STAVKA Military Review 2 Dec 1941
Despite the stunning successes of the opening week of Zapad, Soviet forces are now becoming slowly bogged down along the pre-war German-Polish border. The relative speeds of Kirponos' and Zhukov's sectors has led to three problems:
a) Kirponos is now trying to hold too much of the front, the result is that his Shock Armies are only just catching up with the armour and the tanks are now too spread out to manage quick breakthroughs;
b) The pockets, esp in Zhukov's sector, have netted a lot of German POWs, but took time to reduce, this, combined with the original mis-placement of 3 Tank Army means his formations are only now reaching the front and are too bunched together;
c) Supply!
Accordingly both sectors are ordered over to the defensive for now, with only limited attacks to improve the Soviet position at Danzig. A fresh offensive is now in planning for 20 December.
In Zhukov's sector, the main issue is the intermingling of formations, the need to bring 3 Tank Army into action and that 1 Tank Army is too spread out:
Kirponos, in a way has the opposite problem, he has had almost no problems clearing out the pockets (I now think that JS may have been right a few posts back - relatively there was too much power in this part of the offensive), but his Southern Flank is becoming snagged up on the ongoing battles in Slovakia and N Hungary.
Meanwhile in the Arctic, the main problems are supplies and the length of time it is taking to reduce the German positions on the Swedish-Finnish border. Accordingly, any further breakout will have to wait till 34A clears the border, 33A can take its time in reducing the German armour in the far north as they are no threat. Sweden has been liberated as a Soviet puppet regime and 28 A at Stockholm is slowly expanding its position. The Germans have launched a naval counterattack at Lulea which is not helping!
The Balkan sector is developing slowly, but the main forces in Hungary have stopped the German offensive and are now pushing north - this now has some urgency as the German formations in E Slovakia are causing Kirponos difficulties. Offensive operations into Croatia and Greece as well as in Hungary will continue and Yugoslavia will be liberated once Croatia has surrendered.
At the end of the meeting, Stalin turns on Zhukov and tells him first to sort out how to properly use the heavy armour of 3 Tank Army and second, 'to get there' soon.
In a wider sense, despite the lack of major counterattacks, Soviet casualties have been horrendous. I'm currently allocating around 60 IC just to reinforcements and a number of Infantry divisions are at 20% organisation. At least German strategic bombing has slowed down, but again a number of PVO squadrons are shredded and will take an age to rebuild.
The 'problem' with the 3rd Tank Army seems to be twofold. One is that right at the start all the other tank armies went in on the tips of the border salients, 3 TA was launched into the base of a salient - with hindsight it would have been better to have use rifle armies there to hold the Germans and then envelop them. The second is the lack of speed of the early KV1/2s. They are like lumbering beasts, in combat those units take almost no losses (org or manpower), but they take an age to get to where they are needed.
One solution is that I'm picking up a lot more leadership so am trying to improve their stats overall.
