The Balk Tank – “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 I 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.” There was no single characteristic that made Black such an outstanding combat leader.
The Balk Tank
Hermann Black 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.
What Made Hermann Balck A Great General?
In any specific situation Black 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. When the attack came, Black and his key commanders were making a ground reconnaissance in preparation for the planned advance.
Only Black’s 15th Panzer Regiment was in position. His 110th and 111th 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, the LXVIII Panzer Corps sent Black’s division command post a warning order to have the 15th Panzer Regiment prepare for a counterattack. In the absence of their commander, the divisional staff passed along the warning order.
Hold This City
The 15th Panzer Regiment started moving forward a half-hour later. When Black 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.
Black, 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. Black never hesitated to exercise that prerogative. When Black 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. Black concluded: The series of defensive battles along the Chir was over. The Fifth Tank Army had been virtually destroyed.
In Position
But tactical victory did not translate to operational success for the Germans, who were being pushed farther and farther back from the Don. On Dec. 22, the XLVIII Panzer Corps received orders to immediately move 90 miles to the west and establish blocking positions at Morozovskaya to screen Rostov.
Hitler ordered Morozovskaya held at all costs. Black and his advance party arrived on the scene on Dec. 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. Black closed the ring around the XXIV Tank Corps, but his division of him had been moving and fighting too long and too hard.
It was down to only eight operational tanks. Black 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.
Operation Saturn
By the end of the day, however, Black received operational control of one of the Panzergrenadier regiments and an assault gun battalion from the newly arriving 6th Panzer Division. The XLVIII Panzer Corps was suddenly threatened with annihilation.
Its only significant combat power was the 11th 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 11th Division faced what amounted to mission impossible.
But arriving with its lead elements was the division commander, Hermann Black, who was about to execute one of the most brilliant performances of battlefield generalship in modern military history. 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 Feb. 2, 1943.
Black In 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 situation was desperate. [The German defenders’] only hope lay with a single tired and depleted division that was coming up in dribbles. In my opinion the situation was so dismal that it 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 hodgepodge of troops covering Morosovskaya would hold for a day.”
Bad Straits
The new Soviet attack was supported by more Fifth Tank Army strikes against XLVIII Panzer Corps. Black led another night march and before dawn on December 19 he once again took a superior Soviet force completely by surprise.
Black’s 15th Panzer Regiment was down to about 25 operational tanks when it came upon the rear of a march column of 42 tanks from the Soviet Motor Mechanized Corps at Nizhna Kalinovski. Black’s tanks slipped into the rear of the Soviet column in the darkness “as if on parade,” he wrote in his memoirs of him.
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. Black 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 from him today.
Military Unknown
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. For the next three days Black 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. Black continuously moved his units at night and attacked during the day, employing speed, surprise, and shock action.
“Night marches save blood” became Black’s main axiom of him. Black described his command style of him in his memoirs of him: With his Panzergrenadier regiments not yet in position, Black had little choice but to commit his units piecemeal.
Despite being supported by Black’s 15th Panzer Regiment, the 336th Infantry Division was unable to prevent the Soviet I Tank Corps from penetrating 10 miles beyond the Chir, reaching State Collective Farm 79 by nightfall on Dec. 7. There, the Soviets caught by surprise and massacred the divisional trains of the 336th.
Panzer Commander
But while the Soviets consolidated their position for the night, Black methodically brought up the remainder of his units and prepared to strike the next day. Meanwhile, on Dec. 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 Black was at last preparing to take his units across the river on Dec. 17, the Soviets struck elsewhere.
After the war, Black 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.
Black was convicted and served a short sentence. When Black 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.
Walsk Strikes
Instead, he held onto the money until the fall of 1944, when the 11th 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.
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 Nov. 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. 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.
Black’s panzers then turned to meet a column of 23 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.
The Fall
By the end of the day, the 15th Panzer Regiment had destroyed another Soviet corps and its sixty-five tanks without suffering a single loss. His request from him was granted and, though still only a colonel, Black 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.
Black had to rebuild his unit from scratch—while in combat. Within a month he had the division back on his feet, though it was still short of authorized vehicles by 40 percent. It was obvious to Black 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 Dec. 8, just as the Soviets were starting their move, he struck.
Man Of His Word
By the end of the day the Soviet I Tank Corps had lost fifty-three tanks and effectively ceased to exist. While in command of the 11th Panzer Division, Black was 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 Black 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.
During one of his first actions by him, Black displayed his unflappable nerve leading from the front. Black and his adjutant to him, Major von Webski, were far forward when they came under heavy Soviet artillery fire.
As he was saying something to Black, Webski collapsed in midsentence—with a fatal shrapnel wound to his left temple. Several days later Black 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.
Day And Night
“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. Crush them. Then repeat the process the next day some 10 or 20 kilometers farther west or east.” In early 1942 Black was the inspector of mobile troops at the German Army High Command, the same position held in 1938 by his mentor, Guderian.
But Black champed at the bit to get back into combat. He later wrote in his memoirs of him: In the fall of 1944, Black went to the Western front, commanding Army Group G against Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. in the Lorraine campaign.
Black, 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 Black reassigned as the commander of the newly reconstituted Sixth Army, operating in Hungary.
Winter Warrior
At the end of the war Black managed to prevent his troops from falling into Soviet hands by surrendering his command to Maj. Gen. Horace McBride, commander of U.S. XX Corps. “I did not issue a written order, but oriented my commanders 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.”
Like many senior German officers of his generation from him, Black came from a military family, albeit a slightly unusual one. His great-grandfather of him served under the Duke of Wellington in the King’s German Legion, and his grandfather of him was an officer in the British Army’s Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
Black’s father, William Black, 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 Mérite, Germany’s highest military order (popularly but somewhat irreverently called the “ Blue Max”).
Black 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 he was recommended for the Pour le Mérite, but the war ended before the award was fully processed.
As Black analyzed the flow of orders from the corps, he realized that if the new threat was significant enough to derail the corps’ advance towards 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 Corps, Black 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 Black and Mellinthin worked together, starting a successful partnership that would last for most of the war.
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. Black pushed the principle to the extreme, forbidding any written orders at all.
Describing one of his earliest actions by him with the 11th Panzer Division, Black wrote: At the start of World War II, Black 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, Black walked to the head of the column, picked up a rifle, and pointed 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. Like Rommel, Black was never a German general staff officer.
But Black had several opportunities to become one, receiving more than one invitation to attend the Kriegsakademie. Black always declined, saying he preferred to remain a line officer. Unlike Rommel, though, Black never succumbed to periods of depression and self-pity.
While Rommel ran hot and cold, Black had a rock-solid consistency that emanated from his steely intellectual and psychological toughness. Nevertheless, he was widely known for his dry, almost British sense of humor and consistently cheerful demeanor.
Emma Nehls is a military writer and historian with a passion for exploring the intricacies of warfare and the human experience within the military. With extensive knowledge and a deep understanding of military strategy, tactics, and historical contexts, Nehls brings a unique perspective to his writings.
