Tag Archives: PZKPFW IV

A close thing indeed

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Folks often forget just how close Rommel and the gang came to knocking the British out of North Africa in late 1941.

The haunting image below is from 85 years ago this month.

A Panzerkampfwagen III (Pz.Kpfw. III) of the 15. Panzer-Division moves forward in North Africa just east of besieged Tobruk as a British truck burns, November 1941.

One of just two Panzer divisions in North Africa at the time (along with the 21st), the unit’s 8th Panzer Regiment had upwards of 105 Panzer IIIs in November, the division’s most common tank, balanced with a smattering of Panzer IIs and IVs.

Afrika Korps PzKpfw IV Ausf. D Pz. Rgt. 8, 15th Panzer Division, Tobruk, 1941

Sent to Libya in April 1941 to join the Deutsches Afrikakorps (DAK), the brand-new 15. PzDiv was formed up in Tripoli and moved to the front lines by June, under the soon-to-perish Generalmajor Walter Neumann-Silkow, who wore two Iron Crosses earned in the trenches of the Great War.

When the British Eighth Army under Lt. Gen. Alan Gordon Cunningham (who picked up a DSO and MC himself during the Great War) kicked off Operation Crusader on 18 November to lift the siege of Tobruk, it had 770 tanks, including many new Crusader Cruisers and American M3 Stuarts. By comparison, Rommel had fewer than 500 tanks, with over half being poorly armed Italian models.

The 15. PzDiv took a great mauling over the next six weeks, losing at least 435 killed, 1,361 wounded, and 1,820 missing out of its 5,300~ men, with Neumann-Silkow picking up a posthumous upgrade to lieutenant general.

By Christmas, the division, which started Crusader with 146 operational panzers, had only 31 Panzer IIIs and IVs remaining, plus an additional 12 light Panzer IIs, on its order of battle.

While rebuilt under Rommel, the 15. PzDiv ceased to exist after surrendering in Tunisia in May 1943.

Grouches in the Bulge

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Here we see one Major Eberhard Lemor, 39, commander of Sturmpanzer-Abteilung 217, during the Ardennes offensive, some 75 years ago this month. If his trousers look odd, it is because he is wearing a recently-applied plaster cast over his broken left leg, one that he would sport throughout the campaign.

Behind the good major in the snow is a Sturmpanzer IV (Sd.Kfz. 166) a vehicle that, in an army of panzers named after sleek big cats such as the Tiger and Panther, was dubbed the Brummbär (ironically enough by Allied intel analysts, not the Germans) a word which roughly translates to sorehead, grouch, or grumbly bear depending on who you are talking to.

Mating a Panzer IV hull/chassis, complete with a big V-12 Maybach diesel engine, with a big ole thumping Skoda 150mm StuH 43 L/12 howitzer behind a 100mm steel frontal plate, the assault gun was ideal for knocking out hardpoints or waiting in ambush for virtually any armored vehicle or train ever fielded world.

Grouch indeed. The Germans typically referred to these vehicles as “Stupa” an abbreviation of Sturmpanzer. 

Just over 300 Brummbären were fielded in four dedicated Sturmpanzer-Abteilung (Stu.Pz.Abt.. i.e. assault tank battalion), numbered 216 through 219, between 1943 and the end of the war.

After a baptism of fire at Kursk, they were mostly used in Italy and on the Eastern Front– with the exception of Lemor’s unit.

StuPzAbt 217 was only formed late in the war at Grafenwöhr, just weeks before the Overlord landings, from tankers and panzer grenadiers of Panzer-Kompanie 40 and Panzer-Ersatz-Abteilung 18. Fielded piecemeal in company strength into attempts to stop the Allied advance through Normandy and Belgium, the unit was only able to operate as a full battalion for the last big German push at the end of the year.

A cane, cast and a Brummbar in a snowy Belgian field are all you need for a stirring leadership snap from “somewhere in the Ardennes.”

Thrown into the Wacht am Rhein offensive in the Battle of the Bulge on 19 December 1944 with 31 vehicles, the six-month-old battalion only managed to advance to St. Vith before they were stopped cold, (pardon the pun) ultimately falling back in January 1945 and later being destroyed in the Ruhr pocket.

Lemor would survive the war, join the West German Bundeswehr when it was formed, and go on to reach the rank of Oberstleutnant (lt. col), retiring in the 1960s as a NATO staff officer stationed in Brussels, an assignment ironically just 170km from St. Vith– or about four hours drive in a Brummbär.