The Battle of Smolensk

The Smolensk Defensive Operation ​

“‘Land of song’ said the warrior-bard
’Tho’ all the world betrays thee
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard
One faithful harp shall praise thee’“
-Thomas Moore, “The Minstrel Boy”​

Phase I: The Retreat to the Dvina-Dnieper Line

With the destruction of the Western Front at the culminating point of Operation Teutonic, the Soviet front-line was at the edge of disaster. The situation was untenable, and as Army Group Centre poured into the gaping wound it had gored in the Red Army, the rest of the front-line threatened to roll up like a carpet.

German operational pauses gave very little time for orderly retreat except in Ukraine, where the destruction of Panzer Group 1 gave the Southwestern Front time to organize an orderly retreat to the old fortifications of the Stalin Line on the Dnieper River. This retreat went hand-in-hand with the evacuation of civilians, agricultural and industrial assets from the zone-of-retreat, and a comprehensive scorched-earth campaign that gave the Germans nothing to succor their defeat at Rivne but ash and mud.

Hitler consistently pushed back at the OKW’s insistence on a drive on Moscow as the focus of the campaign, preferring to capture immediately the strategic resources of the Eastern Ukrainian mining and industrial regions. But this was in the immediate terms well out of his grasp, and no one could deny that. Army Group South, particularly the armies of the Axis partners, had been ravaged and would need to refit and rebuild before another major offensive campaign.

The Wehrmacht’s preferred targets of Leningrad and Moscow were now the best option, and as planning began in early June, it seemed like there was little in the way to stop a renewed offensive.

Soviet reservists were mobilising far faster than anyone in the German High Command could anticipate though, and even after the failure of the immediate counterattacks Stalin still wanted to drive the invaders out immediately. Stalin leaned heavily on his new Chief-of-Staff Mikhail Frunze to make this a reality. And with the mass of reservists mobilising and the Americans being highly cooperative, Frunze conceded that a rapid reversal might be possible.

The RKKA would have to raise over a hundred division equivalents from scratch just to make up for the losses and meet the Germans at rough parity, and these new divisions would be a shadow of the pre-war divisions in terms of organization and equipment. Soviet soldiers would have to launch into mortal combat denuded of infantry support tanks, heavy artillery and specialized engineering equipment.

Organisationally, the fronts of the Western TVO were consolidated. Kirponos’ Southwest Front absorbed most of the assets of the Southern Front; the remainder were attached to the expanded Separate Coastal Army holding Odessa and the Crimean Peninsula, directly reporting to the Stavka of the Main Command. The shattered remains of the Western Front were combined with the second echelon units of the Smolensk Front to form the Central Front, now under the command of Semyon Timoshenko. The remnants of the Baltic Front were reorganized with the southern armies of the Northwest Front to form the Leningrad Front, while armies adjacent to Finland were detached to the newly formed Karelian Front.

An additional front headquarters, the Novgorod Front, was established from the newly raised 29th, 30th and 32nd Armies, plugging the gap on the Dvina River between the Central Front and the Leningrad Front. Another front, currently organized as the Reserve Front, was established southeast of Moscow to reinforce the seam between the Central and Southwest Fronts.

Soviet strategic objectives for the late summer campaign season were set in the GKO circular of 18 June 1940 as, in order of priority: 1) Hold both banks of the Dneiper River and ensure its continued navigability 2) Reinforce the eastern bank of the Dvina River to prevent the German Army from breaking out of the Baltic countries and 3) Strategic Counteroffensive to encircle or otherwise destroy Army Group Centre west of Smolensk.

It would take considerable pressure from the Stavka of the Main Command to push these ambitions back towards a more realistic position. In June, the Operations Directorate reported that of the 225 divisions in the Western TVO, precisely zero of them were in a readiness state for offensive operations. Due to reorganizations, manpower limitations, and equipment losses, the standard Soviet rifle division had been slimmed down to just 9,500 men at full strength, just over half that of a German infantry division. Most were far below that strength.

Fresh divisions were mobilizing, and many others were relocating from Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East. But the RKKA would be prepared no earlier than October for any offensive action.

Phase II: Operation Icebreaker

During this retreat, the Axis applied pressure along the entire front even as forces consolidated and reserves (especially armor) were transferred. The Wehrmacht had run to the end of its logistical tether, and the staggering losses incurred at the Battle of Rivne encouraged Hitler to assume more direct control of operational planning.

