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No One Ever Heard Of
In December 1942 Hermann Baick wiped out a force ten times his size in the most briiliantly fought divisional battie in modern military history.
December 1942 was a time of crisis for the
German army in Russia. The Sixth Army
was encircled in Stalingrad. Gen. Erich von
Manstein, the commander of Army Group
Don, planned to break the siege with a
dagger thrust to the Volga River from the
southwest by the Fourth Panzer Army,
supported by the XLVIII Panzer Corps to its immediate north
attacking across the Don River. But before the two German
units could link up, the Soviet Fifth Tank Army under the command
of Gen. P. L. Romanenko crossed the Chir River, a tributary
of the Don, and drove deep into German lines.
The XLVIII Panzer Q>rps was suddenly threatened with annihilation.
Its only significant combat power was the 11 th Panzer
Division, which only days before had been operating near
Roslavl in Belorussia, some four hundred miles to the northwest.
Still strung out along the line of march and arriving little
by little, the I Ith Division faced what amounted to mission
impossible. But arriving with its lead elements was the division
commander, Hermann BaIck, who was about to execute one of
the most brilliant performances of battlefield generalship in
modern military history.
Balck, who ended the war as a General der Panzertruppe
(equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Army), is today
virtually unknown except to the most serious students of World
War 11. Yet in three short weeks his lone panzer division virtually
destroyed the entire Soviet Fifth Tank Army. 1 he odds he
faced were scarcely short of incredible: the Soviets commanded
APRIL/MAY 2008
a local superiority of 7:1 in tanks, 11:1 in infantry, and 20:1 in
artillery. But Balck, leading from the front, reacting instantly to
each enemy thrust, repeatedly parried, surprised, and wiped out
superior Soviet detachments. Over the next few months his
division would rack up an astonishing one thousand enemy
tank kills. For this and other achievements Balck would be one
of only twenty-seven officers in the entire war—Erwin Rommel
was another—to receive the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves,
Swords, and Diamonds, the equivalent of an American receiving
two, or even three, Medals of Honor.
"Balck has strong claims to be regarded as our finest field
commander," declared Maj. Gen. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin.
And he was in a position to know: as a general staff officer
during the war, Mellenthin had worked at one point or
another for virtually all of Germany's greatest commanders—
including such legends as Rommel and Heinz Guderian.
here was no single characteristic that made
Balck such an outstanding combat leader.
Hermann Balck was the sum of thousands of
small factors that were deeply engrained in
him by the system under which he grew up.
What really made him great in the end was a
consistent ability to assess a situation almost
instantly, decide what had to be done, and then carry it out. In
any specific situation Balck almost always did what would have
been expected of a typical well-trained and experienced
German senior officer—and he always did it consistently and
unwaveringly, time after time. He never lost his nerve and he
almost never made a tactical mistake. He was always one step
ahead of his enemy, even in the relatively few situations when
he was initially taken by surprise.
Like many senior German officers of his generation, Balck
came from a military family, albeit a slightly unusual one. His
great-grandfather served under the Duke of Wellington in the
King's German Legion, and his grandfather was an officer in the
British Army's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Baick's
father, William Balck, was one of the German army's foremost
tactical writers in the years prior to World War I, and as a division
commander in that war won the Pour le Merite, Germany's
highest military order (popularly but somewhat irreverently
called the "Blue Max"). Balck himself was a mountain infantry
officer on the western, eastern, Italian, and Balkan fronts during
the First World War, serving almost three years as a company
commander. He was wounded seven times and in October 1918
was recommended for the Pour le Merite, but the war ended
before the award was fully processed.
At the start of World War II, Balck commanded the lead
infantry regiment that spearheaded the crossing of the Meuse
River by Guderian's panzers in May 1940. When his exhausted
troops collapsed to the ground after they crossed the river, Balck
walked to the head of the column, picked up a rifie, and pointed
Soviet tanks, viewed through a German forward observer's
"scissors" binoculars, advance toward the waiting enemy.
to the high ground ahead that was his regiment's objective.
Announcing that he was going to take the hill with or without
them, he started moving forward. His troops got up and followed
him to the top.
In early 1942 Balck was the inspector of mobile troops at the
German Army High Gommand, the same position held in 1938
by his mentor, Guderian. But Balck champed at the bit to get
back into combat. He later wrote in his memoirs:
In my position as Inspector of Mobile Troops I could only maintain
my authority through fresh experience at the front. This was
the official reason 1 gave when I requested a transfer to the front as
commander of a division. The real reason was that I had had
enough of the High Command. I have always been a soldier, not a
clerk, and I didn't want to be one in time of war.
His request was granted and, though still only a colonel, Balck
was assigned to command the 11th Panzer Division. Upon his
arrival in Russia he found a dismal situation. Morale was at rock
bottom. Almost all of the division's regimental and battalion
commanders were on sick leave. Ground down by months of
constant combat, only scattered remnants of the unit remained
intact. Balck had to rebuild his unit from scratch—while in
combat. Within a month he had the division back on its feet,
though it was still short of authorized vehicles by 40 percent.
During one of his first actions, Balck displayed his unfiappable
nerve leading from the front. Balck and his adjutant,
Major von Webski, were far forward when they came under
heavy Soviet artillery fire. As he was saying something to Balck,
Webski collapsed in midsentence—with a fatal shrapnel wound
to his left temple. Several days later Balck and his operations
officer were conferring over a map when a low-flying Soviet
fighter plane made a strafing run at them and put several bullet
holes into the map between them.
