The Bloody Triangle: The Defeat of Soviet Armor in the Ukraine, June 1941 PDF
Preview The Bloody Triangle: The Defeat of Soviet Armor in the Ukraine, June 1941
T THE BLOODY RI A N G L E T THE BLOODY RI A N G L E The DefeaT of SovieT armor in The Ukraine, JUne 1941 Victo r J. Kameni r I think that those who never experienced all the bitterness of the summer of 1941 will never be completely able to appreciate the joy of our victory. —Vassiliy Grossman, Soviet writer Contents Preface ix Part I: OPPOsIng fOrces 1. German Plans, Dispositions, and Organization 1 2. Soviet Military on the Eve of War 9 3. Dispositions of Kiev Special Military District 29 4. Organization and Strength of Kiev Special 33 Military District 5. Creeping up to War 51 Part II: the BOrder Battle 6. We Are Under Attack! What Should We Do? June 22 75 7. Creaking to the Sound of the Guns, June 22 109 8. Hold What You’ve Got! June 23–24 125 9. Piecemeal Forward, June 25 159 10. Battle for Dubno, June 26–27 175 11. Continue Mission, June 28 213 12. Fall Back to Old Border, June 29–30 229 13. The Last Convulsion, July 1–2 245 cOnclusIOn 255 aPPendIces A. Abridged Order of Battle: Army Group South 263 B. Kiev Special Military District Order of Battle 265 C. Order of Battle of Soviet Mechanized Corps 271 D. Organization of German Motorized Infantry Division 275 E. Organization of German Panzer Division 275 F. Organization of Soviet Antitank Artillery Brigade 276 G. Organization of Soviet Mechanized Corps 277 and Tank Division H. Organization of Soviet Motorized Rifle Division 278 I. Organization of Soviet Rifle Division 278 J. Unit Symbols 279 K. Comparative Strength of Armored Units 280 L. German Armored Vehicles 282 M. Soviet Armored Vehicles 284 MaPs 288 nOtes 301 BIBlIOgraPhy 307 Index 311 viii Preface As the years go by, the white areas on a historical map of World War II continue shrinking. However, to most Western military history enthusiasts, the four bloody years of struggle on the Eastern Front continue to be terra incognita. Most people have only heard about the Siege of Leningrad, the slaughter of Stalingrad, and, of course, the Battle of Kursk. The weeklong armored clash near the Russian city of Kursk in 1943 has been widely known as the largest tank battle in history, involving over six thousand armored combat vehicles on both sides. During this bloody battle, the backbone of the German Panzer Corps was broken forever, leaving it unable to mount significant operations for the rest of the war. However, this was not the first large-scale armored struggle on the Eastern Front. Another weeklong conflict featuring massive tank formations took place immediately following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Just two days after launching Operation Barbarossa, from June 24 to July 1, roughly 650 German tanks and 180 assault gun and tank destroyers fought over 1,500 Soviet tanks in a roughly triangular area of approximately 1,800 square miles between the northwestern Ukrainian towns of Lutsk, Dubno, and Brody. The fighting in Ukraine did not parallel fighting in Byelorussia, where the armored warfare on the Eastern Front became associated with exploits of the most famous German panzer leader—Heinz Guderian. Instead of heady dashes by “Hurrying Heinz’s” armored spearheads, the difficult terrain of northwestern Ukraine limited German advances to a grinding series of battles along a miserable road network. Events that took place there, when covered by Western historians, are usually glossed over by an encompassing title of “border battles.” Yet, here, in the swampy and marshy terrain, the German blitzkrieg was for the first time slowed The Bloody Triangle down to a crawl and even halted for several crucial days. The Soviet side lost the battle. However, even in defeat, the Red Army demonstrated that the vaunted German Wehrmacht could be stopped and bloodied, even if only for a time. This experience was costly for the Soviet Union. Numerically superior mechanized forces of the Red Army were savaged by the smaller, more profi- cient and professional German opponents. In this, and similar border battles, the Soviet armored force, larger than all other armored forces in the world combined, melted away under the relentless assault of the German combined- arms style of warfare. Describing the events above, this work relied heavily on numerous memoirs of Soviet and, to a lesser extent, German participants in the conflict. These first-hand accounts provide genuine insights into the unfolding events. While some of them cover the same events, no two of them are exactly alike, each man’s own personality coming through in his interpretation of the events. I intentionally weighted my research towards the Soviet/Russian sources because I wanted to present this conflict from the Soviet point of view. Starting shortly before the war, the Soviet officers, their reports and memoirs describe, often in minute detail, the condition, preparedness, and morale of the Red Army at the outbreak of the conflict. I was not the first writer to rely on these works, and, like others, I drew my own conclusions. Russian writer and former military intelligence officer Vladimir Rezun (pen name Viktor Suvorov) helped fuel the debate whether Soviet Union was planning to attack Germany first. Very persuasively, albeit not very convinc- ingly, Rezun argued that presence of certain types of weapons or personnel in large quantities was the indicator of immediate Soviet aggressive inten- tions. I found his claim that the Soviet Union had one million paratroopers by the start of the war preposterous. While parachute jumping was immensely popular among Soviet youth before the war, a teenager who has several jumps off a tower under his belt does not a trained airborne soldier make. While I do not dispute Stalin’s aggressive intentions overall (it is hard to argue with this, knowing of his swallowing up the three tiny Baltic states and chunks of Finland, Poland, and Rumania), I do not believe that the Red Army was in any shape to conduct major offensive operations in July 1941, as advocated by Rezun/Suvorov. On a much more personal note, I find him usurping the venerated surname of Suvorov as an insult to Russian and Soviet history. x
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