Panzergrenadiers at the beginning of the war were largely lorryborne. It was only as the war on the Eastern Front unfolded that armoured personnel carriers (APCs) replaced lorries and carried the panzergrenadiers into the thick of the action. However, with Allied bombing of Germany’s industrial base and major cities, and with major Allied offensives in North Africa, Italy, Normandy and in the Soviet Union, German industry simply could not produce sufficient APCs and armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) for all the theatres of war in which they were needed. As a consequence, panzergrenadiers often clung onto the sides of panzers (Soviet infantry was carried in a similar fashion on the back of the T-34 Soviet main battle tank), or were carried in whatever lorries were available. The lorries were frequently requisitioned from occupied Europe. Panzergrenadiers were often forced to walk as freezing weather, or petrol and equipment shortages, laid up the available APCs and lorries. The ideal of the mobile panzer-grenadier was, by the end of the war, something of a fiction, as panzergrenadiers frequently marched in and out of battle. As the Third Reich collapsed, horses and bicycles were often the only form of ‘motorisation’ available for many German soldiers.
Below: German SS reconnaissance troops mark the direction of their unit’s advance on the side of a wrecked Soviet aeroplane during the invasion of Russia. Much of the Soviet air power was destroyed on the ground during Barbarossa.
When the panzergrenadiers went into battle by lorry this affected German tactics. The lorry was a soft-skinned vehicle and provided little or no protection for panzer-grenadiers going into action. Thus, instead of the panzer-grenadier driving into enemy positions and fighting from the vehicle or debussing at the point of battle, as was possible with an APC, lorry-borne panzergrenadiers would usually debus at a forming-up point following initial contact or a reconnaissance report, after which they would mount a conventional infantry assault. With sufficient APCs, tactics could be adjusted, the panzergrenadier made more mobile and the battle became more dramatic and swift, but this was not always possible. However, whether in APCs or lorries, the panzergrenadier was a vital component to the German attack on the USSR in 1941, for without supporting infantry, the advancing panzers would have been unable to advance so deep into the Soviet Union.
World History
