Panzergrenadier vs US Armored Infantryman. European Theater of Operations 1944 (Osprey Combat 22)

84 Pages·2017·44.38 MB·English

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Front line, September 29
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CCB III
111 European Theater of Operations 1944
Panzergrenadier
III
111
Forêt de
Benamont
VERSUS
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US Armored Infantryman
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Steven J. Zaloga
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A u t h o r I l l u s t r a t o r
Steven J. Zaloga received his BA in History from Union Johnny Shumate works as a freelance illustrator living in
College and his MA from Columbia University. He has Nashville, Tennessee. He began his career in 1987 after
worked as an analyst in the aerospace industry for over two graduating from Austin Peay State University. Most of
decades, covering missile systems and the international arms his work is rendered in Adobe Photoshop using a Cintiq
trade, and has served with the Institute for Defense Analyses, monitor. His greatest influences are Angus McBride, Don
a federal think tank. He is the author of numerous books Troiani, and Édouard Detaille.
on military technology and military history, with an accent
on the US Army in World War II as well as Russia and the
former Soviet Union.
O t h e r t i t l e s i n t h e C o m b a t s e r i e s
CBT No: 1 • ISBN: 978 1 78096 924 4 CBT No: 7 • ISBN: 978 1 4728 0324 5 CBT No: 8 • ISBN: 978 1 4728 0134 0
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European Theater of Operations 1944

Panzergrenadier
US Armored Infantryman
Steven J. Zaloga
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This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Author’s note
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from the author’s own
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Osprey Publishing,
collection. For brevity, in the text the traditional conventions have been
PO Box 883, Oxford, OX1 9PL, UK
used when referring to units. In both armies, companies were given
1385 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10018, USA
identifying numbers of letters that continued through the sequence of
E-mail: [email protected]
battalions in a regiment.
Osprey Publishing, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Editor’s note
© 2017 Osprey Publishing Ltd. In this book measurements are given in a mixture of metric and US
customary units of measurement, depending on the context. The
All rights reserved
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Ke y to militar y symbols
Ar my Gro up Ar my Corps Division Brigade Regiment Battalion
Company /Battery Platoon Section Squad Infantry Ar tiller y Cav alr y
Airborne Unit HQ Air defence Air Fo rce Air mobile Air transportable Amphibious
Anti-tank Armour Air aviation Bridging Engineer Headquar ters Maintenance
Medical Missile Mountain Nav y Nuclear, biological, Or dnance Parachute
chemical
Reconnaissance Signal Supply Transport Fortre ss or Fortress
movement static machine gun
Ke y to unit identification
Unit Pa rent
identifier unit
Commander
(+) with added elements
(–) less elements
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INTRODUCTION 4
THE OPPOSING SIDES 8
Mechanization or motorization? • Half-track comparison • Mechanized-infantry
tactics • Combat sustainment • Command and control
THE PANZER-LEHR-DIVISION IN NORMANDY 32
July 11–27, 1944
RÉCHICOURT-LA-PETITE 47
September 26–29, 1944
THE BATTLE FOR RODT 59
December 20–23, 1944
ANALYSIS & CONCLUSION 76
UNIT ORGANIZATIONS 78
BIBLIOGRAPHY 79
INDEX 80

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Introduction
Tanks revolutionized land combat in World War II. Yet tanks had distinct
tactical limitations, particularly when operating in wooded or urban areas,
and during defensive missions. Tanks proved to be most effective when used
in combination with the other combat arms, especially infantry and artillery,
but it took several years before combined-arms tactics matured. The Heer
(German Army) was the most effective practitioner of combined-arms tactics
in the Blitzkrieg era of 1939–41. Early Panzer-Division tactics involved the
use of regiments of tanks and mobile infantry in separate skirmishes on the
same battlefield. By the middle of the war in 1942–43, the Panzer-Divisionen
began to integrate tanks and infantry more closely below regimental level,
mixing tanks and infantry at battalion and company level.
Part of the problem in early small-unit combined-arms tactics was the
reliance on trucks to motorize the infantry. While truck-mobile infantry
could keep pace with tanks in the movement to the battlefield when on roads,
The iconic image of the
Panzergrenadier associated
them with the SdKfz 251
armored half-track. In reality,
only a small fraction of the
Panzergrenadier-Regimenter
were in the mechanized
configuration.
4
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Armored infantrymen pictured
on an M3A1 half-track in
Britain during June 1944
before departing for
Normandy. The vehicle is
fitted with a deep-wading air-
intake trunk to prevent the
engine from flooding with
seawater while landing. The
pale-green color inside the
Allied air recognition star is
gas-alerting paint that was
designed to change color in
the presence of chemical-
warfare agents.
they did not possess enough cross-country capability to stay with tanks when
operating in the usual European terrain. Technical innovations, most notably
the armored half-track, helped to deepen tank–infantry integration by
mechanizing the infantry so that they could keep pace with tanks in cross-
country travel. From the German perspective, the main problem with infantry
mechanization was the lack of financial or industrial resources fully to
mechanize the infantry in the Panzer divisions. Even as late as April 1945,
fewer than 40 of the roughly 220 Panzergrenadier battalions of the Heer,
Waffen-SS, and Luftwaffe were mechanized and more than 80 percent still
relied on trucks for mobility.
The US Army began forming armored-infantry units in its armored
divisions later than the Wehrmacht and had the industrial resources to
mechanize all of them. The US Army also deepened the integration of
combined-arms tactics through the introduction of specialized “combat
command” headquarters within each armored division that regularly
integrated tanks and infantry at small-unit level.
This book compares the evolution of German and American mobile
infantry in World War II and uses three examples from the Normandy,
Lorraine, and Ardennes campaigns in 1944 to illustrate how these units
performed in actual combat. The focus in this book is on the Panzergrenadier
5
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The Opposing Sides
MECHANIZATION OR MOTORIZATION?
German
The iconic image of the Panzergrenadier was of a team of riflemen leaping
from their armored half-track. Yet for the entire war, mechanized
Panzergrenadier units were a distinct minority; motorized Panzergrenadier
units using ordinary trucks were the norm.
At the start of the war in 1939, the infantry element of the Panzer-Division
was the Schützen-Brigade (Schützen = riflemen). This consisted of a truck-
mobile Schützen-Regiment and a motorcycle-mobile Kradschützen-Bataillon
(Kradschützen = motorcycle riflemen). During the early Blitzkrieg period, the
Heer experimented with two other forms of mobile divisions: the leichte
Division (light division) and the Infanterie-Division (motorisierte). The leichte
Division was a mechanized-cavalry division and these short-lived formations
were converted to Panzer-Divisionen after the 1939 campaign in Poland due
to their mediocre battlefield performance. Four motorized-infantry divisions
were formed in the early war years and these eventually grew in number,
evolving into the Panzergrenadier-Divisionen in 1943. Germany had very
limited industrial capacity and a choice had to be made between expanding
the Panzer force and using what industrial resources there were to provide a
greater degree of motorization in the infantry. The Heer chose the former
option, with the five Panzer-Divisionen available during the Polish campaign
expanding to ten by the time of the campaign in France in 1940, and
increasing to more than 20 by the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in
the summer of 1941. The remainder of the Heer remained heavily dependent
on horses through the end of the war (DiNardo: 2008).
Early Panzer-Division tactics were shaped by the limited tactical mobility
of the trucks used to transport the infantry. The Schützen-Brigade and the
8
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