Guderian’s Panzers: From Triumph to Defeat on the Eastern Front (1941)

From unstoppable blitzkrieg to brutal defeat--follow Guderian’s panzers as they race toward Moscow and collide with disaster.

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the blitzkrieg bogged down during the approach on Moscow. At the spearhead of the attack was General Heinz Guderian, one of the most celebrated and controversial commanders of the war, who commanded a tank group in the center of the German front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Guderian’s Panzers reconstructs Barbarossa from the perspective of Generaloberst Guderian and his 2nd Panzer Group. With the German war machine at the height of its martial prowess in June 1941, Guderian’s group of 250,000 men and 900 tanks rapidly broke through the Soviet frontier defenses and thrust some 600 kilometers into Soviet Russia in a matter of weeks--in doing so playing an integral part in the successful encirclement (cauldron) battles of Belostok-Minsk (June/July 1941) and Smolensk (July/August 1941); each of these battles resulting in the loss of several Soviet armies and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Despite having sustained alarming losses of personal and equipment in these opening battles, Guderian pushed his men, and himself, to even greater achievements, culminating in the triumphant cauldron Battle of Kiev in the Ukraine (September 1941) that obliterated Soviet Southwestern Front and resulted in the capture of over 600,000 Red Army POWs. It was, perhaps, Germany’s greatest victory in WWII, and Guderian had made it happen.

In October/November 1941, the German Ostheer (Eastern Army) launched a desperate attempt to seize Moscow; and, once again, Heinz Guderian and his tank troops were at the forward edge of battle. Yet, by the end of November, the entire German offensive--exhausted, stretched thin, dangerously reduced in strength, and suddenly largely paralyzed by the fall rain and snow--had ground to a halt.

Meanwhile, in early December, the resurgent Red Army launched a major counteroffensive that, in the weeks ahead, not only threatened Guderian’s forces with annihilation, but those German Army Group Center writ large. Guderian, and the Ostheer as a whole, were now trapped in a remorseless war of attrition they could never win. Refusing his superiors’ orders to stand fast in the face to the advancing Soviet juggernaut, Guderian continued to jerk back in retreat with the remnants of his forces and, thus, was relieved of his command on 26 December 1941.

Military historian and Eastern Front expert, Craig Luther, draws on new material, from letters to diaries, to tell the story of Guderian’s armored force during Operation Barbarossa and fleshes out the story with vivid firsthand accounts from the soldiers who slugged it out with the Red Army on the Eastern Front. The book traces the ups and downs of Guderian and his panzer group during six pivotal months of World War II and explains why and how the Germans, especially its panzers, achieved such impressive successes, only to be defeated on Moscow’s doorstep.

Craig W. H. Luther is a former Fulbright Scholar and a retired U.S. Air Force historian. He is author of Barbarossa Unleashed: The German Blitzkrieg through Central Russia to the Gates of Moscow (Schiffer, 2014), The First Day on the Eastern Front: German Invades the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941 (Stackpole, 2018), and, with acclaimed historian David Stahel, Soldiers of Barbarossa: Combat, Genocide, and Everyday Experiences on the Eastern Front, June-December 1941 (Stackpole, 2020). He lives in Tehachapi, California.