The German command system in World War II emphasized
face-to-face leadership, rather than the detailed and ponderous
written orders so beloved by American commanders. Balck
pushed the principle to the extreme, forbidding any written
orders at all. Describing one of his earliest actions with the 11th
Panzer Division, Balck wrote:
I did not issue a written order, but oriented my commanders
WORLD WAR II
with the help of a detailed war game and extensive terrain walks.
The advantage was that all misgivings could be eliminated; misunderstandings
and opinions could be resolved from the outset.
Unfortunately, my very competent chief of staff, Major von Kienitz,
brought everything together in the form of an operations order and
submitted it to corps. He got it back, carefully graded. I just said, "See
what you get by bringing attention to yourself?" We didn't change
our plan and we worked together in magnificent harmony from that
point on, but we never again submitted anything in writing.
By the end of November 1942 the German position in south
Russia had deteriorated significantly. The Germans' Italian,
Hungarian, and Romanian allies proved to be weak reeds, especially
when the weather in Russia turned cold. On November
19 the Soviets launched Operation Uranus: the Fifth Tank Army
crossed the Don River from the north and cut off the great bend
sector, advancing as far as the north bank of the Chir and the
west bank of the Don above the Chir. The Soviet Fifty-seventh
Army attacked from south of Stalingrad and joined the Fifth
Tank Army on the Don, cutting off the German Sixth Army.
On the night of December 1, the 11th Panzer Division was
alerted to move south from Roslavl to shore up the collapsing
sector of the Romanian Third Army. As the division loaded on
railcars, Balck and von Kienitz drove ahead to assess the situation
firsthand. What they found was far worse than what they
had expected. Along the 37-mile sector where the Chir ran
mostly north to south before turning east and flowing into the
Don, the Romanians had the tlimsiest of defensive lines, with
only a single 150mm howitzer for fire support. The XLVIII
Panzer Corps, under the command of Gen. Otto von Knobelsdorf,
was in an even worse position, trying to hold the lower
dogleg of the Chir and facing into the great bend of the Don,
which was now completely occupied by the Soviets. The right
side of the German line was held by tbe understrength 336th
Infantry Division. The left side was held by the next-to-worthless
Luftwaffe 7th Field Division, a unit of relatively wellequipped
but untrained airmen serving as infantry.
Balck and his advance party arrived on the scene on
December 6. The initial mission of the 11th Panzer Division was
to form the reserve of the XLVIII Panzer Corps' advance on
Stalingrad. But the following day elements of the Fifth Tank
Army crossed the Chir at multiple points, driving deep behind
the left flank of the 336th Infantry Division.
When the attack came, Balck and his key commanders were
making a ground reconnaissance in preparation for the planned
advance. Only Balck's 15th Panzer Regiment was in position. His
110th and U 1th Panzergrenadier Regiments were still moving
forward from the railheads at Millerovo and could not arrive
before the end of the day. At approximately 9:00 a.m. on
December 7, tbe LXVIIl Panzer Corps sent Balck's division command
post a warning order to bave the 15th Panzer Regiment
The Chir River Battles
Ku.viiun tronp
front lines
German troop
front lines
lUissiiin troop
tiKivement
Area of detail
Kalatsch •
German Sixth Army
llngrad
Morozovskaya
. ro Rostov Kalatsch
11'" Panzer 336'" infantry solonovski
Division HQ Division HQ =»oionovsKi
• Nizhna Chirskaya
M
In December
1942, Balck's
underequipped
fought a series of
battles along the
Soviet union's Chir
River, southwest of
Staliiigrad. Moving
out by night and
attacking by day,
the division virtually
destroyed the entire
Soviet Fifth Tank
Army, "It is true,
however, that the
question of when
the men of the
i i t f i Panzer got
any sleep was never
clearly answered,"
Balck later wrote.
A P R I L / M A Y 2 0 0 8
prepare for a counterattack. In the absence of their commander,
the divisional staff passed along the warning order. The 15th
Panzer Regiment started moving forward a half-hour later.
When Balck learned of the situation he immediately moved
to the 336th Infantry Division's command post near Verchne
Solonovski. Locating two divisional command posts together
violated German tactical doctrine and risked presenting the
enemy with a very lucrative target. Balck, however, realized that
in the coming fight, instantaneous coordination between the
two divisions would be vital, and with the primitive and unreliable
communications systems of the day, this was the only way
to do it. The Germans never considered their tactical doctrine
holy writ, and their commanders were authorized and even
expected to deviate from it whenever they thought the situation
required. Balck never hesitated to exercise that prerogative.
As Balck analyzed the flow of orders from the corps, he realized
that if the new threat was significant enough to derail the
'Each day was like the next/
Balck wrote. 'Take them by
surprise. Crush them'
corps' advance toward Stalingrad, then simply pushing the
Soviet tanks back across the river—as he was now being
instructed to do—was far too timid a course of action. Working
with Mellenthin, then chief of staff of XLVIII Panzer Gorps,
Balck managed to get the mission of his division changed to
destroying the Soviet forces on the near side of the river. That
was the first time Balck and Mellinthin worked together, starting
a successful partnership that would last for most of the war.
With his Panzergrenadier regiments not yet in position, Balck
had little choice but to commit his units piecemeal. Despite
being supported by Baick's 15th Panzer Regiment, the 336th
Infantry Division was unable to prevent the Soviet I Tank Corps
from penetrating ten miles beyond the Chir, reaching State
Collective Farm 79 by nightfall on December 7. There, the
Soviets caught by surprise and massacred the divisional trains
of the 336th. But while the Soviets consolidated their position
for the night, Balck methodically brought up the remainder of
his units and prepared to strike the next day.
