None of the officers who commanded the Red Army’s mechanized corps in June 1941 had been in their position for more than a year when the German invasion began, and most only for a few months. Soviet mechanized corps commanders were considerably younger than their German counterparts – an average age of forty-four versus an average of fifty-three for the Germans – and less experienced. Some 58 per cent of the mechanized corps commanders had no prior experience with tank or mechanized units and 16 per cent had no prior experience with commanding large formations. After the purges gutted much of the original cadre of experienced Soviet tank officers and the original mechanized corps disbanded in 1939, the new mechanized corps recreated in 1940–41 were heavily staffed with cavalry officers; by June 1941, half the mechanized corps were commanded by cavalrymen. However, it would be a mistake to generalize all the Soviet tank commanders of 1941 as incapable. In particular, General-major Semen M. Krivoshein, commander of the 25th Mechanized Corps in the Volga Military District (MD), was one of the most experienced tankers in the Red Army; he had successfully commanded tank units in Spain, the Far East, Finland and Poland. Indeed, Krivoshein was easily as experienced and capable as most of the German panzer division or corps commanders of 1941. Although only thirty-nine years old in 1941, General-major General Dmitri D. Lelyushenko, commander of the 21st Mechanized Corps, was another experienced and capable Soviet tanker. Most of the Soviet tank officers were graduates of the Frunze Military Academy or VAMM, but some, such as General-major Mikhail P. Petrov, had negligible civilian or military education (in his case, limited to a fourth-grade education), which put them at a huge disadvantage when matched against the Wehrmacht’s Generalstab-trained panzer generals. Among the commanders with no tank experience was General-major Konstantin K. Rokossovsky, a cavalry officer who would quickly demonstrate an aptitude for combined-arms warfare. Overall, the Red Army’s tank leadership in June 1941 was a mixed bag, with a few exceptional officers, a large batch of moderately-capable but inexperienced officers, and a healthy number of chair-warmers.
At the division, brigade, regiment and battalion levels, the situation was about the same, although there were far more unfilled vacancies, with many units still awaiting 25 to 50 per cent of their junior officers from training units. Pre-war officer training required between one and two years and the rapid formation of so many mechanized units temporarily overwhelmed the tank training schools administered by the GABTU. For example, the premier Orel Tank Training School (BTU) had begun training 800 junior officers in September 1940 to operate as T-34 platoon leaders, and the first would be available in the late summer of 1941. In the interim, the Red Army did have a number of outstanding mid-level tank officers, such as Polkovnik Pavel Rotmistrov and Polkovnik Mikhail E. Katukov, who were quite capable of handling a tank brigade or division-size force in combat, if given the opportunity. At the company and platoon level, most extant junior officers were the products of hasty training and few could read a map or direct more than their own tank in battle. Although the enlisted ranks had not been damaged by Stalin’s purges, the rapid expansion of 1940–41 created a great shortage of trained drivers and gunners that had not yet been made good by June 1941. Thousands of conscripts had been sent to six-month tank training schools at Orel and Leningrad, but were still in the pipeline when the invasion began. Lacking a solid NCO corps like the Wehrmacht, the Red Army had few unit-level trainers and had to rely upon centralized training facilities, and there was no one in most tank units to enforce training standards. Few crewmen were cross-trained on other crew functions, which meant that it was difficult to replace casualties. Soviet driver training was particularly inadequate; before the invasion, the Soviet general staff training directorate had issued a directive that the obsolete T-27 tankette would be the primary vehicle used for training in order to save wear and tear on the Red Army’s main battle tanks. Unfortunately, the handling characteristics of the 2.7-ton T-27 were so dissimilar that operating it in no way prepared novice drivers to operate the 32-ton T-34 or 45-ton KV-1. The number of hours allocated to driver training during the hectic re-formation of the mechanized corps was minimal, particularly for the newer tanks. Consequently, Soviet tank crews had numerous accidents during road movements in 1941, often resulting in the loss of tanks.