For now, this meant yanking on the OKW’s leash, who wanted to preserve operational tempo by lunging deeper into the Soviet Union before they could regroup. The next phase of German offensive operations would require a two pronged assault and the logistical situation needed to catch up.

Simultaneous attacks would have to be made both to Soviet concentrations defending the approach to Moscow as well as to the Dnieper River industrial zone. Striking straight to Moscow, as Franz Halder insisted, would leave the Southwest Front poised on a long flank, ready to embarrass the Heer yet again.

Similarly, the long lunge to Moscow would require taking Leningrad and the main trunkline to Moscow. With the destruction of Panzergruppe 1 , there were only enough panzer divisions available to push in two sectors. Panzergruppen 4 and 5 would have to be transferred from Army Group North to make the offensive possible. The two additional Panzergruppen forming in Germany would not be ready for operations until Winter at the earliest, and Hitler wished to keep them in reserve in case France re-evaluated its strategic situation.

The railways would have to be repaired and reguaged, and additional locomotives and rolling stock procured to support the offensive. With tens of thousands of Red Army troops forming partisan commands behind German lines, this would be no easy task. German machinations continued with genocidal determination, as the first meeting of the Comintern Combined Staff met in Moscow.

The plan for the destruction of Army Group Centre was named Operation Icebreaker, and chief operational planning for this multi-front offensive would begin under the direction of General Frunze, serving as the GKO representative for the Western TVO. The American Joint Staff Mission pledged everything it could to make the plan a reality.

With Soviet mechanised forces smashed, the main punch of the counteroffensive would be supplied by the American expeditionary force. For the rest of the year, the RevMilCouncil would pursue a quality over quantity approach as the WFRA mobilised.

For this, they’d have to once again reinvent the wheel of their doctrine. Rather than deploy the existing WFRA combined arms armies, with their mix of motorised line infantry, tanks, mechanized infantry and supporting assets, the Separate Mechanised Army was formed from the headquarters of the reserve 8th Army. Two mechanised corps, the 5th and 7th, would be pulled from their role as army mobile groups. An additional Airborne Corps was established, with the 82nd and 101st Airborne transferred from Stavka Reserve.

The Separate Mechanised Army would deploy immediately to the Soviet Union, directly reporting to Stavka, with Lieutenant General Patton in command. Army Air Forces assets arrived well in advance of the Army Land Forces. These veteran fighter regiments had cut their teeth as “volunteer groups” in the Spanish and Chinese Civil Wars, and now arrayed in western Russia they must fight tooth and nail to prevent the Luftwaffe from running riot.

As the main weight of Army Group Centre trudged forward to their starting points on the Vitebsk-Mogilev-Gomel line, the Separate Mechanised Army filtered into Velikiye Luki, 127 km north-by-northeast of Vitebsk. The battle plan for Operation Icebreaker would utilize the the Separate Mechanised Army as a rapier, bypassing forward strong-points of Army Group Centre to cut deep into the German rear, interdicting the main road and rail lines and reaching the city of Minsk, nearly 300 km from the starting point.

The Soviet 6th Army, with the Southwest Front’s tank and mechanised brigades organised into three Cavalry-Mechanised Corps with the front’s three cavalry divisions, would strike simultaneously from the beacheads across the Dnieper near Kiev. Attacking into the weak linkage between Army Group South and Army Group Centre, 6th Army would isolate the German center of gravity and punch through the chink in German lines to meet east of Minsk.

If the Comintern could pull it off, it would be a stupendous military success equal or greater in scale to the destruction of the Western Front at Bialystok-Minsk. It would isolate and encircle the bulk of Army Group Centre deep in hostile territory, at the end of their logistical tether, allowing the concentric assault by the Central Front to smash them.

The key to the advance would be a frantic operational tempo. To make it possible, the major concentration of American air power would be used to cover the hitherto largest airborne operation in history, deploying two full airborne divisions of paratroop and glider troops into the rear to secure lines of communication. The paralytic effect by airborne troops sitting astride roads and rail-lines and wherever possible securing bridges before they could be destroyed would speed the advance of the two operational maneuver groups.