It was obvious to Balck that the Soviets' next move would be
an attempt to roll up the 336th Infantry Division. To prevent
that, he screened the division's left flank with his own engineer,
antitank, and antiaircraft battalions. Simultaneously, he moved
his three maneuver regiments into their attack positions. Before
dawn on December 8, just as the Soviets were starting their
move, he struck. By the end of the day the Soviet I Tank Corps
had lost fifty-three tanks and effectively ceased to exist.
For the next three days Balck and his division fought a series
of running battles, eliminating bridgeheads across the Chir as
soon as the Soviets established them. The 336th Infantry
formed the shield against which the Soviets struck; the panzers
were the hammer that destroyed them. Balck continually moved
his units at night and attacked during the day, employing speed,
surprise, and shock action. "Night marches save blood" became
Baick's principal axiom, Balck described his command style in
his memoirs:
My brilliant chief of staff, Major Kienitz, remained in a fixed
position somewhat to the rear of the fighting, maintaining contact
with God and me and all the world by radio. I was mobile, at the
focus of the action. Generally ! visited each regiment several times
a day. While I was out I decided on my course of action for the next
day. I discussed the plan by telephone with Kienitz, then drove to
each regiment and briefed the commander personally on the next
day's plan. Then I drove back to my command post and telephoned
Colonel Mellenthin, the chief of staff at XLVIII Panzer
Gorps. If Knobelsdorff, the commanding general, agreed, I let the
regiments know. No change in plans. If any changes were necessary,
I drove out during the night and visited each regiment again.
There were no misunderstandings. At dawn I once again positioned
myself at the decisive point.
By December 15 the 1 Ith Panzer Division had been marching
by night and fighting by day for eight continuous days in a
seemingly never-ending cycle of fire brigade actions. Describing
this period, Balck wrote in his memoirs:
Each day was like the next. Russian penetration at Point X,
counterattack, everything cleared up by evening. Then, another
report 20 kilometers eastwards of a deep penetration into some
hasty defensive position. About face. Tanks, infantry and artillery
march through the winter night with burning headlights. In position
by dawn at the Russians' most sensitive point Take them by
surprise. Grush them. Then repeat the process the next day some
W or 20 kilometers farther west or cast.
Meanwhile, on December 10 the Fourth Panzer Army had
begun its move toward Stalingrad; XLVIII Panzer Corps still had
the mission to cross the Don River and link up with this advance.
But as Balck was at last preparing to take his units across the river
on December 17, the Soviets struck elsewhere.
The new Soviet thrust. Operation Saturn, threatened to drive
to Rostov at the mouth of the Don on the Azov Sea. If successful,
it would cut off Army Group Don from the rear and seal off
all of Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist's Army Group A in the
Caucasus. Manstein had no option but to divert the bulk of the
Fourth Panzer Army to defend Rostov. That in turn sealed the
fate of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad—which finally fell
on February 2, 1943.
The new Soviet attack was supported by more Fifth Tank
Army strikes against XLVIII Panzer Corps. Balck led another
night march and before dawn on December 19 once again took
a superior Soviet force completely by surprise. Baick's 15th
WORLD WAR II
A German tank
marked with
the 11th Panzer
Division's "flying
ghost" insignia
traverses snowy
Russian terrain.
o
Panzer Regiment was down to about twenty-five operational
tanks when it came upon the rear of a march column of fortytwo
tanks from the Soviet Motor Mechanized Corps at Nizhna
Kalinovski. Balck's tanks slipped into the rear of the Soviet
column in the darkness "as if on parade," he wrote in his memoirs.
The Soviets mistook the German tanks for their own.
Before the Soviets knew what was happening, the panzers
opened fire and rolled up the entire column, destroying every
one of the enemy tanks.
Balck's panzers then turned to meet a column of twenty-three
Soviet tanks approaching in the second echelon. On lower
ground, the Germans had perfect belly shots when the Soviet
tanks crested the higher ground to their front. By the end of the
German tanks slipped into the
rear of the Soviet column 'as if
on parade/ in Balck's words
day the 15th Panzer Regiment had destroyed another Soviet
corps and its sixty-five tanks without suffering a single loss.
Balck's units were in night defensive positions when Kienitz
awakened him at 2:00 a.m. on December 21:
There was the devil to pay. The UOth broken through, the
lllth overrun. The Panzer regiment signaled: Situation serious.
In the bright moonlit night the Russians had attacked at the
boundary between the two Panzergrenadier regiments. When I
arrived on the scene the situation had already been consolidated
somewhat. To close the gap between the regiments I organized
a counterattack with [the motorcycle company of the Panzer
Reconnaissance Battalion] and some tanks. By 0900 hours the
situation was pretty well in hand. Hundreds of dead Russians lay
in and around our positions.
The series of defensive battles along the Chir was over. The
Fifth Tank Army had been virtually destroyed. But tactical victory
did not translate to operational success for the Germans,
who were being pushed farther and farther back from the Don.
On December 22 the XLVIII Panzer Corps received orders to
move immediately ninety miles to the west and establish blocking
positions at Morozovskaya to screen Rostov. Hitler ordered
Morozovskaya held at all costs.
