Balck 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. Balck’s father, William Balck, 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”). His great-grandfather served under the Duke of Wellington in the King’s German Legion, and his grandfather was an officer in the British Army’s Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Like many senior German officers of his generation, Balck came from a military family, albeit a slightly unusual one.
He was always one step ahead of his enemy, even in the relatively few situations when he was initially taken by surprise. He never lost his nerve and he almost never made a tactical mistake. In any specific situation Balck 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. 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. Hermann Balck was the sum of thousands of small factors that were deeply engrained in him by the system under which he grew up. There was no single characteristic that made Balck such an outstanding combat leader. 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. “Balck has strong claims to be regarded as our finest field commander,” declared Maj. For this and other achievements Balck would be one of only twenty-seven officers in the entire war-Erwin Rommel was another-to receive the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds, the equivalent of an American receiving two, or even three, Medals of Honor. Over the next few months his division would rack up an astonishing one thousand enemy tank kills. But Balck, leading from the front, reacting instantly to each enemy thrust, repeatedly parried, surprised, and wiped out superior Soviet detachments. The odds he faced were scarcely short of incredible: the Soviets commanded a local superiority of 7:1 in tanks, 11:1 in infantry, and 20:1 in a local superiority of 7:1 in tanks, 11:1 in infantry, and 20:1 in artillery. Yet in three short weeks his lone panzer division virtually destroyed the entire Soviet Fifth Tank Army. Army), is today virtually unknown except to the most serious students of World War II.
But arriving with its lead elements was the division commander, Hermann Balck, who was about to execute one of the most brilliant performances of battlefield generalship in modern military history.īalck, who ended the war as a General der Panzertruppe (equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Still strung out along the line of march and arriving little by little, the 11th Division faced what amounted to mission impossible. 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. The XLVIII Panzer Corps was suddenly threatened with annihilation. Romanenko crossed the Chir River, a tributary of the Don, and drove deep into German lines. But before the two German units could link up, the Soviet Fifth Tank Army under the command of 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. The Sixth Army was encircled in Stalingrad. In December 1942 Hermann Balck wiped out a force ten times his size in the most brilliantly fought divisional battle in modern military historyĭecember 1942 was a time of crisis for the German army in Russia.