The political situation in Moscow was fraught. The Americans were making promises, but aside from the delivery of war materiel, they were all in the future. Many were naturally skeptical. And similarly, the presence of former White exiles now collaborating put the Kremlin in a tense mood. The working relationship between Frunze and Wrangel, the oldest of adversaries, was particularly icy. At the staff meeting on 18 October, the two engaged in particularly pointed barbs after Frunze casually mentioned Wrangel’s still undelivered promise of a White exile legion.

Wrangel interrupted to defend himself against what he considered an attack on his loyalty to Russia, stating: “I thought that you Red scum who recognize neither God nor Country, who bring confusion and shame in their wake, were bad enough. However, you are nothing compared to these Germans who are delivering all-Russia over to pillage and ruin in a global conflagration. The National Socialists are the greatest common enemy of liberty and order, and I will not sit to the side and be an accomplice to that.”

Phase III: A Bridge Too Far

The counteroffensive was scheduled to begin on 7 November, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. It would take a superhuman logistical effort to move the nearly quarter million American ground troops, hundreds of warplanes, and all their equipment for the operation. Nearly two thousand tanks, thousands of field and anti-tank guns, nearly a hundred thousand trucks for it and to supplement the Soviet Army were shipped via Vladivostok and Murmansk, arrayed and drilled for the operation.

Six days before the already premature launch date, the Germans struck first. The savage fighting in Ukraine had not been enough to sap their strength. Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 joined the Second Army attacking the main Soviet defensive line south of Velikiye Luki. Panzergruppe 3 under General Hoth broke through towards Roslavl.

These attacks were heralded by the sudden arrival of the V. and VII. Fliegerkorps to new forward air bases in Byelorussia. With the OKW now confident of France’s diplomatic position, the renewed German assault could begin with a superior correlation of force in both the air and on land.

With many American air regiments still awaiting aircraft, fuel or pilots, and the VVS’ back still broken, Operation Sedantag began with German tactical aviation running riot over Soviet lines. Already tenuous morale among Soviet troops faltered rapidly as news spread of the speed and depth of German penetrations.

The Revolutionary Army Air Forces had clashed sporadically with the Luftwaffe since late summer, with the small but growing American Expeditionary Force concealing by using Russian for radio traffic and painting its plains with VVS livery as part of a deliberate strategy of maskirovka. The VVS flying known American models like the F-34 was far from surprising.

In these clashes, the RAAF gained a good estimation of its adversary. The Bf 109 was fast, especially in a dive, and maneuverable enough in the hands of a capable pilot. Its time-to-altitude performance suited the nature of air war in the East, dictated largely by coverage of ground forces.

The real weapon, though, were the pilots, who’d been building institutional knowledge in active combat for several years. But they were also held back by the need to cover the large fleet of close air support and bomber aircraft, and those airframes were notably less sophisticated. Without fighter cover, they were largely helpless against interceptors, and few had anything larger than rifle calibre machine guns for defensive armament.

The strategy worked out by the RAAF was to avoid dogfighting whenever possible. 1 on 1, the F-34C was a superior dogfighter to the Bf 109. But in 1940, it would always be outnumbered. Instead, the RAAF used the turbocharged Allison engine to its fullest, cruising at altitudes above the performance optimum for the Bf 109E and early F models. They’d make diving attacks on fighter and bomber formations and avoid losing the energy advantage before retreating.

It was considered cowardly work, and contributed to accusations that the Americans were hiding behind their allies, but the Stavka understood the need for unglamorous Fabian actions. Increasing enemy attrition while conserving strength was the best method of resistance in the interim.

By 3 November, the main line of resistance was collapsing. Operation Icebreaker was shelved indefinitely, and the Separate Mechanised Army would move to plug the gaps. The Airborne Corps would rush forward into battle against Panzergruppe 3 , with the main bulk of the Separate Mechanised Army would strike south against the Second Army and Panzergruppe 2.

The Wehrmacht as a whole had treated the defeat at Rivne as an embarrassing fluke on their propagandistic and inflated “undefeated record”. Now as they clashed with the cream of the WFRA and the veterans of the RKKA’s border battles in the Far East, the hope for a quick victory in the east died.