When Balck first arrived at Morozovskaya a Soviet tank corps
was bearing down on the city from the north, and threatening
to envelop the town of Tatsinskaya on the left. The only thing
standing in front of them was a thin defensive screen of scratch
units. Balck concluded:
The situation was desperate. [The German defenders'] only
hope lay with a single tired and depleted division that was coming
up in driblets. In my opinion the situation was so dismal that it
WORLD WAR II
could only be mastered through audacity—in other words, by
attacking. Any attempts at defense would mean our destruction.
We needed to crush the westernmost enemy column first in order
to gain some swing space. We would just have to hope—against
reason—that the hodge-podge of troops covering Morosovskaya
would hold for a day.
With only twenty operational tanks and one understrength
infantry battalion, Balck moved toward Skassyrskaya to block
the oncoming Soviets. After securing the town with brief but
heavy fighting on December 24, he moved on to Tatsinskaya,
which put him in the Soviet rear. With his entire division still
strung out along the route of march from the Chir, Balck
deployed his units in a circle around Tatsinskaya as they started
to arrive. When the commander of the Soviet XXIV Tank Corps
learned that German tanks were in his rear and his line of communications
had been cut, he ordered all his units to consolidate
around his position at Hill 175. The order was sent by
radio—and in the clear. When the Uth Panzer Division intercepted
the transmission, Balck knew he had his enemy in a trap.
Balck closed the ring around the XXIV Tank Corps, but his
division had been moving and fighting too long and too hard.
It was down to only eight operational tanks. Balck did not have
the combat power to eliminate the Soviets. On Christmas Day
the Germans still could not break into the cauldron, but neither
could the Soviets break out. By the end of the day, however, Baick
received operational control of one of the Panzergrenadier regiments
and an assault gun battalion from the newly arriving 6th
Panzer Division.
Over the next three days Balck continued to tighten the vise
on the Tatsinskaya pocket, which finally burst on December 28,
with the Soviets attempting a breakout to the northwest. But
only twelve tanks and thirty trucks managed to escape initially,
and when Balck's forces sprung, they first annihilated all
remaining Soviet units inside the pocket, then turned to pursue
the escaping column and destroy all those vehicles as well.
Another Soviet corps had been wiped out at the hands of
Balck's understrength division. Balck had pulled off a modernday
Cannae, and from that point on the 1 ltb Panzer Division
was known by the code name "Hannibal."
aick went on to fight more winter battles
until he was reassigned in early March 1943.
On his last day in command his division
destroyed its thousandth tank since his
arrival. During the period from December 7,
1942, through January 31, 1943, the Uth
Panzer Division was credited with destroying
225 tanks, 347 antitank guns, 35 artillery pieces, and killing
30,700 Soviet soldiers. Balck's losses for the same period
were 16 tanks, 12 antitank guns, 215 soldiers killed in action,
1,019 wounded, and 155 missing.
While in command of the 11th Panzer Division, Balck was
Balck's successes still
didn't prevent German dead
from piling up in Stalingrad,
where Soviets encircled the
German Sixth Army.
promoted to Generalmajor (U.S. Army one-star equivalent)
and then to Generalleutnant (two-star equivalent). He later
returned to Russia to command the XLVIII Panzer Corps,
where Mellenthin was still the chief of staff. When Balck commanded
the Fourth Panzer Army in August 1944, his counterattack
brought the Soviet offensive in the great bend of the
Vistula River to a halt.
In the fall of 1944 Balck went to the western front, commanding
Army Group G against Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. in the
Lorraine campaign. Balck, however, ran afoul of German
Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and was unceremoniously
fired by Hitler in late December. But the Germans desperately
needed good commanders, and Guderian, by then the chief of
staff of the German army, intervened to have Balck reassigned
as the commander of the newly reconstituted Sixth Army, operating
in Hungary. At the end of the war Balck managed to prevent
his troops from falling into Soviet hands by surrendering
his command to Maj. Gen. Horace McBride, commander of
U.S. XX Gorps.
After the war Balck supported his family by working as a
manual laborer in a supply depot. In 1948 he was arrested by
the German government and put on trial for murder for ordering
the summary execution by firing squad in 1944 of a German
artillery battalion commander who was found drunk on duty.
Balck was convicted and served a short sentence.
Balck was one of the very few senior German commanders
captured by the Americans who refused to participate in the
U.S. Army's postwar historical debriefing program in the late
1940s and early 1950s. That, along with the fact that he spent
most of the war on the eastern front, accounts for his relative
obscurity today. In the late 1970s, however, he finally started
talking when he and Mellenthin participated in a number of
symposiums with senior American generals at the U.S. Army
War College.
Like Rommel, Balck was never a German general staff officer.
But Balck had several opportunities to become one, receiving
more than one invitation to attend the Kriegsakademie. Balck
always declined, saying he preferred to remain a line officer.
Unlike Rommel, though, Balck never succumbed to periods of
depression and self-pity. Wliile Rommel ran hot and cold, Balck
had a rock-solid consistency that emanated from his steely
intellectual and psychological toughness. Nonetheless, he was
known widely for his dry, almost British sense of humor and
consistently cheerful demeanor.
When Balck left the 11th Panzer Division in 1943 he was
given several weeks of well-deserved home leave and a bonus of
1,500 Reichsmarks (the equivalent of $8,000 today) to take his
wife on a trip. Instead, he held onto the money until the fall of
1944, when the 11 th Panzer Division was again under his command
as part of Army Group G. He then used all of the money
"to cover the costs of a pleasant evening" with all of the members
of the division who had fought with him in Russia, -k
A P R I L / M A Y 2 0 0 8
No One Ever Heard Of
In December 1942 Hermann Baick wiped out a force ten times his size in the most briiliantly fought divisional battie in modern military history.
