Panzer Divisions, The Eastern Front 1941-43

On 22 June 1941, when Operation Barbarossa was unleashed, there was no longer any doubt; the Panzerwaffe, the German armoured branch, was the new, decisive instrument of modern land warfare – and it would be the tool that Germany would use to overcome her enemies. In the wake of the fall of France and the German victory in the West in June 1940, Hitler ordered the doubling of the number of Panzer and motorized infantry divisions, seeking a new, larger and better-mechanized army. The months before Barbarossa clearly shown how correct his desire had been; in April the German Army, spearheaded by its Panzer Divisions, quickly conquered both Yugoslavia and Greece, while in North Africa, Rommel’s Panzers reconquered all of the territory – except Tobruk – that the Italians had lost the previous winter. In the first weeks of Barbarossa, it appeared that the war on the Eastern Front was going to follow the same pattern as the Panzer Divisions, spearheading the German forces, drove deep into Soviet territory, encircling large numbers of Red Army units. The extent of these initial successes was such that in early July 1941 an overconfident General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German Army, wrote in his diary that the war against the Soviet Union had been won. Events would prove that Halder was quite wrong.