On the whole, Soviet tank training was overly mechanical in nature, geared to produce soldiers who performed tasks by rote, not by personal initiative. Gunnery training was also inadequate, with sub-caliber firing often substituted for actual main gun firing. In 1945, when the Red Army overran German gunnery ranges in East Prussia and Silesia, Soviet tankers were amazed to find tank gunnery ranges with pop-up targets and moving targets mounted on sleds – none of which existed in the Soviet Union even at the end of the war. Instead, most Soviet crews were fortunate if they had fired four shells at a stationary plywood target before heading off to their unit. In combat, Soviet tankers often fired off all their ammunition as fast as possible, since they had not been taught about the need to conserve rounds.[12] Stalinist-era paranoia also had a negative influence on maintenance training in Soviet tank units. During the purges, the NKVD had created the threat of internal ‘wreckers’, or counter-revolutionary saboteurs, so the RKKA general staff – not wanting to appear in collusion with anti-regime forces – issued a directive that forbade tank crews from conducting routine maintenance without proper (i.e. political officer) supervision. Concerned that soldiers might willfully contaminate the oil or fuel in their tank engines, political officers simply forbade most routine maintenance at unit level and directed that any work be conducted by supervised technicians at army-level depots.
Soviet armoured operations at the outset of the war were severely hampered by inadequate logistic preparations. Logistics was never a strong suit of the Red Army and operational planning was still tied to a reliance on railroads and fixed supply bases, which proved very vulnerable to the German style of Blitzkrieg. Tank ammunition, particularly 76.2mm armour-piercing rounds, was in short supply and few KV or T-34 tanks had more than one basic load in June 1941. About one-quarter of the available ammunition was stored in supply dumps near the western border, which were quickly overrun in the first weeks of Barbarossa. Even worse, most of the Red Army’s fuel reserves were held back in depots around Moscow, Orel and Kharkov, leaving the forward units with only enough fuel for 1–2 weeks of operations.[13] Simply put, the superficial appearance of combat-readiness among even the best-equipped mechanized corps was quickly exposed as false when tank units were found to have only enough fuel and ammunition for brief combat operations. A Soviet 1941 tank division required one-third less fuel than a German panzer division, about 60–70 tons, but too few GAZ and ZIS-5 fuel tankers were available to move it with the tanks. The logistical infrastructure to enable true mechanized maneuver operations – which had often been identified as a key weakness in pre-war maneuvers – simply did not exist in June 1941.
Among the many deficiencies of the Red Army’s mechanized forces in June 1941, the aspect that sealed the fate of the pre-war mechanized corps was the lack of effective radios. Most of the mechanized corps only had about half of their authorized radios and most of those available dated back to 1933–34. While Soviet industry had pulled ahead of the Germans in terms of tank development, it had fallen behind in terms of communications technology.[14] Unlike the Germans, only tanks operated by company or battalion commanders were equipped with radios, although some platoon leaders were just getting them in June 1941. Soviet command tanks, usually a BT-5, BT-7 or T-34, mounted a HF 71-TK-3 Model 1939 radio set. The 3-watt output of the 71-TK-3 transmitter was weak compared to the 20 or 30-watt transmitters on German command tanks, and this Soviet radio had an effective range of only about 6km. Of course, radius becomes a moot point when only one tank in ten even carried a radio. Even the most modern Soviet tanks, such as the KV and the T-34, were saddled with these underpowered and obsolescent radios, with which only one or two tanks in a company were equipped. The failure of the Red Army leadership to insist on equipping all tanks with modern radios – as Guderian had done for the Panzerwaffe – rendered effective command and control over large Soviet armoured formations virtually impossible at the outset of the war. Lacking effective communications, Soviet armoured units were forced to rely upon flags, messengers and dangerous follow-the-leader formations.
12
Artem Drabkin and Oleg Sheremet,
13
David Glantz,