Luther, Craig W. H. Guderian's Panzers

From Triumph to Defeat on the Eastern Front (1941)

On 22 June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, a surprise attack on the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army broke through Soviet territory, overran the Red Army and achieved some of the most dramatic victories in military history until the Blitzkrieg stalled as it approached Moscow. At the forefront of the attack was General Heinz Guderian, one of the most famous and controversial commanders of the war, who commanded a tank group in the centre of the German front, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Guderian's Panzers reconstructs Barbarossa from the perspective of Colonel General Guderian and his 2nd Panzer Group. With the German war machine at the height of its military power in June 1941, Guderian's group, with 250,000 men and 900 tanks, broke through the Soviet border defences within a few weeks and advanced about 600 kilometres deep into Soviet Russia. This played a decisive role in the successful encirclement battles of Belostok-Minsk (June/July 1941) and Smolensk (July/August 1941), leading to the loss of several Soviet armies and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Despite the alarming losses of personnel and equipment in these early battles, Guderian drove his men and himself to even greater achievements, culminating in the triumphant encirclement of Kiev in Ukraine (September 1941), which destroyed the Soviet southwestern front and led to the capture of over 600,000 Red Army soldiers. It was perhaps Germany's greatest victory of the Second World War, and Guderian had made it possible. In October/November 1941, German troops launched a desperate attempt to capture Moscow, and once again Heinz Guderian and his tank troops were at the forefront. But by the end of November, the entire German offensive had come to a standstill exhausted, overextended, dangerously weakened and suddenly largely paralysed by autumn rain and snow. Meanwhile, the resurgent Red Army launched a large-scale counteroffensive in early December that threatened not only Guderian and his troops, but the entire German Army Group Centre in the weeks that followed. Guderian and the Eastern Army as a whole were now caught in a merciless war of attrition that they could never win. Guderian refused to follow the orders of his superiors to stand firm against the advancing Soviet superiority and withdrew with the remnants of his troops, whereupon he was relieved of his command on 26 December 1941. Military historian and Eastern Front expert Craig Luther draws on new material, including letters and diaries, to tell the story of Guderian's tank force during Operation Barbarossa, supplementing it with vivid eyewitness accounts from soldiers who fought against the Red Army on the Eastern Front. The book traces the highs and lows of Guderian and his tank group during six crucial months of the Second World War and explains why and how the Germans, especially their tanks, were able to achieve such impressive successes, only to be defeated at the gates of Moscow.