German military attitudes about Americans had been formed predominantly during the years of 1915-17 during the Great War, when the fledgling National Army had endured embarrassment after embarrassment in France. The pervasiveness of the Dolchstosslegende even among those who should have known better prevented the defeats the Entente inflicted on the Imperial Army from changing this analysis. While there were dissenters (Heinz Guderian among their most notable in the Heer ‘s senior officers), the general belief was that Americans were going to be a non-entity in the war in the East. The common refrain “The American would not die for the French in the last war? Why would he die for the Russian now?” had to be quickly unlearned.

Phase IV: Operation Little Icebreaker

The two-pronged American counterattack coincided with the loss of Luftwaffe air dominance. In the three weeks of fighting before the heavy, melting snows turned the countryside into a quagmire, it was no-man’s sky above Smolensk Oblast, with both sides suffering high attrition in pilots and equipment.

The WFRA was not content to hide behind Soviet lines, as Guderian soon learned the hard way. Doctrinally, their first instinct was always to attack, and they did so with mechanical efficiency and cold-blooded aggression. The pitiless thunder of American artillery almost always heralded a combined arms attack by infantry and armor. The rapid penetrations into the German rear areas were made possible by intense, precise artillery fires called in, plotted and carried out in mere minutes. This speed, coupled with the robust logistical backbone of the WFRA, multiplied the effective firepower.

The initial reports from the front invariably overestimated the number of artillery pieces they were facing. But the American Kanonenkult was not made by the number of artillery tubes; an American formation would typically have a similar number of artillery pieces as its German counterpart. It was the combination of highly detailed military maps, the wide proliferation of radios in the WFRA, and the use of pre-computed artillery firing tables that allowed artillery support to be summoned quickly and effectively.

The Airborne Corps, consisting of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, with the 19th Grenadier Division and the 45th Breakthrough Tank Brigade attached, struck the flank of Panzergruppe 3 near the village of Yelnya, bringing the Smolensk encirclement operation to a halt. Using infiltration tactics, the paratroopers shattered the main line of resistance on the morning of 5 November, allowing the 45th Tank Brigade to thrust deep into the German rear.

German counter attacks began immediately, but were quickly frustrated. The local tank concentrations could not find space to maneuver, and frontal attacks against the phalanx of anti-tank artillery, rifles and rifle grenades were fruitless. Though heavily outnumbered, the small number of T-5 “Paul Bunyan” heavy tanks of the 45th were decisively superior to the Panzer III, and worked to defeat-in-detail pockets of German armor and field guns.

The next morning, General Hoth ordered a pause to further exploitation to deal with the threat at his rear. His operational goal, Vyazama, was only eighty kilometers away, and Panzers had made single day advances greater than that before. But it might as well have been on the moon right now.

Over the next three days, Panzergruppe 3 and the Fourth Army would hammer at the Yelnya defense arc with everything they had, but the paratroopers held onto the reclaimed ground like ticks as Soviet troops filtered in from what would have been the Smolensk cauldron to reinforce them.

Further north, Guderian had reached the outskirts of Vyazma only to find his ass left hanging in the wind. Hoth had only lost ground since, and all of Hitler’s exhortations could not move the front forward. Without the pressure of the double-envelopment, the Soviet 30th Army held fast against his attacks despite the heavy casualties.

At 0500 Moscow time on 9 November 1940, the trap was sprung. The American 5th and 7th Mechanised Corps filtered through the Soviet lines near the town of Velizh. Just after a short but concentrated artillery barrage, they scythed into the German 56. Infanterie-Division.

The battle quickly turned into a rout, the kind that the Wehrmacht had inflicted on numerous foes in Poland, the Balkans and Byelorussia but until now had never been on the receiving end. German 3.7cm anti-tank guns were entirely useless, and the smaller number of less mobile 5 cm guns proved totally inadequate against the frontal armor of American tanks. When they encountered similar problems with Soviet T-34s, German infantry could make up the deficit by exploiting the poor infantry/armor cooperation of the Soviets to close in and destroy Soviet tanks in close battle.

This was not possible when infantry, armor and artillery operated in close synchronization. The Separate Mechanised Army overran the entirety of the LIII. Armeekorps , advancing 75 kilometres in the day.

The rest of the German Second Army, along with Panzergruppe 2 it was supporting, were now isolated and in danger of encirclement. Guderian wheeled south immediately to engage the American tanks.

