It was now, almost too late, that the German High Command began to urgently request new tanks with superior armour and more effective guns, to combat the KV-1 and T-34. This report, from a unit of Panzer Group IV facing the KV-1 for the first time, gives a clear indication of just how unprepared the German forces were when faced with the new breed of Russian armour:
“The Russian armoured force played only a subordinate role at the beginning of the war. In the advance of 1941, our troops encountered only small units which supported the infantry in the same manner as our own self-propelled assault guns. The Russian tanks operated in a very clumsy manner and were quickly eliminated by our anti-tank weapons. The Russians carried out counter¬attacks with large tank forces, either alone or in combined operations with other arms, only at individual, important sectors.
On 23rd June 1942 our 4th Panzer Group, after a thrust from East Prussia, had readied the Dubysa and had formed several bridgeheads. The defeated enemy infantry units scattered into the extensive forests and high grain fields, where they constituted a threat to our supply lines. As early as 25th June the Russians launched a surprise counter-attack on the southern bridgehead in the direction of Raseiniai with their hastily brought-up XIV Tank Corps. They overpowered the 6th Motorcycle Battalion which was committed in the bridgehead, took the bridge, and pushed on in the direction of the city. Our 114th Armoured Infantry Regiment, reinforced by two artillery battalions and 100 tanks, was immediately put into action and stopped the main body of enemy forces. Then there suddenly appeared, for the first time, a battalion of heavy enemy tanks of a previously unknown type. The tanks overran the armoured infantry regiment and broke through into the artillery position. The projectiles of all defence weapons (except the 88mm flak) bounced off the thick enemy armour.
The one hundred German tanks were unable to check the 20 Russian Dreadnoughts, and suffered losses. Several Czech-built tanks of the type 35(t) which had bogged down in the grain fields because of mechanical trouble, were flattened by the enemy monsters. The same fate befell a 150mm medium howitzer battery which kept on firing until the last minute. Despite the fact that it scored numerous direct hits from as close a range as 200 yards, its heavy shells were unable to put even a single tank out of action. The situation became critical. Only the 88mm flak finally knocked out a few of the Russian KV-1s and force the others to withdraw into the woods.
One of the KV-1s even managed to reach the only supply route of our task force located in the northern bridgehead, and blocked it for several days. The first unsuspecting trucks to arrive with supplies were immediately shot afire by the tank.
There were practically no means of eliminating the monster. It was impossible to bypass it because of the swampy surrounding terrain. Neither supplies nor ammunition could be brought up. The severely wounded could not be removed to the hospital for the necessary operations, so they died. The attempt to put the tank out of action with the 50mm anti-tank gun battery, which had just been introduced at that time, at a range of 500 yards, ended with heavy losses to crews and equipment of the battery. The tank remained undamaged in spite of the fact that, as was later determined, it got fourteen direct hits. These merely produced blue spots on its armour. When a camouflaged 88mm flak gun was brought up, the tank calmly permitted it to be put into position at a distance of 700 yards, and then smashed it and its crew before it was even ready to fire. The attempt of engineers to blow it up at night likewise proved abortive. To be sure, the engineers managed to get to the tank after midnight, and laid the prescribed demolition charge under the caterpillar tracks. The charge went off according to plan, but was insufficient for the oversized tracks. Pieces were broken off the tracks, but the tank remained mobile and continued to molest the rear of the front and to block all supplies. At first it received supplies at night from scattered Russian groups and civilians, but we later prevented this procedure by blocking off the surrounding area. However, even this isolation did not induce it to give up its favourable position. It finally became the victim of a ruse. Fifty tanks were ordered to feign an attack from three sides and to fire on it so as to draw all of its attention in those directions. Under the protection of this feint it was possible to set up and camouflage another 88mm flak gun to the rear of the tank, so that this time it actually was able to fire. Of the 12 direct hits scored by this medium gun, three pierced the tank and destroyed it.”
To combat the KV-1 and the T-34 a new heavy tank was needed urgently, but, in the form of the Tiger, it wouldn’t be available for at least a year.
To further compound matters, mistaken assessments based on experience in France, had led to even the heaviest German tank, the Mark IV, still being equipped with the short barrelled 75mm guns which were developed for the infantry support role. While Germany scrambled to produce the new heavy tanks, the Mk IVs were urgently re-equipped with long barrelled 75mm guns which gave them the high velocity which was required to deal with the T-34. Extra welded steel skirts were also added as defence against the new Russian hollow charged weapons.
Measures like these helped to keep up the momentum of the German advance in 1942 but, all the while, the Panzer Divisions were increasingly hard pressed by the growing numbers of T-34s and KV1s. Guderian himself, in November 1941, ran into a T-34 ambush and he witnessed his force being completely destroyed. It was then that the Germans began to realise they were up against something which they had not counted on.
In the German Reich it was felt that the deadly 88mm anti-tank gun was the ideal weapon for the task of destroying the hordes of T-34s. But the ‘88’ was originally designed as an anti-aircraft gun. It was very large and not designed to be carried in the turret of a tank. What the Germans now needed was a tank big enough to house such a gun and well armoured enough to withstand the punishment which it would receive on the battlefield. It would take time to develop such a machine and, in 1941, one stop-gap measure was to increase the production of assault guns in the form of the Sturmgeschütze, which utilised the Panzer in chassis and now also carried a high velocity 75mm gun.
There were two big advantages to the Sturmgeschütze. Firstly they were quicker and cheaper to produce, and secondly, they could actually fit a far larger gun than could normally be fitted into the turret of the Panzer III. The disadvantage, of course, was that the
Sturmgeschütze would never be as effective in open battle as the Russian tanks. It had no turret to swing round, and to fire in a different direction meant moving the whole vehicle round.
In 1941 the puny 50mm gun was still the standard anti-tank armament for German Panzer III tanks. The experience of tank ace Herman Bix was typical of the desperate straits many German tank commanders now found themselves in. Bix saw a dozen of his shells bounce off a KV-1 even at the closest ranges. Eventually he managed to silence the steel monster as it swung its turret to take aim against him by the expedient of a well aimed shot deliberately fired through the barrel of his opponents main gun.
Men like Bix were part of a new breed of German tank commanders who achieved incredible victories against superior forces. But these superior forces were now also armed with better equipment and a deadly race would now develop between the Russian capacity to manufacture more tanks and the Germans’ ability to engineer better tanks. Although the German engineers would prove themselves winners, they were let down by their manufacturing capacity. The German war effort was being run inefficiently and by 1942 Germany was being targeted by wave after wave of allied bombers which were reducing her war industries to rubble, while Stalin had wisely moved his factories back into the interior of Russia, out of harm’s way. The workers from one tank factory actually walked along railway lines under German gunfire to get in the trains to be moved out. It was the largest industrial migration in the history of the world; well over one thousand nine hundred plants were moved eastwards.
This artist’s impression conveys something of the shock which the German tank forces experienced under attack by the KV-1 for the first time. The superior power and armour of the KV-1 is well represented in this dramatic but accurate propaganda drawing for Signal magazine.