencies, the assault gunners restored many a position and turned back many an attack.

In the process they developed a new specialty as tank killers. The assault gun’s low silhouette was a positive advantage against opponents still learning how to read terrain. Having to aim the gun by pointing the vehicle was less of a problem in defense when targets came to you, and in large numbers unsupported by infantry. In Stalingrad there remained plenty of standard assault work to do, helping the infantry forward as they ground into the massive factory and warehouse complexes along the Volga. The price was high. Four assault-gun battalions fought in Stalingrad. One had only two of its original officers left by September. Another was down to two guns when the encirclement was complete. A third had so few survivors that it was impossible to reconstruct the details of its fight and finish.

Weichs fed Paulus’s calls for more of everything by replacing German troops north and south of Stalingrad with Romanians and Italians. That gamble might have been justified if the German-tipped spearhead had been able to regain the initiative. Instead the panzers in Stalingrad were “demodernizing,” losing the ability to fight anything but the close-quarters battle of attrition they had been created to avert. Even then Vasily Chuikov, Soviet commander in Stalingrad and as matter-of-fact a man as ever wore a uniform, spoke of an inexplicable force driving the Germans. It was a last flash of the fighting power that had carried the panzers through Europe, across North Africa, and into the heart of Russia. In mid-November the tide turned.

Stavka had held its hand for a month, waiting for the rains to end and the ground to freeze. A million men, 1,000 modern tanks, 1,400 aircraft, 14,000 guns—all of it went undetected by a German intelligence blinded by Soviet deception measures and by its own belief that the Red Army was as locked into Stalingrad as the German. On November 19 two tank-headed sledgehammers struck the Romanian armies holding the flanks of the Stalingrad salient. On November 23, the Soviet spearheads met at Kalach, 50 miles west of Stalingrad, in a textbook encirclement.

Professionals at the time and armchair generals since have frequently argued that 6th Army should have withdrawn immediately, with orders or without them. But the Germans were locked in close combat with an opponent determined not to let go. The maneuver-war mentality in the headquarters of what was a foot-marching army had declined after two months of static operations. So had the resources—above all tanks and fuel—to support a fighting retreat against superior numbers in midwinter. And at the back of many minds was the question of the wounded. Evacuating them would encumber what had to be a fast-paced strike in order to have any chance of success. As for leaving them—after 18 months, awareness of German treatment of Soviet prisoners and civilians was sufficiently widespread to make the option a nonstarter for all but the most callous.

Hitler’s proposal to relieve Stalingrad from outside thus merely reinforced an attitude widespread in 6th Army. If it could be done at all, the panzers would have to do it. Most general accounts focus on the relief operation and its failure. In fact the German mobile forces had a threefold challenge between November and January. One involved keeping Operation Uranus, and eventually Operation Mars, from eviscerating the entire German position in Russia. A second involved withdrawing from a Caucasus front that was clearly no longer sustainable. Should either of those operations fail, the third challenge, successfully relieving Stalingrad, would do no more than present both what remained of 6th Army and its would-be rescuers to the Russians on the serving-dish of an ever-lengthening salient.

Fourth Panzer Army had escaped being encircled, but most of its divisions had already been sent to 6th Army. Hoth nevertheless began organizing a relief force. It was an exercise in making bricks without straw. His 16th Motorized Division, returned from its Caspian excursion with a stray greyhound as a mascot and the appropriate nickname of “greyhound division,” was more or less sustaining the link with Army Group A. In the Russian breakthrough’s northern half, a German panzer corps controlled 1st Romanian Armored Division and 22nd Panzer Division. Both were used up plugging ephemeral holes, with the 22nd taking such heavy losses it was disbanded in January. Kleist had been given command of Army Group A on November 21, and the High Command hoped to bring back at least some of his panzers for the Stalingrad operation. Most of them were, however, far away at the toe of the Caucasian sock. They were also needed to cover a retreat, finally authorized by Hitler on December 28, that could not afford to be conducted too rapidly lest it collapse into a rout of the sorely tried Germans. Eventually Hoth would acquire Kleist’s 23rd Panzer Division, with fewer than three dozen tanks and an overall effectiveness so reduced it was rated only “conditionally suitable” for attacks, even by the desperate standards of December 1942. After six months of fighting, that was all the southern front could provide for the most crucial offensive of the war to date.

Matters were little better in a general context. Erich von Manstein, who by now had an established reputation as the Eastern Front’s specialist in difficult missions, had been transferred from the siege of Sev astopol to the siege of Leningrad. Now he was handed command of a new Army Group Don and ordered to relieve Stalingrad. Manstein had Hoth and 4th Panzer Army. He was promised eleven divisions by mid-December. Three of them, formed from transferred Luftwaffe personnel, were close to useless. That meant—what else—primary responsibility rested with the panzers: three newly arrived divisions plus the 23rd.

Army Group Center provided 17th Panzer Division. It had been on the line most of the year, and seen its strength eroded in constant small-scale fighting. It suffered from comprehensive wear and tear. Eleventh Panzer Division had been in reserve since September. It was up to tank strength, most of its Panzer IIIs with the L/42; Balck was almost worth another division by himself. But 11th Panzer Division was immediately sent north to replace the broken 22nd along the line of the Chir River. Between December 8 and 22, the division virtually annihilated the Soviet 5th Tank Army, stabilizing the sector single-handed. It was an example of staff work, willpower, and tactical skill still legitimately cited as among the greatest divisional-level battles ever fought.

It also left 6th Panzer Division in the spotlight when Operation Winter Storm began on December 12, 1942. The division had been in France since May. Fully reequipped with German tanks, with one of its four infantry battalions in half-tracks and a fully rested Raus, the 6th fought to within 20 miles of Stalingrad by December 19. It was another virtuoso performance by a first-class formation and a top-flight general. It was not a blitz breakthrough in the style of 1941. On a single day the division’s panzer regiment did gain 40 miles. But the Russians were craftier, more sophisticated in defense. Raus husbanded his limited number of tanks, advancing by night, using dive bombers and artillery to blast the 6th forward, mounting a series of attacks by panzer grenadiers on foot, whose tactics evoked the storm troops of the First War more than the panzers of this one. When the Soviets counterattacked, the panzer grenadiers let them through, shot down their accompanying infantry, then took out the tanks with grenades and explosive charges: 1918 all over again. On December 19, 6th Panzer Division seized and held a bridgehead over the Mishkova River in the teeth of the 2nd Guards Army. Raus saw his way to Stalingrad open, paved by “iron will, coupled with bravery and a skilled conduct of operations.”

He was looking through blinders. Air support was minimal and unpredictable. The Luftwaffe had been dispersed more comprehensively than even the panzers, with already-weak groups and wings transferred and then reassigned in near-random fashion. Flank security on the ground was in the hands of a 23rd Panzer Division barely able to take care of itself. By the time 17th Panzer Division came up, its single panzer battalion had 30 tanks of all types. So many of its wheeled vehicles were disabled that one company in each motorized battalion was following the division on foot. Soviet counterattacks were increasing in strength and effectiveness across Hoth’s front. The 6th Panzer Division might in fact have retained enough fighting power to push a battle group forward to 6th Army’s perimeter. Less likely things had happened and would happen again. As early as the nineteenth, however Manstein concluded that such a corridor could not be held long enough either to reinforce or to evacuate the pocket.

The debate as to the precise responsibility for holding 6th Army on the Volga remains lively and venomous. Whatever the actual prospects of some combination of breakthrough and breakout at this late date, neither Manstein nor Paulus gave the order. They showed a corresponding absence of the moral courage that is a requisite for high command in any military system. The issue, however, was rendered moot by events on the ground. On December 16 the Soviets launched Operation Little Saturn, a less ambitious version of the original. The Italian 8th Army bought three days, and then splintered. As Soviet tanks and cavalry ran wild in the virtually undefended German rear areas, 2nd Guards Army began an offensive that pushed 4th Panzer Army’s slender spearhead back toward its start lines. The Germans’ attention refocused from the fate of Stalingrad to the survival of the entire south Russian sector.

Manstein made the best of what he had. In a series of ripostes between January and March 1943, he confirmed his reputation as a battle captain and blunted a Soviet operation already compromised by Stalin’s overreaching, pushing Little Saturn and its successors beyond an already overstretched Red Army’s capacity to sustain them. These achievements would have been impossible without the High Command’s cold-blooded write-off of Stalingrad. Now hopelessly isolated, the garrison was expected to tie down as many Soviet forces as possible, for as long as possible. The endgame dragged on until February 2.

Meanwhile Stavka planned a major offensive toward Rostov, part of a new Stalin-devised grand strategic plan to drive the Germans back across the entire Eastern Front while the winter held, establishing an intermediate stop line extending from Narva to the Black Sea. From the first days of that offensive in late January, the Germans received an unpleasant tactical surprise. The Red Army was no longer following its familiar pattern of engaging German strong points and exposing themselves to paralyzing local ripostes by the panzers. Instead, they were masking the “hedgehogs” and driving past them deep into the German rear. That only reinforced Manstein’s conviction that to restore the German position in south Russia, it was necessary to restore operational maneuver. That in turn meant taking the risk of refusing to use mobile divisions as the core of ad hoc task forces to cope with what were becoming routine emergencies. It involved concentrating the panzers and the motorized divisions, using them in coordinated, multicorps operations focused on the Russians’ weak spots and institutional weaknesses. Operational maneuver, in short, meant returning to the basics tested in 1940 and applied in the summer of 1941.

In the contexts of January 1943, operational warfare had two immediate prerequisites. One was administrative: a united command in the southern sector. The entropy into which Operation Blue had fallen led to tunnel vision—every senior officer emphasizing his own problems, and addressing them without regard for the big picture. The second prerequisite was doctrinal: trading space for time. That concept is so closely associated with the by-now canonical ex post facto criticism of Hitler’s intransigent insistence on holding all ground at all costs that it is easy to overlook its relative absence in a practical sense from the “German way of war.” Prussia had been too small, the Second Reich too isolated, to make the concept viable in operational or strategic contexts; there was no space to exchange. Even tactically, the flexible approach of giving ground and counterattacking had required two years of total war and an increasingly desperate situation on the Western Front to take hold.

It was Manstein who not only understood the theoretical concept, but recognized its applicability on an unprecedented scale. It was also Manstein who had the intellectual force and moral courage to convince Hitler that operational exigencies overrode the strategic and economic arguments Hitler presented against them. With Soviet pressure increasing across the front, Manstein withdrew into the Donets Basin, north of Rostov, shortening the arc of his operational semicircle and concentrating his still- rebuilding mobile formations. The Russians in turn were outrunning their supply and overextending their communications. Forward units were living off the resources they carried for up to two weeks at a time. Their commanders’ contact with higher headquarters was increasingly tenuous—and initiative even at corps level was not a Red Army hallmark. But the prizes on the horizon encouraged Stavka to go a stage further. At the beginning of February, Operations Gallop and Star retook the city of Kursk and drove forward, toward the industrial center and transportation hub of Kharkov.

Manstein benefited when, on February 14, Army Groups B and Don were merged into the reborn Army Group South. That gave him two panzer armies with a near-ideal command mix. Hoth had the longest tenure in senior panzer command. Not merely seasoned, but marinated, he was wise in the ways of the Soviets and clear-eyed in evaluating the capacities of his own forces. Mackensen had taken over 1st Panzer Army on Kleist’s promotion, and his force and flair were still undiluted. Reinforcements were arriving steadily: men and vehicles for the veteran outfits beginning to see, if not exactly light at the end of the tunnel, then a chance of getting payback. Relief also came from some of the remaining best of the mobile divisions, Grossdeutschland and 7th Panzer; and a new player in the East, one with some fundamental differences in skills, equipment—and baggage: the SS Panzer Corps under Paul Hausser.

The question remained how best to use these resources. Not only did the Führer risk a little of Stalingrad by giving Kharkov’s defense top priority, some of Manstein’s subordinates were unwilling to give ground on Manstein’s proposed scale. Manstein in general receives correspondingly high marks for cool calculation in conceding the loss of Kharkov in order to lure the Soviets forward and into better position for the counterstroke he was preparing. His postwar memoirs are more sanguine than the contemporary mood at his headquarters. Manstein did not sacrifice the city in order to recapture it. He saw the loss instead as the unpleasant but acceptable consequence of the few days needed to convince a visiting Hitler of the advantages of concentrating real reserves for a real counterattack. The Führer was nevertheless considering installing a newer broom when a relatively lowly panzer corps commander disregarded a chain of orders and withdrew his men at the last minute from a situation he considered hopeless.

Kharkov’s loss was a major defeat in itself. In the wake of Stalingrad it seemed to prefigure disaster. The city fell on February 16. But next day 4th Panzer Army struck. Kharkov was retaken on March 14; Hoth’s spearheads were back on the Donets a few days later. Mackensen’s 1st Panzer Army covered Hoth’s right against the Soviet Southwest Front, cutting off and cutting up its overextended 5th Tank Army and reaching the Donets on February 28. Seventh and 11th Panzer Divisions proved a lucky combination, with Hans von Funck handling Rommel’s division like a master and Balck enhancing an already formidable reputation for coup d’oeil. The Luftwaffe played a vital role, mounting as many as a thousand sorties a day while shifting its emphasis between the two panzer armies. The weather for once worked in the Germans’ favor just as they reached the Donets, with the rasputitsa setting in and immobilizing Soviet reserves.

Otherwise the tactical and operational patterns of Manstein’s riposte are surprisingly familiar on both sides. He described a tennis player’s “backhand blow.” By this time Germans and Russians alike were more like boxers in the late rounds of a bruising fight: exhausted, punch-drunk, working more from memory than inspiration. The final version of the front line strongly resembled its spring 1942 predecessor. Strategic consequences were another, more complex story. Manstein’s success in restoring and stabilizing the southern sector of the German front has inspired assertions that Hitler and the High Command should have continued the offensive instead of throttling back and preparing for a climactic battle at Kursk. The obvious counter is that despite Manstein’s careful stewardship, the panzers were fought out by the end of March, needing rest and reinforcement before going anywhere. Stavka had responded by reinforcing the sector from other parts of the front, to a level that made continuing the attack an invitation to overextension.

To contextualize that sentence it is necessary to return in time and space to the other half of Operation Uranus. Mars had been delayed a month by heavy rains, giving the Germans time to prepare—and for once, intelligence accurately predicted something like the massive Soviet forces involved.

More useful for the Germans, paradoxically, was Mars’s timing. The attack began on November 24. And with the Stalingrad front collapsing, Hitler and the High Command were quite willing to allow early commitment of local reserves and “adjustments” of local front lines. The command team on the spot was also well suited to its responsibilities. Von Kluge had replaced Bock as CO of Army Group Center the previous year, and he had long expected an attack on his front. The sector hit hardest was held by Model’s 9th Army, and Model took justifiable pride in his defensive skills.

The Red Army’s initial commitment to Mars matched that to Uranus: 37 rifle divisions, 45 tank and mechanized brigades, plus dozens of independent artillery regiments: guns, howitzers, and the truck-mounted rockets veterans of the Eastern Front regularly described as the most terrifying of all Soviet weapons. They hit the Rzhev salient on both sides of its base. In some sectors penal battalions were in the first wave: men sentenced for a variety of military and political offenses, with at least a chance of pardon if they survived. Initially German strong points held. German panzers took heavy toll on their Russian counterparts. But numbers and courage wore down the determined defenders. More and more panzer grenadiers were being committed in sectors where original infantry garrisons were worn down by what seemed endless bombardment and assault.

Had the Soviets been able to get out of their own way, the German front might have broken from the attack’s sheer mass. Instead, traffic and supply problems slowed and constrained the Red Army columns just long enough. By November 28, 9th and 5th Panzer Divisions were in position not merely to hold the flanks of a narrow salient driven into 9th Army’s eastern flank, but to cut off elements of two tank corps at its apex. In the western sector it was the 1st Panzer Division, overcoming mud that immobilized even its light reconnaissance vehicles, which hung on along with elements of Grossdeutschland Division, then shifted into a series of local counterattacks in battle group strength—meaning whatever could be scraped together in the face of the latest Russian assault.

Here too the German line bent but did not break. It is no disrespect to the infantry that did most of the fighting and bore the heaviest losses to say that the backbone and muscle of the Rzhev salient’s initial defense was provided by the panzers—and not least by the two corps headquarters that controlled the battle: Hans-Jürgen von Arnim’s XXXIX Panzer on the east and Josef Harpe’s LXI Panzer on the west. Von Arnim’s career would be truncated by his next assignment to a collapsing North African front. Harpe would rise—briefly—to army group command, and sustain a dual reputation as a master of the well-timed armored riposte and one of the panzer generals openly sympathetic to National Socialism.

With his reputation, perhaps his position, and possibly his neck at stake, Zukhov brought the offensive’s senior commanders together on November 28 for counseling and admonition. The attack resumed with renewed vigor the next day, featuring everything from tank attacks to cavalry charges. The weather grew more bitter in the first days of December. This year the Germans were well supplied with winter clothing, and had learned how to use trees and drifts to keep from freezing. The Landser held. When they could no longer hold, they pulled back. One battle group broke out with fewer than 100 men and three tanks: the last of what had been a reinforced panzer grenadier battalion. Its parent, 5th Panzer Division, was down by more than 1,600 men and 30 tanks. In Harpe’s western sector, T-34s with “tank marines” mounted on the vehicles brought 1st Panzer Division to the breaking point before 12th Panzer Division arrived from army reserve. First Panzer Division was one of the divisions stripped to a single tank battalion earlier in the year. One of its companies accounted for more than 40 Soviet tanks in four days. Only two of its Mark IIIs remained operable at the finish.

Men, tanks, and ammunition: the Soviets seemed to have limitless supplies of each, and committed them regardless of losses everywhere along the German reinforcements arrived in driblets. Most of the antiaircraft guns were being used as ground support, and the Sturmoviks had a correspondingly free hand. By battery and battalion, sometimes singly, the assault guns were essential wherever the panzers were unavailable. StuGs were the rallying points for battle groups cobbled together from whatever rear echelon troops were at hand, around the survivors of an infantry or panzer grenadier battalion. In turn they formed the nuclei of counterattacks that kept the Russians off balance, unable to break through where they broke in.

With the salient beginning to stabilize, Zukhov prepared for another major effort on December 7 and 8—only to be forestalled by a German counterattack launched one day earlier. Elements of Grossdeutschland and 1st Panzer Division struck the Russian front in Harpe’s sector. Nineteenth and 20th Panzer Divisions hit the flank from the south, from outside the salient. By December 9 they had succeeded in cutting off a mechanized corps and most of a rifle corps—between 40,000 and 50,000 men. It was an order of magnitude short of Minsk, Smolensk, or Kiev. Compared to what was happening around Stalingrad, it was a victory to be celebrated.

From close up, the differences between 1941 and 1942 were even more pronounced. The pocket’s front was being held not by infantry, but by panzer and panzer grenadier battle groups forming small strong points around the perimeter, linking up where possible, and pushing forward in fighting that was slow enough and costly enough to replicate in the open what had earlier happened in Stalingrad. It was not a tankers’ battle in the previously understood sense: 19th and 20th Panzer Divisions were even under command of an infantry corps. On December 16, the Russians succeeded in breaking out as organized formations, albeit with losses exceeding 75 percent.

Harpe’s effort to mount a major counterattack to the northeast was stopped by a Russian defense that wore down the battalion-strength battle groups that were all Grossdeutschland and the 1st, 12th, and 20th Panzer Divisions were able to muster after days of close-quarters attri tional fighting. In the end, however, it was the Red Army that stood down. Soviet casualties were more than 200,000 men, half of them dead. More than 1,800 of the 2,000 tanks committed had been lost. Grimly, the Germans reported fewer than 5,000 prisoners: quarter was neither asked nor given in most times and places in the Rzhev Salient.

David Glantz correctly describes the original strategic plan for Mars as too ambitious and Zukhov as too stubbornly optimistic to modify it. Operationally and tactically, Rzhev was nevertheless a watershed. This was the last time in a major sector the Red Army made the adolescent mistakes characteristic of its post-Barbarossa reconstruction: poor tank-infantry-artillery cooperation; inflexibility at all command levels; a tendency to reinforce failure at the expense of exploiting success. In a comparative context Rzhev, seen from a Soviet perspective, resembles the French offensives of 1915 in the Champagne and the later stages of the Somme a year later: a study in learning curves, facing an instructor charging high tuition.

The German victory was also a product of the limited geographic scope of Operation Mars. The essential difference between Mars and Uranus, the reason the Soviets succeeded on one front and not the other, was that in the south the Red Army established in Uranus’s opening stage a force-to-space ratio in both halves of the breakthrough that the panzers could counter in neither. The German mobile forces immediately available lacked the mass to give weight to their impulsion, and were correspondingly swamped. At Rzhev the panzers were able to do what they did because the Soviet generals were obliging enough to commit their formations in action in limited sectors, as one might push candles into blowtorches, in a force-to-space ratio the Germans were just able to match.

Model, his subordinates—especially Harpe—and the mobile division commanders excelled at assembling, shifting, and committing both organized and ad hoc battle groups at key places and times. The initially limited, steadily eroding strength of the armored forces made that technique dependent on a battlefield small enough for the fire brigades to reach critical spots before the fires burst out of control. At Rzhev, the Germans were correspondingly able to assume control of the battle—albeit at a cost so heavy that the salient was abandoned in March.

In tactical terms Rzhev was characterized by the increasing long-term employment of panzer troops in the front lines. The panzer grenadiers in particular were the shock troops of the defense, time after time taking the brunt of Soviet attacks that had exhausted the undermanned and underequipped infantry formations. With only a battalion’s worth of tanks available, a panzer division’s counterattacks depended heavily on surprise and finesse while lacking the force to have more than a temporary effect. As had been the case in World War I, the Germans could no longer exploit their tactical successes.

Both of these developments moved the panzers away from their original roles. Both foreshadowed major revisions in the Germans’ theory and practice of armored war but, in the immediate context of events in the winter of 1942-43, Rzhev invited interpretation as the counterpoint to Manstein’s more visible, more spectacular riposte in the Don Basin. The conditions were different; the point was the same. A bear hunted long enough might increase his strength and improve his cunning. Killing him might be more difficult. But a bear remained a bear: a trophy waiting to be collected.

V

A HUNTER EXPECTING to take his trophy and live to admire it could nevertheless ill afford to lag behind his prey. If the second half of 1942 proved anything about the Eastern Front at the operational level, it was that the panzers were more than ever not merely the army’s core, but its hope. The Reich’s manpower resources continued to erode, making it impossible to keep the infantry divisions at anything like authorized strength. A new generation of personal weapons was coming off the drawing boards. Light machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket launchers would enhance the infantry’s firepower and fighting power alike beginning in 1943. But at unit level the new hardware would at best be able to balance the lost men. In a wider context the Reich’s factories could not produce enough of it to replace existing weapons in anything but fits and starts. What had begun in the 1930s as a choice to enable forced-draft rearmament had become a necessity in the context of forced-draft war. The panzers must be the focal point of the army’s post-Stalingrad reconstruction.

Seven panzer and three motorized divisions—four if the 90th Light Africa Division were counted—had gone under in Stalingrad or surrendered in Tunisia. More than half the rest had been battered back to near-cadre status at Rzhev, on the south Russian steppes, or from Leningrad to points south. Reorganizing and reequipping them took most of a year. Even more than their predecessors, the revised tables of organization and equipment tended, in practice, to be approximations depending on what was available. The tank regiment was returned to its authorized two-battalion strength, each with four companies of 22 tanks—Panzer IVs in theory; in practice a mix of IIIs and IVs, depending on what was available. The antitank battalion was up-gunned to three batteries of open-topped, self-propelled Marders carrying the 75mm PAK 40, the definitive German antitank gun in the second half of the war, which inflicted much of the damage credited to the 88. The artillery regiment converted one of its battalions to self-propelled, full- tracked mounts: twelve 105mm howitzers and six 150mms. Both equipments were excellent. The lighter Wespe (Wasp), based on the still-useful Panzer II chassis, was a rough counterpart of the US M7 Priest. The 150mm Hummel (Bumblebee), with a chassis purpose-built from Panzer III and IV components, outmatched anything any other army’s self-propelled divisional artillery would see until well into the Cold War.

The panzer grenadier regiments received a company of 20mm antiaircraft guns on half-tracks, and a company with six 150mm infantry guns on 38(t) chassis. Despite open tops and relatively light armor, these were generally used as assault guns manqué, and were correspondingly welcome. While the number of half-tracks could still not be stretched beyond a single battalion, the available vehicles began sporting a bewildering variety of heavy weapons. Each of a mechanized battalion’s three rifle companies now had two 81mm mortars, two light infantry guns, and two 251 half-tracks with short 75mm pieces removed or salvaged from old Panzer IVs—all in addition to the 37mm guns on the platoon commander’s half-tracks. The fourth “heavy” company had a section of two towed light infantry guns—even on an armored battlefield these were still useful against obstacles and entrenchments, and usually better than nothing—a platoon of three towed 75mm antitank guns, and another platoon of six of the 75mm 251s.

That was a lot of large-caliber firepower for 800 men. Its increased hardware would, in the next year, increasingly move the panzer division’s mechanized battalion tactically apart from its three truck-riding counterparts, whose armament remained essentially unchanged, and into the panzer regiment’s orbit.

A related major change in that panzer divisions’ order of battle involved its “fast units.” The reconnaissance battalion was expected to scout for information as opposed to fighting for it. On the Russian front, however, the terrain, the weather, and the enemy made reconnaissance by armored cars difficult. The motorcycle battalions faced constant difficulties maintaining effective combat strength as their mounts proved vulnerable to mud, snow, and Russian fire. The panzer arm made two problems into a solution by amalgamating the organizations into a reconnaissance battalion: one company of armored cars and three rifle companies, sometimes on motorcycles, sometimes riding the Volk swagen counterparts of US jeeps, but whenever possible converted to the light SdKfz half-tracks, finally at the production and deployment stage.

Like their larger counterparts, these chassis were also fitted with heavy weapons. No fewer than 14 official variants of this useful light armored vehicle would be introduced in the course of the war, carrying everything from extra radio equipment to a 20mm cannon turret. The new-style reconnaissance battalion also had a support company including a pioneer platoon, three 75mm antitank guns and a couple of the ubiquitous light infantry guns, and—as they became available—no fewer than six of the 75mm L/24s originally mounted on Panzer IVs, now transferred to SdKfz 251 half-tracks. Small wonder that the new formation was increasingly considered—and used—as an additional panzer grenadier battalion, with scouting and screening capabilities.

The net result of the chopping and changing was to facilitate splitting the panzer division into armored/unarmored or tracked/wheeled categories. The tanks and half-tracks, the self-propelled artillery and antitank guns, and the pioneer company with SdKfz 251s could form a battle group that was able to operate independently of the motorized elements, kept up to strength by internal transfers, and available at short notice for the kinds of emergencies that were the norm at Rzhev and Stalingrad, or in the Don Basin. The corresponding risk involved enhanced entropy: further decentralization of the panzer arm in the face of steadily increasing Soviet fighting power.

The panzer grenadier divisions received little more during 1942 than their new titles. The infantry battalions had two 81mm mortars per rifle company, a heavy company with three 75mm antitank guns, and another with—eventually—four 120mm mortars. Copied from a particularly effective Soviet weapon, these were intended to provide organic close-support for panzer grenadier battalions that had done far more fighting in isolation than the original doctrine for motorized infantry had expected. The reconnaissance battalion was upgraded to panzer division standards, though with lower priority for the light half-tracks. The antitank battalion usually had two self-propelled batteries. All of the remaining artillery and heavy weapons were moved by truck, just as on September 1, 1939. Their independent offensive power, even with the tank battalion authorized the previous year, was not much greater—a fact highlighted by the introduction of the MG 42.

German rifle squads were, unlike their US counterparts, built around a light machine gun. The MG 42 was the best of its kind in World War II and set design standards for another half century. The MG 42 resembled in appearance its predecessor, the MG 34: shoulder-stocked, bipod-mounted, and belt-fed in its usual configuration. What distinguished it was a uniquely high cyclic rate of fire—up to 1,500 rounds a minute. Even with a quick-change barrel (five or six seconds was the usual time frame), that was hardly normal usage. But in emergencies the “Hitler saw,” as the gun was known, could lay down a near-impenetrable cone of fire.

Standard issue around the turn of the year was one MG 42 per squad; enterprising panzer grenadiers doubled it. The extra weight was not important in a truck or half-track, which could also readily carry enough spare barrels and extra ammunition belts to keep the guns in action. On every front after 1942 the characteristic tearing-silk brrrrip of an MG 42 drove the boldest infantryman down until he could make sure of the gun’s position, and the likely locations of any other MG 42s waiting for a would-be hero. Panzer grenadiers, finding more and more of their employment on the defensive, increasingly depended on their MG 42s as they waited for the panzer counterattack that would restore the situation—if it materialized.

The status quo ante Stalingrad was not completely restored. Tenth Panzer Division was never reformed, while 15th Panzer was converted to panzer grenadiers. Grossdeutschland, though retaining the panzer grenadier title, was upgraded to de facto panzer status with two tank battalions and a half-track battalion in each panzer grenadier regiment. Sixtieth Motorized emerged from the post-Stalingrad reconstruction of 6th Army as the Feldherrnhalle Panzergrenadier Division, to commemorate Hitler’s first strike for power in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The 14th and 36th Motorized, on the other hand, became standard infantry divisions—reflecting a growing shortage of vehicles, equipment, and cadres that stabilized the ceiling of the army’s effective panzer forces for the rest of the war. The infusion of strength that carried the panzers through 1945 and sustained them as the army’s backbone came from an external source: one the soldiers had long viewed askance but would come to welcome—at a price.

Replacing the panzers’ material losses was not a simple one-for-one process. The workhorse Panzer III was increasingly outclassed by its Soviet opponents—less from any qualitative improvement than because the Russians were beginning to learn how best to take tactical advantage in particular of the T-34’s powerful gun and high maneuverability. The Panzer III’s chassis was too light, its turret ring too small, to be a useful transition to the next panzer generation. They were issued as stopgaps, and by mid-1943 appeared in no more than company strength.

The Panzer IV, in contrast, had a future. Improved muzzle braking enabled it to carry the 43-caliber Tank Gun M 40, and a more powerful 48-caliber version introduced in late 1942. More than 1,700 of these F and G models were produced or upgraded before they gave way in March 1943 to the definitive late-war Panzer IVH. Its armor was significantly increased: 80mm on the front and 50mm on the turret, 30mm on the sides and 20mm in the rear—the latter reflecting Red Army infantrymen and antitank crews’ willingness to come to close quarters for a kill. The additional protection increased weight to 25 tons and reduced speed to 21 miles per hour, but the Model H could still move and maneuver well enough. Its 75mm, 48-caliber gun was roughly equivalent to the T-34’s main armament, and effective against almost anything it could reach.

The Panzer IVH integrated a useful set of upgrades into a state-of-the-art light medium tank, intended to equip one battalion in each panzer division. More than 3,000 would be built in 1943, and more than 3,100 in the war’s final 18 months. They were nevertheless regarded as stopgaps, holding the line for a new generation of exponentially more powerful armored fighting vehicles.

The signifier of that family of weapons systems was the Panzer VI, better known as the Tiger I. The Tiger lent its aura to the whole German armored force. Even experienced British and US troops were likely to see Tigers behind every hedgerow and leading every counterattack. A cursory search turns up at least a hundred books in English, French, and German devoted to the Tiger’s origins and performance. The vehicle’s genesis can be traced to a 1935 Army Weapons Office report describing a 30-ton vehicle with a 75mm main gun capable of piercing the armor of French heavy tanks. Redesignated “escort tank,” “infantry tank,” then “breakthrough vehicle,” the concept sputtered along through the 1930s, reflecting a lack of consensus on how the tank should be armed and used, and the problems of designing a chassis able to support the projected weight and an engine able to move it.

The firm of Henschel and Sons made just enough progress to spark Hitler’s interest. Following the Third Reich’s common approach of pitting competitors directly against each other, in the fall of 1940 automobile engineer Dr. Ferdinand Porsche was commissioned to design a 45-ton tank. Krupp, fearing to be shut out of potentially lucrative contracts, offered Porsche a turret designed around an adaptation of its 88mm Flak as the main armament. Not until May 1941, however, did the project begin taking material form—and that reflected concern for the heavily armored British infantry tanks encountered in North Africa rather than anxiety about what might await in Russia.

Gun power was a key issue in the discussion. It was generally agreed that the new tank’s main armament be able to penetrate around four inches of armor from a distance of a mile. This was a major leap forward, but the army was looking a long distance ahead. It projected the Henschel design to mount a completely new kind of weapon: a tapered-bore gun of around 75mm. Tapered-bore began as a German effort to increase the effect of small- caliber antitank weapons by squeezing the round as it traveled through the barrel, thus improving muzzle velocity and penetrating power without raising the gun’s size and weight. That enabled a tank to carry more rounds—an important factor, given the proven difficulty of replenishing ammunition in the midst of a battle—and allowed for a lower weight, with corresponding advantages using roads and bridges.

Germany produced two major versions. The 28mm model, usually mounted on an armored car or half-track, was issued to the mobile troops to improve their firepower despite its still relatively limited effect against tanks. The 75mm tapered-bore closed its round down to 55mm. Its performance was well above its conventional counterpart, and correspondingly attractive to panzer technocrats. Though the guns were complex and expensive, the critical problem involved raw materials. The armor-piercing rounds required tungsten cores. Tungsten was also necessary for the armament industry’s machine tools, and neither Germany nor its victims had any indigenous sources. Supplies had to be brought in by blockade runners—a small-scale and unpredictable process—or imported from Spain, which was not much easier given Allied pressure on Franco’s government. Finding enough of the metal to produce and supply more than a token number of large-caliber, tapered-bore weapons was a corresponding impossibility. But it required Hitler’s direct intervention to “convince” the army and the firm of Henschel that they were pursuing a dead end.

The tapered-bore issue merits discussion because of the familiar trope that Hitler was solely responsible for the technical dead ends that plagued the armored forces during the war’s second half. The generals too suffered from technocratic grandiosity, and entertained visions whose implementation depended on final, total victory. When it came to the projected heavy tank, Hitler’s principal technical criterion was relatively modest. He accepted pursuing the tapered-bore solution, but as a backup wanted the Krupp 88mm to be replaced by an 88mm whose effectiveness was equal to a more powerful Rheinmetall design. Krupp unsurprisingly replied that a direct switch to the Rheinmetall gun was technically impossible. Nor could Rheinmetall develop and produce a conventional 75mm gun to match either the theoretical tapered-bore weapon or the existing 88mm in time to meet production schedules. Krupp’s gun and turret was therefore adopted for both the Porsche and Henschel designs as much by default as intention.

No more than its design parameters were the Tiger’s production schedules developed on an emergency basis. Even the appearance of the KVs and T-34s during Barbarossa failed to concentrate German minds and efforts. Instead Porsche and Henschel were told to have a half dozen of their respective designs available—by the summer of 1942. After all, the Russians would be crushed before the new tanks could take the field, in any case.

The first Tiger was a birthday present for the Führer in April 1942. Its production runs were set modestly, at 15 a month by September. The Porsche and Henschel versions competed through the summer. In October, the Henschel won the contract for what passed for mass production in the Reich—not especially surprising, given its insider position on the project.

The leading authorities on the Tiger agree that it was no purebred. Its technical genesis was ad hoc, incorporating components from several firms and several design projects. Modifications continued on the production lines, ranging from mud guards on the hull to a redesigned turret. Though the vehicle’s final size and weight—57 tons—enabled it to absorb the changes with relative equanimity, it was always high maintenance. That does not mean unreliable. “Tiger was not a lady,” in the words of one old hand. “But she was like a good woman. If you treated her right, she’d treat you right.” Extending the metaphor, Tiger was also no cheap date. Range on a full tank was only 125 miles. Speed was on the low side of adequate by previous panzer standards: about 20 miles per hour on roads, half that and less cross-country. But with an 88mm gun behind more than 100mm of frontal armor, the Tiger could outshoot anything on any battlefield. Through the rest of the war, for most Allied tanks to have a chance at penetrating a Tiger’s armor, they had to maneuver within the killing range of its gun. No one ever sought the experience a second time.

The Tiger was all muscle, a slab-sided beast as sophisticated as a knee in the groin—and no less effective. Its cross-country mobility was as good as most of its contemporaries. Far from being a semi-mobile Möbelwagen (furniture van), it was intended for offensive operations—not merely breakthrough but exploitation, if proper attention was paid to refueling. The Tiger’s technology nevertheless completely inverted the army’s existing armor doctrine. It was twice as heavy as anything else in the inventory of a panzer arm that from its beginnings had emphasized speed and maneuverability. Its tactical doctrine, always flexible, improvised, or random depending on perspective, developed into three primary missions. Tigers were expected to lead armored attacks against strong positions, to break through prepared defensive works and overcome enemy defenses generally, and to destroy heavy tanks and equivalent targets at long ranges.

The first two points are essentially identical with British practice in World War I and French theory in the 1920s and ’30s. The third, whose relative importance increased by the month, reflected material and numerical circumstances in Russia that offered an unusually target-rich environment. That is to say a Tiger company could expect to find ample numbers of poorly handled Soviet tanks within range of its guns.

There were things the Tiger could not do. The first three battalions had two companies each of nine Tigers and ten Panzer IIIs with the idea that the lighter tanks could perform screening and scouting missions more effectively and economically. The Tigers’ usual employment, however, favored their concentration into “pure” companies of 14, three to a battalion, with the battalions deployed as army troops to cooperate with the panzers in the kind of decisive sectors where Panzer IIIs were little more than targets.

The Tigers benefited from a policy of allowing recruits to volunteer for Tiger duty; from having their own training facilities; and from building crews, whenever possible, from experienced men, be they casuals, recovered wounded, or transfers. They later benefited by converting existing tank formations. The resulting mix of still-enthusiastic seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds with still- crafty old hands proved as effective as it usually does in war. Success was enhanced as well by the Tiger’s high survivability rate. Not only did displaced crews usually live to fight again; they were likely to regard the loss of their vehicle as an accident rather than a certainty waiting to happen. That sharp contrast to the men who took Shermans and Cromwells into action after D-Day did much to sustain morale and effectiveness in Tiger battalions throughout the war.

Like their British predecessors in 1916, the Tigers were initially fed into combat on small scales. One battalion went to Leningrad in August 1942 to shore up a front eroding under steady Russian pressure. A second was dispatched to Tunisia in November as a response to the Allied invasion. The third, Heavy Tank Battalion 503, was assigned to Army Group Don in December 1942. It made its bones in a series of rearguard actions and small-scale counterattacks that reduced it to two operating Tigers by the time it was withdrawn in late February. In two months, however, the 503rd accounted for more than 70 Soviet tanks and 55 antitank guns for the combat loss of only three Tigers—a kill ratio that more than compensated for maintenance problems resulting more from enemy fire than mechanical defects. As for mobility, one company covered more than 65 miles in ten and a half hours with no breakdowns—an impressive achievement for a complex vehicle with limited field testing.

If the Tiger seemed immediately promising, the same could not be said for its intended stablemate. As early as 1938, the Weapons Office had begun considering replacements for the Panzer III and IV: something along the same lines, in the 20-ton category with improved armor, armament, and chassis. A few prototypes were developed in leisurely fashion through 1940. Its priority remained low in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, when the Russian heavy tanks appeared sporadically. That began to change as the campaign progressed. In particular the T-34 was impossible to ignore. Its gun could take out Panzer IIIs and IVs at more than a thousand yards—ten times the effective range of the German tanks against the T-34’s comprehensively well-sloped armor. The Soviet vehicle’s mobility over mud, swamp, and dirt roads was no less impressive.

On October 5, 1941, Guderian’s 4th Panzer Division encountered a brigade of T-34s. Not only were the Germans stopped cold; for the first time in a head-to-head fight at even odds, their losses were significantly greater. Well before that oft-cited day, however, it was clear in the panzers that besides upgrading and upgunning an entirely new weapons system, it was necessary to sustain the synergy of technical and human superiority on which their effectiveness depended. Continuing to rely on crew expertise and command skill to compensate for inferior equipment created an ultimately unsustainable imbalance in a military/political system structurally vulnerable to attrition and overextension.

Guderian had something his colleagues lacked: enough influence to demand an inquiry. In late November 1941, a commission of officers and civilian designers toured the combat zone, examined derelict T-34s, and evaluated the situation. Guderian recommended copying the T-34—not literally through reverse engineering but by imitating the essentials. The Weapons Office replied by citing the problem of producing diesel engines, and by making the point that copying what existed gave the Soviets an automatic lead for the next generation. On returning to Berlin, the commission issued contracts to Daimler-Benz and MAN for a 30-ton tank with a difference.

When the prototypes were completed Hitler favored a Daimler version resembling the T-34. The Weapons Office supported MAN, in good part because of a larger turret ring. The soldiers won politically and technically. Working on the Tiger, Rheinmetall had sought to balance the army’s wish for a relatively light main armament and Hitler’s insistence on maximum hitting power. The eventual result was a 75mm L/70 piece developed too late for the Tigers, but mounted on the MAN chassis just in time to give the Panther the most ballistically effective tank gun of World War II.

Preproduction was authorized in May 1942; the first of what were eventually designated Panther Model D reached the proving grounds in November. Apart from the predictable teething troubles, two fundamental issues emerged. One was protection. The Panther’s well-sloped frontal armor was 80mm on the hull and 100mm on the turret. This was a substantial improvement over the Panzer III and IV, but would it suffice against the weapons likely to be introduced as a counter? That increase, moreover, was at the expense of side armor not much better than the Panzer IV. The Panther’s other problem was the engine. The tank weighed 45 tons. Its Maybach 230 engine delivered a power-to-weight ratio of 15.5 horsepower per ton: lower than its panzer predecessors, lower than the T-34, and low enough to seriously strain the entire drive system.

One difficulty sustained the other. The Panther D’s already overstrained engine could not take the additional strain of up-armoring. As a result the tanks were disproportionately vulnerable to a flank shot. On the other hand, the cadres and crews of a Panther battalion were expected to avert or solve that kind of tactical problem, especially since the new vehicles were expected to be assigned to existing, experienced battalions. “Not perfect, but good enough” was a verdict rendered in the developing crisis of the Eastern Front. Serial Panther production was authorized in November 1942, with a projected delivery of 250 delivered by May 1943 and a projected deployment of a battalion in each panzer division, replacing Panzer IVs.

As a stopgap measure pending the Panthers’ design, production, and delivery, Guderian’s commission had recommended upgrading the army’s assault guns. About 120 of the Model IIIF with a 75mm L/43 had entered service in 1942, prefiguring the assault gun’s development from an infantry support vehicle into a tank destroyer. As a rule of thumb, the longer a gun, the less effective its high-explosive round. From the infantry’s perspective, however, the tradeoff was acceptable, and the Sturmgeschütz IIIG was even more welcome because of its 75mm L/48 main armament. The effective range of this adapted Pak 43 was more than 7,000 feet. It could penetrate almost 100mm of 30-degree sloped armor at half that distance. The IIIG took the original assault gun design to the peak of its development by retaining the low silhouette and improving frontal armor to 80mm by bolting on extra plates, all within a weight of less than 25 tons. The family was completed, ideally at least, with the addition of a 105mm howitzer version in one of the battalion’s three ten-gun batteries to sustain the infantry support role.

The one-time redheaded stepchild of the armored force now had a place at the head table. There had been 19 independent assault gun battalions in May 1941. In 1943 that number would double. Constantly shifted among infantry commands, their loyalty was to no larger formation. Continuously in action, they developed a wealth of specialized battle experience that led infantry officers to follow the assault gunners’ lead when it came to destroying tanks and mounting counterattacks. Assault guns cost less than tanks. Lacking complex revolving turrets, they were easier to manufacture, and correspondingly attractive in an armaments industry whose workforce skill and will were declining with the addition of more and more foreign and forced labor and the repeated combouts of Germans destined for the Wehrmacht.

Meanwhile, tank production was in the doldrums. The Panzer III was so clearly obsolete as a battle tank that its assembly lines had been converted to providing chassis for assault guns. By October 1942, production of the Panzer IV was down to 100 a month. The General Staff recommended a leap in the dark: canceling Panzer IVs and concentrating exclusively on Panthers and Tigers. Previous outsiders like Porsche, and a new generation of subcontractors turning out assault guns, were jostling and challenging established firms. But the German automotive industry, managers and engineers alike, had from its inception been labor-intensive and conservative in its approaches to production. As late as 1925 the US Ford Motor Company needed the equivalent of five and three-quarters days’ labor by a single worker to produce a car. Daimler needed 1,750 worker days to construct one of its top-line models. When it came to design, focus was on the top end of the market and emphasis was on customizing as far as possible by multiplying variants. It was a far cry from Henry Ford’s philosophy that customers could have any color they wanted as long as it was black.

For their part, the civilian tank designers were disproportionately intrigued by the technical challenges Panthers and Tigers offered. They took apparent delight in solving engineering problems in ways that in turn stretched unit mechanics to limits often developed originally in village blacksmith shops.

One might suggest that by 1942 a negative synergy was developing between an armored force and an automobile industry, each in its own way dedicated to an elite ethos and incorporating an elite self image. The designers were correspondingly susceptible to the dabblings of Adolf Hitler. Previously, his direct involvement in the issue had been limited, his demands negotiable, his recommendations and suggestions reasonable. The Hornet, for example, combined the Hummel’s armored open-topped superstructure with the 88mm L/71 gun Hitler had wanted for the Tiger. The vehicle’s bulky chassis made it too much of a target to render feasible stalking tanks in the fashion of the Marder and the assault guns. But its long-range, high-velocity gun was welcome to the half dozen independent heavy antitank battalions that absorbed most of the 500 Hornets first introduced in 1943.

The Ferdinand, later called the Elephant, was a waste-not/want-not response to the Porsche drives and hulls prepared in anticipation of the Tiger contract that went to Henschel. Hitler saw them as ideal mounts for a heavily armored tank destroyer mounting the same 88mm gun as the Hornet. Ninety were rushed into production in spring 1943 and organized into an independent panzer regiment. Without rotating turrets, at best they were Tigers manqué, with all the teething troubles and maintenance problems accompanying the type and no significant advantages. At 65 tons, any differences in height were immaterial. And the omission of close-defense machine guns as unnecessary would too often prove fatal for vehicles whose sheer size made them targets for every antitank weapon in the Red Army’s substantial inventory when they were sent into action at Kursk.

The Hornet and the Elephant were mere preliminaries. Since adolescence the Führer had liked his architecture grandiose, his music molto pomposo, and his cars high-powered. In June 1942, he authorized Ferdinand Porsche to develop a super-heavy tank: the Maus (“Mouse”—and yes, the name was ironic). The vehicle carried almost ten inches of frontal armor, mounted a six-inch gun whose rounds weighed more than 150 pounds each, and weighed 188 tons. Its road speed was given as 12.5 miles per hour—presumably downhill with a tail wind. It took more than a year to complete two prototypes. To apply a famous line from the classic board game PanzerBlitz, “The only natural enemies of the Maus were small mammals that ate the eggs.”

The complete worthlessness of the Maus as a fighting vehicle in the context of World War II needs no elaboration. Neither does the total waste of material resources and engineering skill devoted to the project. The Maus was nevertheless a signifier for Germany’s panzer force during the rest of the war. Apart from its direct support by Hitler, the Maus opened the door to a comprehensive emphasis on technical virtuosity for its own sake, in near-abstraction from field requirements. The resulting increases in size at the expense of mobility and reliability were secondary consequences, reflecting the contemporary state of automotive, armor, and gun design. After 1943, German technicians turned from engineering to alchemy, searching for a philosopher’s stone that would bring a technical solution to the armored force’s operational problems. Hubris, idealism—or another example of the mixture of both that characterized so many aspects of the Third Reich’s final years?

The Maus thread, however, takes the story a few months ahead of itself. Its antecedent combination of institutional infighting, production imbroglios, and declining combat power led an increasing number of Hitler’s military entourage to urge the appointment of a plenipotentiary troubleshooter—specifically Heinz Guderian. Guderian describes meeting privately on February 20, 1943, with a chastened Führer who regretted their “numerous misunderstandings.” Guderian set his terms. Hitler temporized. He was given the appointment of Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, reporting directly to Hitler; with inspection rights over armored units in the Luftwaffe and the Waffen SS, and control of organization, doctrine, training, and replacement. That was a lot of power in the hands of one officer.

There was also a back story. Guderian had spent most of 1942 restoring his stress-shaken health, which centered on heart problems, and looking for an estate suitable to his status, to be purchased with the cash grant of a million and a quarter marks Hitler awarded him in the spring of 1942. Norman Goda establishes in scathing detail that once Guderian became a landed gentleman on an estate stolen from its Polish owners, his reservations about Hitler as supreme warlord significantly diminished. Cash payments, often many times a salary and pension, were made to a broad spectrum of officers and civilians in the Third Reich—birthdays were a typical justification. Since August 1940, Guderian had been receiving, tax-free, 2,000 Reichsmarks a month—as much as his regular salary. Similar lavish gifts were so widely made to senior officers that Gerhard Weinberg cites simple bribery as a possible factor in sustaining the army’s cohesion in the war’s final stages.

The image of an evil regime’s uniformed servants proclaiming their “soldierly honor” while simultaneously being bought and paid for is so compelling that attempting its nuancing invites charges of revisionism. Nevertheless there were contexts. A kept woman is not compensated in the same fashion as a streetwalker. Dotation, douceur, “golden parachute,” hush money, conscience money, or bribe—direct financial rec ognitions of services rendered the Reich were too common to be exactly a state secret. Guderian and his military colleagues were more than sufficiently egoistic to rationalize the cash as earned income, as recognition of achievement and sacrifice in the way that milk and apples are necessary to the health of the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

The appointment Hitler signed on February 28, 1943, ostensibly gave Guderian what he requested. But lest any doubt might remain as to who was in charge, only the heavy assault guns, still in development stages, came under Guderian’s command. The rest, whose importance was increasing by the week, remained with the artillery. It was a relatively small thing. But Guderian’s complaint that “somebody” played a “trick” on him belies his own shrewd intelligence and low cunning. The desirability of trust between the head of state and the general in such a central position was overshadowed in Hitler’s mind by Lenin’s question: “Kto, kogo?” (Who, whom?): the question of who was to be master. Guderian had spent a year in the wilderness. Now he was back on top. Omitting the assault guns was a reminder that what had been given could be withdrawn at a chieftain’s whim. It might well make even a principled man think twice before deciding and thrice before speaking. And Hitler’s army was increasingly commanded by pragmatists.

From the Führer’s perspective, Guderian’s appointment was one of the heaviest blows he had struck against the High Command. The ground forces’ key element, the panzers, were now under his personal authority—at one remove, to be sure, but Guderian was the kind of person whose ego and energy would focus him on the job at hand, and whose temperament was certain to lead to the same kinds of personal and jurisdictional clashes that had characterized his early career. Hitler would have all the opportunities he needed either to muddy the waters or to resolve controversies, as circumstances indicated.

VI

NINETEEN FORTY-TWO MARKED the end of Hitler’s panzers as originally conceived and configured. For the rest of the war, the army’s armored force plateaued, then declined—not only absolutely but relative to a counterpart and a rival, a battle companion and a partner in the Third Reich’s crimes. The Waffen SS made its first appearance at stage center in the aftermath of Stalingrad. Previously its formations had served individually. Now it was an SS Panzer Corps that retook Kharkov in March, anchoring Manstein’s counterattack to the Donets with a combination of maneuver engagements recalling Barbarossa at its best, and close-gripped street fighting suggesting Stalingrad in reverse. The campaign’s price was almost 12,000 SS men killed or wounded. And if Russian prisoners and civilians were regularly shot out of hand, if several hundred wounded Red Army soldiers were murdered when the SS overran a Kharkov hospital—victory has its price, and Manstein was not especially squeamish.

An overjoyed Hitler declared the SS Panzer Corps to be worth 20 Italian divisions, and ordered that it be given priority in personnel and equipment—including the latest tanks. The discontent that last caused in the army was balanced by a sense, albeit sometimes grudging, that the men who wore the lightning runes had the right stuff for what the panzers knew was a coming showdown battle for control of the Eastern Front.

The Waffen SS has been described in terms ranging from “soldiers like the rest” to a criminal institution distinguished even in the Third Reich for ideologically based bestiality. It is unrivaled in the spectrum and intensity of the attention lavished on it. Not merely SS divisions but regiments and battalions have their own English-language histories. Waffen SS military reenactors exist in Britain and the US, carefully proclaiming their nonpolitical, non-revisionist ethos on websites whose constructions nevertheless often resemble—too closely for comfort—throwbacks to purported glory days on the Russian Front.

Simple anti-Communism has never contributed much to the enduring fascination with the Waffen SS. More relevant is the underlying and uncomfortable question whether criminality is a component of military effectiveness. Another element involves taboo-breaking. In a Western culture where traditional masculine values are increasingly downgraded when not denigrated, there can be a certain appeal in the men who—in mythic terms at least—lived large, accepting neither boundaries nor limitations, staking everything on the iron dice of battle for themselves and their comrades.

Those kinds of subtexts guarantee controversy. A historiography of the Waffen SS is a book by itself; a study of its images a second; and an analysis of its fascination a third. All three, however, begin at the same point: the focal point of this work. The identity of the Waffen SS is constructed around its panzer divisions. They established a legitimate reputation as some of the most formidable combat formations in the brief history of armored war. Waffen SS soldiers learned tactical and technical skills quickly. Waffen SS officers combined a charismatic fearlessness and an aggressive, opportunistic approach to command that together focused an esprit de corps able to overcome heavy odds and survive high casualties.

Waffen SS achievements involved more than iron discipline and battlefield ferocity, more than often-cited superior weaponry allegedly obtained at the army’s expense. F. Scott Fitzgerald speaks of a whole-souled emotional equipment as necessary in modern war. The Waffen SS ethos was a blend of vitalism and racism—culturally, ideologically, and institutionally based—that nurtured and synergized conscious ruthlessness and conscious brutality, each an integral element of Waffen SS fighting power. That fighting power in turn manifested the inseparability of war and racism in Nazi Germay. One was the other, and the Waffen SS epitomized both.

The Waffen SS grew out of the Schutzstaffel (security force) created in 1925 to protect Nazi Party meetings and senior cadres. From its beginnings the SS was a party instrument rather than a paramilitary force of the kind otherwise familiar in Weimar Germany. Its loyalty was personal, to Hitler himself, and inspired his creation after the seizure of power in 1933 of the regiment-sized Leibstandarte (bodyguard). Its title suggests its function: to secure the regime against a coup. Created at the same time was a second armed element: the Totenkopf (Death’s Head) units guarding the concentration camps. A year later a number of gun-carrying local leg-breakers called Political Emergency Readiness Formations were combined into three regiments of Verfügungstruppen (special service troops) equipped, like the Leibstandarte, as motorized infantry.

This was scarcely a promising matrix for expansion—especially given Hitler’s simultaneous emphasis on the “Two Pillars Theory” hailing the Wehrmacht as the Third Reich’s sole “bearer of arms.” SS chief Heinrich Himmler combined the zeal of an ideologue and the soul of a bureaucrat. His response, echoed by Hitler, usually spoke of the SS as National Socialism’s ideological soldiers: a party force, limited in size and focused in purpose, which was nevertheless honored to serve alongside the army in the field.

The explanation was fairly transparent, especially when volunteer enlistment in any of the SS armed branches became an alternate form of military service. But there were not that many of them relative to a rapidly expanding army. Compromise seemed reasonable in the context of all the other compromises the soldiers were making with the New Order. Besides, four extra motorized regiments might prove a useful addition to a mobile force at best none too large for its projected mission.

Nothing, moreover, indicated that the effectiveness of the armed SS would transcend its numbers. Himmler’s vision aspired to a new human type, able to serve as a model and an instrument for revitalizing the Nordic race. It was a vision readily marketable among the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service in the early years, when the Reich was still an empire of dreams, when the General SS attracted doctors, attorneys, and businessmen—and when the black uniform was still fresh and new. The Leibstandarte in particular looked elegant. Its close-order drill was unmatched even by Grossdeutschland. Its men were handsome: not a pair of glasses in the ranks, at least on parade.

But could these “asphalt soldiers” fight? The SS officer corps at this stage was a mixed bag of ideologues seeking to serve the Reich, opportunists seeking quick promotion, and second-tier transfers the army was not eager to retain. There were some exceptions. Paul Hausser was a retired army major general who justified his advancement in the SS by professional competence as a trainer and commander. Felix Steiner transferred in as a major because he admired SS ideas of training. But most of the men who rose from commanding companies and battalions to leading divisions and corps by 1945 did it in what came to be understood as the SS way: headlong energy and ruthless, never-say-die aggressiveness. SS doctrine emphasized speed and ferocity. SS training stressed physical toughness and incorporated risk to an extent surpassing the army.

From the beginning Himmler was determined to develop an officer corps fundamentally different from its army counterpart. Once the cadres of transfers were in place, Waffen SS officer candidates were required to spend time in the ranks—two years initially, less as the war progressed. Only after that enlisted service were they eligible for the Junkerschulen, the special officer training schools, the best known—or most notorious—being Bad Tölz. The curriculum, ironically, included extensive instruction in table etiquette and similar bourgeois social graces. This reflected the fact that a higher proportion of SS officers were from lower social strata than their army counterparts. It reflected as well Himmler’s determination that his personal armed force would stand out in every particular.

Hausser, Steiner, and their senior-officer counterparts also stressed breaking down the hierarchic rank stuctures still considered characteristic of the army. Officers and noncommissioned officers were encouraged to get to know their men, to participate in team games. In the field, rations and facilities were essentially the same—at least at company and battalion levels. “Pulling rank” off-duty was strongly discouraged. In principle, any Waffen SS man could request of another, from corporal to general, to “speak with you as a comrade,” and that request would be honored.

The army’s collective reservations regarding SS military effectiveness nevertheless seemed justified by the Polish campaign. Exchanging SS black for army field gray, done on the outbreak of war, did not transform party activists to German soldiers. Lectures on Nordic racial superiority and the world mission of the Third Reich were no substitute for a sense of terrain. Heedless—and brainless—valor was a quick ticket to a mass grave. Employed by regiments under army command, the SS distinguished itself by disproportionately high casualties, by junior officers who knew how to lead but not command; and by majors and colonels baffled by situations that required solutions more sophisticated than a headlong assault. The High Command also found SS units prone to commit atrocities against Poles and Jews more systematically, more publicly, and on a larger scale than the army was willing to stomach—yet.

The SS response was standard military alibi: high-risk missions, inadequate equipment, misuse by unsympathetic generals. Supported by Hitler, Himmler took steps to bring the armed formations together as the Waffen SS, to form the three Verfügungs regiments into a motorized division, and to form another three-regiment motorized division around a cadre of concentration camp guards. The Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division was well named. Its commander, Theodor Eicke, was a protégé of Himmler’s whose motto was “tolerance is weakness.” He had been committed briefly to a mental hospital by a Party superior. He encouraged contempt for “military” virtues and behavior among the men he supervised as Inspector of Concentration Camps. But as a division commander Eicke had his points. He made his men obey superiors, focused their camp-conditioned viciousness with a spectacularly demanding training program, and used his connections to scrounge modern equipment for the collection of thugs and aspiring thugs who called him “Pop.”

It must be noted that the often-cited distinction between the Waffen SS and the concentration camp system existed only in the minds of apologists. Throughout the war, exchanges took place between camp personnel and field units, usually on the basis of physical fitness.

From the Leibstandarte the Waffen SS drew an identity as the Führer’s personal elite. The Verfügungstruppen contributed a willingness to learn soldiering from the professionals. Totenkopf emphasized ferocity for the fun of it. In the 1940 campaign the latter tendency predominated. Under orders, elements of Leibstandarte and Totenkopf carried out large-scale massacres of British POWs; in the Totenkopf, it was standard procedure to give no quarter to French black troops. Operational effectiveness was another matter. During the fight for Holland, Leibstandarte added a German general to its bag by severely wounding Kurt Student when some of its men opened fire on what turned out to be surrender negotiations. In a campaign otherwise characterized by low German casualties Verfügungsdivision was manhandled twice: by the British in front of Dunkirk and again at the Aire River on June 7 during the final attack on France.

Hitler nevertheless had no problems with expanding and upgrading the Party’s army. Leibstandarte received enough new bells and whistles, including its own reconnaissance battalion and a full battalion of assault guns, to be redesignated a division. Verfügungsdivision got a new title: Das Reich. The major institutional development of the Waffen SS, however, was external. Volunteers for the Waffen SS were still ample, but the army controlled the supply through a regulation that no one registered for conscription could volunteer for any form of service until his local military district approved. With available manpower increasingly stretched between the Wehrmacht and industry, the kind of high-quality recruits demanded by the Waffen SS were an increasing source of friction well before preparations for Barbarossa got underway.

Gottlob Berger, in charge of SS recruitment since 1938, initially responded to the army’s barriers by turning to the ethnic German communities still not called “home to the Reich.” Several thousand volunteered, especially from Romania. Even before the overrunning of Western Europe, Berger proposed the enlistment of volunteers from racially suitable non-German sources. Himmler was not merely receptive but enthusiastic. He saw a future that would begin with a European crusade against Bolshevism and end with a Germania extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Waffen SS would be at the forefront of this effort, eventually developing into a multinational force that would not merely supplant the Wehrmacht but transcend it.

In the summer of 1940 the SS began soliciting volunteers from Germany’s “Nordic” conquests: Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgian Flemings. In September, Hitler, despite reluctance to provoke an army that was also recruiting in the conquered territories, authorized a new SS division. Built around an experienced Verfügungs regiment, it would include a Regiment Westland drawn from Belgium and the Netherlands, and a Scandinavian Regiment Nordland. Hitler christened it the Viking Division and authorized its organization as a motorized division.

The Viking Division generated as many myths and legends as any German formation of the Second World War. Foremost is its enduring image as a body of blond, blue-eyed, six-foot Scandinavians: berserkers. In fact, Viking from its inception had more Germans than “Nordics” in its ranks—more than 90 percent. In January 1942, an SS survey listed the number of Finns, Norwegians, and Danes at around 5,500, not all of them serving in Viking. Yet its non-Germans gave Viking a particular ambience, one that endured when most of the originals were dead or in hospitals.

The Viking Division’s motivations have been endlessly debated. It is reasonable to suggest that most recruits, like most human beings generally, were motivated by combinations of factors whose respective influence was constantly changing. Some were proto-Europeans and some anti-Communists. Some saw German Europe as a given and wished to make their way in the new world. Others were indigenous fascists, encouraged or pressured by local movements seeking to curry influence. More volunteers than might be expected were motivated by economic considerations exacerbated by conquest and occupation. And a good many are best described as adventurers. The Low Countries and Scan dinavia had worked assiduously during the twentieth century to create societies congenial to slightly overweight men with briefcases. They offered little scope and less encouragement to the kind of large living suggested by the SS. Boredom can be as good a recruiting sergeant as hunger.

Whatever their motivations, the “Nordics” provided the seedbed of the division’s professionalism. Unlike some of their counterparts in the German army’s European “legions,” Viking’s men had generally enlisted as individuals. Even when ideologically based, the volunteers’ motives seldom included the genocidal racism at the heart of the German SS. Their cadres, mostly from the Verfügungsdivision, were more concerned with making them battle-ready than with their ideological development. The Germans who filled out Viking’s ranks in good part acculturated to the foreigners—not least, as one old hand reminisced, because their exotic aura helped pick up girls.

Its variant identity did not make Viking anything but an SS division. During service entirely on the Eastern Front, the men whose shoulder patch was a stylized longship acquired and preserved a reputation as not being freely given to the large-scale, gratuitous ferocity characteristic of their fellows. That of course did not avert shooting Jews on what admittedly by SS standards were limited numbers: a few hundred here and a few hundred somewhere else, usually justified as “reprisals” and underwritten by an internal order that Jew-killing was not a punishable offense.

Leibstandarte and Das Reich served in the Balkan campaign, enhancing the Waffen SS reputation for aggressiveness and arrogance. An officer of Das Reich at the head of a dozen men was able to bluff the mayor of Belgrade into suspending resistance until it was too late. When some men of the Leibstandarte hesitated to advance against a Greek position, their battalion commander, himself in the front line, got them moving by throwing a grenade at them. “It’s not bragging when you back it up.” And if the army as an institution still found the Waffen SS as a concept unpleasant to swallow, its four motorized divisions on the ground looked better and better as Barbarossa’s orders of battle were finalized.

In June 1941, the Waffen SS remained firmly under the army’s organizational thumb. Leibstandarte and Viking went with Army Group South, Das Reich with Center, and Totenkopf with North. Hoepner kept the Skulls in supporting roles. Mopping up stragglers and maintaining contact with Bock’s left flank, the division took heavy casualties as it fought toward Leningrad through the forests and swamps.

Das Reich was initially not even allocated road space by Army Group Center, but when it found a way to the front it played a crucial role in the late July fighting around Yelna. One of its staff officers used the division’s last reserve, its pioneer battalion, to stop a major Soviet breakthrough. The corps report singles out the SS riflemen for “fearlessness and bravery,” swarming over heavy tanks to set them afire with gasoline when the antitank guns proved useless. And the casualty records show Das Reich took almost three times the losses of 10th Panzer Division, which fought alongside it.

That pattern persisted throughout the drive for Moscow. As part of Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, Das Reich fought to within sight of Moscow, then was caught in the Soviet counterattack and hammered so badly its effective remnants were organized into a battle group and the remaining survivors sent all the way to France for rest and refitting. Not for a year would it return to the east, and to a new emergency.

Leibstandarte was also held in the wings during Barbarossa’s early stages. It was a week before it joined III Panzer Corps, then XLVII Panzer Corps, for the drive into the Ukraine. Leibstandarte had always been the best of the Waffen SS formations, and it sustained that reputation both in the attack and while fending off Soviet counterattacks. It got as far as the Black Sea before turning north in November 1941 and rejoining III Panzer Corps to play a key part in capturing the city of Rostov. A Leibstandarte rifle company set up the victory by capturing a vital railway bridge before it could be blown. Its quick-thinking CO ordered his men to shoot up a locomotive and stormed across under cover of the clouds of steam.

That was the kind of warrior performance that inspired Mackensen to inform Himmler that every unit wanted to have Leibstandarte on its flank in a tight spot. And if the “toughness” Mackensen praised manifested itself occasionally in the mass shooting of Soviet prisoners—as many as 4,000 in a single incident, according to one allegation—the usual explanation was that the shootings were reprisals for the murder and mutilation of captured SS men. It was a fig leaf, but it camouflaged what the army understood to be a negotiable trade for SS “discipline, eagerness, and enthusiasm.”

Soviet counterattacks drove the Germans out of Rostov and inflicted heavy casualties. By the turn of the year, more than half Leibstandarte’s originals were dead or wounded. The replacement pool was almost exhausted; Soviet counterattacks so reduced its fighting power that Leibstandarte was not considered for Operation Blue. Instead it was withdrawn to France in June for refitting—and assignment to the newly forming SS Panzer Corps.

Viking saw its first action fighting for Tarnopol in Galicia, then shifted south across the Dnieper and served alongside Leibstandarte in the capture and loss of Rostov. Viking also held the line in the Ukraine during a winter of counterattacks. Unlike Leibstandarte, Viking was not favored with reassignment to France. Instead, replenished and reequipped on the ground, it received its own tank battalion and proved a key to the successes of 1st Panzer Army during its drive into the Caucasus. Viking crossed the Kuban Steppe in hundred-degree temperatures, fought into Grozny as the oilfields burned, sent spearheads toward Astrakhan, and won consistent praise from the panzer corps to which it was assigned.

By no means was all of this flattery aimed at Himmler by uniformed politicians. Retitled “panzer grenadier” in October 1941, Viking increasingly assumed the role of a panzer division in a theater where armor was scarce and distances wide. Half its 50 tanks were Panzer IIIs, and its officers made up for the relative lack of armor with by-now predictable aggressive tactics that earned the grudging respect of the Soviets. Steiner proved a clear-eyed general as well as a hard-driving commander. As early as mid-September he reported to his SS superiors that Hitler’s directive was impossible: the Caucasus could not be crossed before winter set in.

If Viking was at one end of the Waffen SS approach to war-making, Totenkopf set new standards at the other. The Skulls were one of the half dozen divisions and 100,000 men trapped in what came to be known as the Demyansk Pocket by the Soviet Northwest Front’s massive offensive of February 1942. When terrain, weather, and command arteriosclerosis put an end to the operation, Demyansk remained, attacked repeatedly by a total of five Soviet armies, and kept minimally supplied by air. And by all accounts and admissions, Totenkopf was the backbone of the defense. Combining with army troops or fighting on their own, the SS men held nothing back. Eicke’s pathological ferocity focused a spirit of “no quarter, no surrender” that rendered four-fifths of the division casualties by the time the pocket was relieved in April.

Not many of the original concentration camp guards remained when Totenkopf’s remnants joined Leibstandarte and Das Reich in France. By this time the occupied zone was developing into a rest and refit area for divisions burned out in Russia. “To live like God in France” is a familiar German proverb, and the SS survivors took full advantages of the opportunities provided in a society still complaisant, if not enthusiastic, about its situation. It was not all down time. The SS divisions were reconfigured and upgraded to panzer grenadier status. The title was another fig leaf to keep the army quiet. While not officially renamed until October 1943, all three were full- fledged panzer divisions where it counted, with, thanks to the lobbying of Himmler and Hauser, two-battalion tank regiments, at least a battalion on infantry in half-tracks, and—eventually—a company of Tigers.

This upgrading was a major step in an anomaly. The Waffen SS was the only large-scale high-tech elite force fielded by any army during World War II. The special forces, rangers, raiders, and commandos, the paratroopers, even the US Marines, depended to varying degrees on the quality of their personnel to compensate for a lack of the hitting power sacrificed to mobility and flexibility. The Red Army’s guards units were upgraded to recognize combat performance. Only the Waffen SS—and only its best divisions—combined physical, ideological, and material elements to the same degree.

With their generous allowances of supporting weapons, the divisions’ authorized strengths grew to more than 20,000—a sharp contrast to the army, whose divisional strengths were being steadily reduced to cope with diminishing manpower. There were certain costs involved. The reinforcements’ standards of training were generally described as low. For the first time, even Leibstandarte was constrained to accept men born outside the Reich but “German” by official standards of racial descent—which, in passing, grew increasingly flexible as the war continued. A living link with the worst aspects of the Waffen SS also returned to its ranks when Eicke, recovered from his wounds, resumed command of Totenkopf. Its men welcomed him like a returning father.

Hitler had first authorized an SS Panzer Corps in May 1942, strongly against army wishes. Its commander was Paul Hausser, recovered from a wound that cost him an eye, and supremely confident that his corps was just the instrument needed to restore the situation and turn the tide in the east. Redeployed east in January 1943, it played a crucial role in Manstein’s offensive. Hausser, the “lowly corps commander” mentioned above, may well have averted a second Stalingrad by defying Hitler’s initial order to hold Kharkov. His men paid for the city’s recapture with more than 12,000 casualties. Leibstandarte’s fighting strength was reduced by almost half, the city square was renamed in its honor, and its men were accused postwar of clearing a hospital by the simple expedient of shooting its 700 patients. Das Reich also took heavy losses in the city’s industrial zone, and according to one of its captains, had the subsequent pleasure of showing the ladies “who the real men were” in Kharkov. The Skulls lost their CO when Eicke’s light plane was shot down between the lines on February 23, 1943—and took more losses recovering the body. Manstein received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, and came away with a different attitude toward the men in black who had helped hang it around his neck. The Waffen SS would be front and center in the next German offensive.