December 1942 was a time of crisis for the
German army in Russia. The Sixth Army
was encircled in Stalingrad. Gen. Erich von
Manstein, the commander of Army Group
Don, planned to break the siege with a
dagger thrust to the Volga River from the
southwest by the Fourth Panzer Army,
supported by the XLVIII Panzer Corps to its immediate north
attacking across the Don River. But before the two German
units could link up, the Soviet Fifth Tank Army under the command
of Gen. P. L. Romanenko crossed the Chir River, a tributary
of the Don, and drove deep into German lines.
The XLVIII Panzer Q>rps was suddenly threatened with annihilation.
Its only significant combat power was the 11 th Panzer
Division, which only days before had been operating near
Roslavl in Belorussia, some four hundred miles to the northwest.
Still strung out along the line of march and arriving little
by little, the I Ith Division faced what amounted to mission
impossible. But arriving with its lead elements was the division
commander, Hermann BaIck, who was about to execute one of
the most brilliant performances of battlefield generalship in
modern military history.
Balck, who ended the war as a General der Panzertruppe
(equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Army), is today
virtually unknown except to the most serious students of World
War 11. Yet in three short weeks his lone panzer division virtually
destroyed the entire Soviet Fifth Tank Army. 1 he odds he
faced were scarcely short of incredible: the Soviets commanded
APRIL/MAY 2008
a local superiority of 7:1 in tanks, 11:1 in infantry, and 20:1 in
artillery. But Balck, leading from the front, reacting instantly to
each enemy thrust, repeatedly parried, surprised, and wiped out
superior Soviet detachments. Over the next few months his
division would rack up an astonishing one thousand enemy
tank kills. For this and other achievements Balck would be one
of only twenty-seven officers in the entire war—Erwin Rommel
was another—to receive the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves,
Swords, and Diamonds, the equivalent of an American receiving
two, or even three, Medals of Honor.
"Balck has strong claims to be regarded as our finest field
commander," declared Maj. Gen. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin.
And he was in a position to know: as a general staff officer
during the war, Mellenthin had worked at one point or
another for virtually all of Germany's greatest commanders—
including such legends as Rommel and Heinz Guderian.
here was no single characteristic that made
Balck such an outstanding combat leader.
Hermann Balck was the sum of thousands of
small factors that were deeply engrained in
him by the system under which he grew up.
What really made him great in the end was a
consistent ability to assess a situation almost
instantly, decide what had to be done, and then carry it out. In
any specific situation Balck almost always did what would have
been expected of a typical well-trained and experienced
German senior officer—and he always did it consistently and
unwaveringly, time after time. He never lost his nerve and he
almost never made a tactical mistake. He was always one step
ahead of his enemy, even in the relatively few situations when
he was initially taken by surprise.
Like many senior German officers of his generation, Balck
came from a military family, albeit a slightly unusual one. His
great-grandfather served under the Duke of Wellington in the
King's German Legion, and his grandfather was an officer in the
British Army's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Baick's
father, William Balck, was one of the German army's foremost
tactical writers in the years prior to World War I, and as a division
commander in that war won the Pour le Merite, Germany's
highest military order (popularly but somewhat irreverently
called the "Blue Max"). Balck himself was a mountain infantry
officer on the western, eastern, Italian, and Balkan fronts during
the First World War, serving almost three years as a company
commander. He was wounded seven times and in October 1918
was recommended for the Pour le Merite, but the war ended
before the award was fully processed.
At the start of World War II, Balck commanded the lead
infantry regiment that spearheaded the crossing of the Meuse
River by Guderian's panzers in May 1940. When his exhausted
troops collapsed to the ground after they crossed the river, Balck
walked to the head of the column, picked up a rifie, and pointed
Soviet tanks, viewed through a German forward observer's
"scissors" binoculars, advance toward the waiting enemy.
to the high ground ahead that was his regiment's objective.
Announcing that he was going to take the hill with or without
them, he started moving forward. His troops got up and followed
him to the top.
In early 1942 Balck was the inspector of mobile troops at the
German Army High Gommand, the same position held in 1938
by his mentor, Guderian. But Balck champed at the bit to get
back into combat. He later wrote in his memoirs:
In my position as Inspector of Mobile Troops I could only maintain
my authority through fresh experience at the front. This was
the official reason 1 gave when I requested a transfer to the front as
commander of a division. The real reason was that I had had
enough of the High Command. I have always been a soldier, not a
clerk, and I didn't want to be one in time of war.
His request was granted and, though still only a colonel, Balck
was assigned to command the 11th Panzer Division. Upon his
arrival in Russia he found a dismal situation. Morale was at rock
bottom. Almost all of the division's regimental and battalion
commanders were on sick leave. Ground down by months of
constant combat, only scattered remnants of the unit remained
intact. Balck had to rebuild his unit from scratch—while in
combat. Within a month he had the division back on its feet,
though it was still short of authorized vehicles by 40 percent.
During one of his first actions, Balck displayed his unfiappable
nerve leading from the front. Balck and his adjutant,
Major von Webski, were far forward when they came under
heavy Soviet artillery fire. As he was saying something to Balck,
Webski collapsed in midsentence—with a fatal shrapnel wound
to his left temple. Several days later Balck and his operations
officer were conferring over a map when a low-flying Soviet
fighter plane made a strafing run at them and put several bullet
holes into the map between them.
The German command system in World War II emphasized
face-to-face leadership, rather than the detailed and ponderous
written orders so beloved by American commanders. Balck
pushed the principle to the extreme, forbidding any written
orders at all. Describing one of his earliest actions with the 11th
Panzer Division, Balck wrote:
I did not issue a written order, but oriented my commanders
WORLD WAR II
with the help of a detailed war game and extensive terrain walks.
The advantage was that all misgivings could be eliminated; misunderstandings
and opinions could be resolved from the outset.
Unfortunately, my very competent chief of staff, Major von Kienitz,
brought everything together in the form of an operations order and
submitted it to corps. He got it back, carefully graded. I just said, "See
what you get by bringing attention to yourself?" We didn't change
our plan and we worked together in magnificent harmony from that
point on, but we never again submitted anything in writing.
By the end of November 1942 the German position in south
Russia had deteriorated significantly. The Germans' Italian,
Hungarian, and Romanian allies proved to be weak reeds, especially
when the weather in Russia turned cold. On November
19 the Soviets launched Operation Uranus: the Fifth Tank Army
crossed the Don River from the north and cut off the great bend
sector, advancing as far as the north bank of the Chir and the
west bank of the Don above the Chir. The Soviet Fifty-seventh
Army attacked from south of Stalingrad and joined the Fifth
Tank Army on the Don, cutting off the German Sixth Army.
On the night of December 1, the 11th Panzer Division was
alerted to move south from Roslavl to shore up the collapsing
sector of the Romanian Third Army. As the division loaded on
railcars, Balck and von Kienitz drove ahead to assess the situation
firsthand. What they found was far worse than what they
had expected. Along the 37-mile sector where the Chir ran
mostly north to south before turning east and flowing into the
Don, the Romanians had the tlimsiest of defensive lines, with
only a single 150mm howitzer for fire support. The XLVIII
Panzer Corps, under the command of Gen. Otto von Knobelsdorf,
was in an even worse position, trying to hold the lower
dogleg of the Chir and facing into the great bend of the Don,
which was now completely occupied by the Soviets. The right
side of the German line was held by tbe understrength 336th
Infantry Division. The left side was held by the next-to-worthless
Luftwaffe 7th Field Division, a unit of relatively wellequipped
but untrained airmen serving as infantry.
Balck and his advance party arrived on the scene on
December 6. The initial mission of the 11th Panzer Division was
to form the reserve of the XLVIII Panzer Corps' advance on
Stalingrad. But the following day elements of the Fifth Tank
Army crossed the Chir at multiple points, driving deep behind
the left flank of the 336th Infantry Division.
When the attack came, Balck and his key commanders were
making a ground reconnaissance in preparation for the planned
advance. Only Balck's 15th Panzer Regiment was in position. His
110th and U 1th Panzergrenadier Regiments were still moving
forward from the railheads at Millerovo and could not arrive
before the end of the day. At approximately 9:00 a.m. on
December 7, tbe LXVIIl Panzer Corps sent Balck's division command
post a warning order to bave the 15th Panzer Regiment
The Chir River Battles
Ku.viiun tronp
front lines
German troop
front lines
lUissiiin troop
tiKivement
Area of detail
Kalatsch •
German Sixth Army
llngrad
Morozovskaya
. ro Rostov Kalatsch
11'" Panzer 336'" infantry solonovski
Division HQ Division HQ =»oionovsKi
• Nizhna Chirskaya
M
In December
1942, Balck's
underequipped
fought a series of
battles along the
Soviet union's Chir
River, southwest of
Staliiigrad. Moving
out by night and
attacking by day,
the division virtually
destroyed the entire
Soviet Fifth Tank
Army, "It is true,
however, that the
question of when
the men of the
i i t f i Panzer got
any sleep was never
clearly answered,"
Balck later wrote.
A P R I L / M A Y 2 0 0 8
prepare for a counterattack. In the absence of their commander,
the divisional staff passed along the warning order. The 15th
Panzer Regiment started moving forward a half-hour later.
When Balck learned of the situation he immediately moved
to the 336th Infantry Division's command post near Verchne
Solonovski. Locating two divisional command posts together
violated German tactical doctrine and risked presenting the
enemy with a very lucrative target. Balck, however, realized that
in the coming fight, instantaneous coordination between the
two divisions would be vital, and with the primitive and unreliable
communications systems of the day, this was the only way
to do it. The Germans never considered their tactical doctrine
holy writ, and their commanders were authorized and even
expected to deviate from it whenever they thought the situation
required. Balck never hesitated to exercise that prerogative.
As Balck analyzed the flow of orders from the corps, he realized
that if the new threat was significant enough to derail the
'Each day was like the next/
Balck wrote. 'Take them by
surprise. Crush them'
corps' advance toward Stalingrad, then simply pushing the
Soviet tanks back across the river—as he was now being
instructed to do—was far too timid a course of action. Working
with Mellenthin, then chief of staff of XLVIII Panzer Gorps,
Balck managed to get the mission of his division changed to
destroying the Soviet forces on the near side of the river. That
was the first time Balck and Mellinthin worked together, starting
a successful partnership that would last for most of the war.
With his Panzergrenadier regiments not yet in position, Balck
had little choice but to commit his units piecemeal. Despite
being supported by Baick's 15th Panzer Regiment, the 336th
Infantry Division was unable to prevent the Soviet I Tank Corps
from penetrating ten miles beyond the Chir, reaching State
Collective Farm 79 by nightfall on December 7. There, the
Soviets caught by surprise and massacred the divisional trains
of the 336th. But while the Soviets consolidated their position
for the night, Balck methodically brought up the remainder of
his units and prepared to strike the next day.
It was obvious to Balck that the Soviets' next move would be
an attempt to roll up the 336th Infantry Division. To prevent
that, he screened the division's left flank with his own engineer,
antitank, and antiaircraft battalions. Simultaneously, he moved
his three maneuver regiments into their attack positions. Before
dawn on December 8, just as the Soviets were starting their
move, he struck. By the end of the day the Soviet I Tank Corps
had lost fifty-three tanks and effectively ceased to exist.
For the next three days Balck and his division fought a series
of running battles, eliminating bridgeheads across the Chir as
soon as the Soviets established them. The 336th Infantry
formed the shield against which the Soviets struck; the panzers
were the hammer that destroyed them. Balck continually moved
his units at night and attacked during the day, employing speed,
surprise, and shock action. "Night marches save blood" became
Baick's principal axiom, Balck described his command style in
his memoirs:
My brilliant chief of staff, Major Kienitz, remained in a fixed
position somewhat to the rear of the fighting, maintaining contact
with God and me and all the world by radio. I was mobile, at the
focus of the action. Generally ! visited each regiment several times
a day. While I was out I decided on my course of action for the next
day. I discussed the plan by telephone with Kienitz, then drove to
each regiment and briefed the commander personally on the next
day's plan. Then I drove back to my command post and telephoned
Colonel Mellenthin, the chief of staff at XLVIII Panzer
Gorps. If Knobelsdorff, the commanding general, agreed, I let the
regiments know. No change in plans. If any changes were necessary,
I drove out during the night and visited each regiment again.
There were no misunderstandings. At dawn I once again positioned
myself at the decisive point.
By December 15 the 1 Ith Panzer Division had been marching
by night and fighting by day for eight continuous days in a
seemingly never-ending cycle of fire brigade actions. Describing
this period, Balck wrote in his memoirs:
Each day was like the next. Russian penetration at Point X,
counterattack, everything cleared up by evening. Then, another
report 20 kilometers eastwards of a deep penetration into some
hasty defensive position. About face. Tanks, infantry and artillery
march through the winter night with burning headlights. In position
by dawn at the Russians' most sensitive point Take them by
surprise. Grush them. Then repeat the process the next day some
W or 20 kilometers farther west or cast.
Meanwhile, on December 10 the Fourth Panzer Army had
begun its move toward Stalingrad; XLVIII Panzer Corps still had
the mission to cross the Don River and link up with this advance.
But as Balck was at last preparing to take his units across the river
on December 17, the Soviets struck elsewhere.
The new Soviet thrust. Operation Saturn, threatened to drive
to Rostov at the mouth of the Don on the Azov Sea. If successful,
it would cut off Army Group Don from the rear and seal off
all of Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist's Army Group A in the
Caucasus. Manstein had no option but to divert the bulk of the
Fourth Panzer Army to defend Rostov. That in turn sealed the
fate of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad—which finally fell
on February 2, 1943.
The new Soviet attack was supported by more Fifth Tank
Army strikes against XLVIII Panzer Corps. Balck led another
night march and before dawn on December 19 once again took
a superior Soviet force completely by surprise. Baick's 15th
WORLD WAR II
A German tank
marked with
the 11th Panzer
Division's "flying
ghost" insignia
traverses snowy
Russian terrain.
o
Panzer Regiment was down to about twenty-five operational
tanks when it came upon the rear of a march column of fortytwo
tanks from the Soviet Motor Mechanized Corps at Nizhna
Kalinovski. Balck's tanks slipped into the rear of the Soviet
column in the darkness "as if on parade," he wrote in his memoirs.
The Soviets mistook the German tanks for their own.
Before the Soviets knew what was happening, the panzers
opened fire and rolled up the entire column, destroying every
one of the enemy tanks.
Balck's panzers then turned to meet a column of twenty-three
Soviet tanks approaching in the second echelon. On lower
ground, the Germans had perfect belly shots when the Soviet
tanks crested the higher ground to their front. By the end of the
German tanks slipped into the
rear of the Soviet column 'as if
on parade/ in Balck's words
day the 15th Panzer Regiment had destroyed another Soviet
corps and its sixty-five tanks without suffering a single loss.
Balck's units were in night defensive positions when Kienitz
awakened him at 2:00 a.m. on December 21:
There was the devil to pay. The UOth broken through, the
lllth overrun. The Panzer regiment signaled: Situation serious.
In the bright moonlit night the Russians had attacked at the
boundary between the two Panzergrenadier regiments. When I
arrived on the scene the situation had already been consolidated
somewhat. To close the gap between the regiments I organized
a counterattack with [the motorcycle company of the Panzer
Reconnaissance Battalion] and some tanks. By 0900 hours the
situation was pretty well in hand. Hundreds of dead Russians lay
in and around our positions.
The series of defensive battles along the Chir was over. The
Fifth Tank Army had been virtually destroyed. But tactical victory
did not translate to operational success for the Germans,
who were being pushed farther and farther back from the Don.
On December 22 the XLVIII Panzer Corps received orders to
move immediately ninety miles to the west and establish blocking
positions at Morozovskaya to screen Rostov. Hitler ordered
Morozovskaya held at all costs.
When Balck first arrived at Morozovskaya a Soviet tank corps
was bearing down on the city from the north, and threatening
to envelop the town of Tatsinskaya on the left. The only thing
standing in front of them was a thin defensive screen of scratch
units. Balck concluded:
The situation was desperate. [The German defenders'] only
hope lay with a single tired and depleted division that was coming
up in driblets. In my opinion the situation was so dismal that it
WORLD WAR II
could only be mastered through audacity—in other words, by
attacking. Any attempts at defense would mean our destruction.
We needed to crush the westernmost enemy column first in order
to gain some swing space. We would just have to hope—against
reason—that the hodge-podge of troops covering Morosovskaya
would hold for a day.
With only twenty operational tanks and one understrength
infantry battalion, Balck moved toward Skassyrskaya to block
the oncoming Soviets. After securing the town with brief but
heavy fighting on December 24, he moved on to Tatsinskaya,
which put him in the Soviet rear. With his entire division still
strung out along the route of march from the Chir, Balck
deployed his units in a circle around Tatsinskaya as they started
to arrive. When the commander of the Soviet XXIV Tank Corps
learned that German tanks were in his rear and his line of communications
had been cut, he ordered all his units to consolidate
around his position at Hill 175. The order was sent by
radio—and in the clear. When the Uth Panzer Division intercepted
the transmission, Balck knew he had his enemy in a trap.
Balck closed the ring around the XXIV Tank Corps, but his
division had been moving and fighting too long and too hard.
It was down to only eight operational tanks. Balck did not have
the combat power to eliminate the Soviets. On Christmas Day
the Germans still could not break into the cauldron, but neither
could the Soviets break out. By the end of the day, however, Baick
received operational control of one of the Panzergrenadier regiments
and an assault gun battalion from the newly arriving 6th
Panzer Division.
Over the next three days Balck continued to tighten the vise
on the Tatsinskaya pocket, which finally burst on December 28,
with the Soviets attempting a breakout to the northwest. But
only twelve tanks and thirty trucks managed to escape initially,
and when Balck's forces sprung, they first annihilated all
remaining Soviet units inside the pocket, then turned to pursue
the escaping column and destroy all those vehicles as well.
Another Soviet corps had been wiped out at the hands of
Balck's understrength division. Balck had pulled off a modernday
Cannae, and from that point on the 1 ltb Panzer Division
was known by the code name "Hannibal."
aick went on to fight more winter battles
until he was reassigned in early March 1943.
On his last day in command his division
destroyed its thousandth tank since his
arrival. During the period from December 7,
1942, through January 31, 1943, the Uth
Panzer Division was credited with destroying
225 tanks, 347 antitank guns, 35 artillery pieces, and killing
30,700 Soviet soldiers. Balck's losses for the same period
were 16 tanks, 12 antitank guns, 215 soldiers killed in action,
1,019 wounded, and 155 missing.
While in command of the 11th Panzer Division, Balck was
Balck's successes still
didn't prevent German dead
from piling up in Stalingrad,
where Soviets encircled the
German Sixth Army.
promoted to Generalmajor (U.S. Army one-star equivalent)
and then to Generalleutnant (two-star equivalent). He later
returned to Russia to command the XLVIII Panzer Corps,
where Mellenthin was still the chief of staff. When Balck commanded
the Fourth Panzer Army in August 1944, his counterattack
brought the Soviet offensive in the great bend of the
Vistula River to a halt.
In the fall of 1944 Balck went to the western front, commanding
Army Group G against Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. in the
Lorraine campaign. Balck, however, ran afoul of German
Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and was unceremoniously
fired by Hitler in late December. But the Germans desperately
needed good commanders, and Guderian, by then the chief of
staff of the German army, intervened to have Balck reassigned
as the commander of the newly reconstituted Sixth Army, operating
in Hungary. At the end of the war Balck managed to prevent
his troops from falling into Soviet hands by surrendering
his command to Maj. Gen. Horace McBride, commander of
U.S. XX Gorps.
After the war Balck supported his family by working as a
manual laborer in a supply depot. In 1948 he was arrested by
the German government and put on trial for murder for ordering
the summary execution by firing squad in 1944 of a German
artillery battalion commander who was found drunk on duty.
Balck was convicted and served a short sentence.
Balck was one of the very few senior German commanders
captured by the Americans who refused to participate in the
U.S. Army's postwar historical debriefing program in the late
1940s and early 1950s. That, along with the fact that he spent
most of the war on the eastern front, accounts for his relative
obscurity today. In the late 1970s, however, he finally started
talking when he and Mellenthin participated in a number of
symposiums with senior American generals at the U.S. Army
War College.
Like Rommel, Balck was never a German general staff officer.
But Balck had several opportunities to become one, receiving
more than one invitation to attend the Kriegsakademie. Balck
always declined, saying he preferred to remain a line officer.
Unlike Rommel, though, Balck never succumbed to periods of
depression and self-pity. Wliile Rommel ran hot and cold, Balck
had a rock-solid consistency that emanated from his steely
intellectual and psychological toughness. Nonetheless, he was
known widely for his dry, almost British sense of humor and
consistently cheerful demeanor.
When Balck left the 11th Panzer Division in 1943 he was
given several weeks of well-deserved home leave and a bonus of
1,500 Reichsmarks (the equivalent of $8,000 today) to take his
wife on a trip. Instead, he held onto the money until the fall of
1944, when the 11 th Panzer Division was again under his command
as part of Army Group G. He then used all of the money
"to cover the costs of a pleasant evening" with all of the members
of the division who had fought with him in Russia, -k
A P R I L / M A Y 2 0 0 8