The combination of attrition, supply shortage and exhaustion had taken its toll though. The Panzer III tanks were knocked out by the dozens in fighting on the 10th, as Panzer kampfgruppen smashed against the American lines to little effect. Guderian made the decision to withdraw without consulting von Kluge at Army Group Centre’s headquarters, and spared this army from being trapped. General Maximilian von Weichs at Second Army, who heeded von Kluge’s order to not retreat in the face of the Soviet Central Front and cede the recently taken city of Smolensk and instead trust that Third Army would contain the situation, would not be so lucky.

At 1512 Moscow Time on 12 November, the lead tanks of the 3rd Tank Division linked up with the Airborne Corps south of Yelnya, an hour after the last of Guderian’s troops had escaped. For his tactical acumen, Guderian would be relieved of his command as whispers of court-martial echoed through the halls of the OKH.

Phase V: The Noose Tightens

Elements of 11 German infantry divisions, constituting the bulk of the manpower and equipment of Second Army, were trapped in an oblong pocket stretching from Yartsevo to Smolensk. But now that they had the Germans pinned, the Red Army had to hold them there. The pocket was too large and currently too well supplied and organised to reduce out of hand. Instead, the Soviet and American forces would have to shift forward to prevent relief by the rest of Army Group Centre while simultaneously building an inner defensive ring around Smolensk to keep the Second Army contained.

Blizzard conditions and heavy snow blanketed the area from the 13th to the 16th, hindering both sides’ efforts. The Soviet Army was better prepared for the winter conditions, but the Central and Reserve Fronts still suffered tremendous attrition during the snowy march. The tanks of the Separate Mechanised Army were down to an average of a few litres of fuel and seven rounds per vehicle by the time the skies cleared and resupply trucks could slowly crawl to them.

Von Weichs used these days to dig-in heavily to the city of Smolensk, withdrawing his perimeter dramatically. When the weather cleared, the Luftwaffe renewed its air offensive as it began a sky-bridge to resupply the army with fuel and ammunition.

Panzergruppen 4 and 5 , who were initially supposed to take part of exploitation operations towards Moscow and Kiev, were now tasked with cracking the siege. But the clock was ticking, with the German transport fleet suffering unsustainable attrition from a combination of mechanical wear, anti-aircraft guns and Soviet fighters.

The early onset of winter weather similarly wrought havoc on the German Army. When nighttime temperatures plummeted to -30° C routinely during the week of 17 November, most of the motorised and mechanised assets of Army Group Centre were immobilised, forcing the relief operation to be postponed another week. Tank engines refused to start, and several were lost to fire as crews tried to thaw frozen radiators and warm up engine oil that had turned to sludge. The paucity of food and winter clothing, which lost out to the pressing need for fuel and munitions in the limited transport capacity, made life hell for German soldiers.

Second Army at least initially fared better, able to keep its forces fed and in doors as much as possible in the urban environment, utilizing winter stores of food and fuel to the detriment of the trapped civilian population. “Anti-partisan operations” consumed much of the spare time, which in reality was little more than the rape, murder and brutalization of the civilian population by landsers seething at being bested by “degenerates” and “subhumans”.

On 21 November, a warm air front moved north, bringing relief from the arctic chill. This proved to be too much of a good thing, as the snows began to thaw as the Panzertruppen began their counterattack on the 23rd. Tank on tank combat was fierce once American tanks maneuvered to the German schwerpunkt. Only the small handful of 7.5 cm KwK 40 armed PzKpfw III Ausf. F tanks rushed to the front could fight on anywhere close to equal terms.

As the snow turned into a sea of slush and mud, the attack ground to a halt. The narrow tracks of the Panzers and their half-track personnel carriers were ill-suited to the rasputitsa conditions. Soviet and American tanks were frustrated as well, but their broader tracks and lower resulting ground pressures allowed them to continue to maneuver.

As the counterattacks drowned in the mud, the noose tightened around Smolensk. Soviet attacks grew more frequent, and the pace of shelling quickened. The skybridge faltered, and by 25 November, the operation was cancelled. Soviet infantry began to push into the outskirts of the city, fighting the Germans in a house-by-house, block-by-block struggle.

Von Weichs continued to receive explicit orders to not surrender. But as it became clear that the full might of Army Group Centre was not enough to dislodge the Soviet 21st Army and the Separate Mechanised Army, continued resistance was hopeless, and the Second Army was now an active detriment to the Wehrmacht by its continued existence. On the evening of 1 December 1940, Von Weichs ordered the Second Army to surrender.

Aftermath: Total War

On 2 December, Hitler issued a Fuhrer directive halting all large-scale offensive operations on the Eastern Front. The heads were rolling at the OKW and OKH, and now men who had previously been disgraced, such as Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb and Walter Reichenau, made their way back to prominence as ardent converts to the Nazi ethos.

With the hope of another quick war dashed, Reich Minister for Propaganda Joseph Goebbels turned the defeat into a spectacle. Amid tens of thousands of cheering stalwarts of the Nazi faithful, Goebbels asked those fateful words, “Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine?”

The spectacle was captured in color with all the crisp clarity of 70mm film by Leni Riefenstahl in the propaganda film Der Sturm. It, along with all the depictions of the might of the Wehrmacht and the selectively captured moments of occupied territories “freed from Judeo-Bolshevism” were a means to counter flagging morale on the home front in the face of sharp reduction of standard of living by reduced rationing, increased work hours and other measures of total war mobilisation. It was also a statement to the rest of the world to convince those it could from across Europe to enlist in the now open Waffen-SS foreign legion, and to pressure their governments to side with Germany in the “clash of civilization.”

The reality was that Germany had to at least temporarily stop its eliminationist measures in the occupied Soviet Union to instead focus on using those populations as forced labor to enable the mobilisation of more men for the war effort.

Deep reforms of tactics and strategy were underway in the German General Staff. The gaps in equipment, particularly in the field of tanks and aircraft, would be rectified. There wouldn’t be mere parity with the enemy’s machines, Hitler had demanded that Germany could and would do better. This reorganization of German war economy further benefited the Todt-Ford clique in the Nazi Party.

On the Soviet home front, it was the first real victory of the whole campaign. As Pyrrhic as it was in terms of casualties, a whole German field army had been destroyed. Almost a hundred thousand German prisoners of war would be paraded through Moscow, as the Red Army leading the procession cast the captured banners and medals at the footsteps of the Palace of the Soviets.

The Soviet Union would endure and they would not fight the war alone. Their allies would fight and die alongside them, and this demonstration of shared resolve that more than any other factor would stabilize the domestic political situation.

Following the victory, the Central Workers’ Government in DeLeon-Debs published the public, non-classified version of the “Victory Program”, to mobilise fifteen million men in 300 divisions, a plan so outlandish in its scope that no one feared publicising it because they deduced their enemies would dismiss it as a propaganda document.

Which it undoubtedly was. But the intention was deadly serious. Through technocratic planning, rationalisation of industrial and agricultural production, strict rationing and a guest worker program for Central America, it was found to be achievable. With the ongoing census estimating the resident population of the UASR of around 154 million (excluding the Associate Republics who were exempt from conscription), this would mean mobilising more than ten percent of the total population in the Army and Navy.

The classified Victory Program envisioned a worst-case scenario, with the UASR engaged on every continent against a reactionary coalition headed by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. The program thus intensified the breakneck expansion of the WFRN, and continued to prepare defeatist and revolutionary actions across the British and French colonial empires, from Palestine to South Africa, Indochina to Morocco.

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Appendix: Order of Battle for the Separate Mechanised Army

Commander - Lt. General George Patton

• 5th Mechanised Corps
  • 1st Grenadier Division
  • 3rd Tank Division
  • 7th Tank Division
  • 5th Artillery Brigade
  • 5th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade
  • 5th Sustainment Brigade
• 7th Mechanised Corps
  • 1st Tank Division
  • 4th Tank Division
  • 14th Grenadier Division
  • 7th Artillery Brigade
  • 7th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade
  • 7th Sustainment Brigade
• Airborne Corps
  • 82nd Airborne Infantry Division
  • 101st Airborne Infantry Division
  • 40th Artillery Brigade
  • 40th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade
• Army Troops
  • 2nd Artillery Corps
  • 19th Grenadier Division
  • 45th Breakthrough Tank Brigade
  • 56th Breakthrough Tank Brigade
  • 1st Anti-Tank Brigade
  • Combat Applications Cadre

*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation