The little known battle of Brody-Dubno pitted the highly proficient German Wehrmacht against the unproven Red Army colossus, both supported by their own air forces. In the first part of this article, I described the Red Army, and now it’s time to address the Germans.

Let’s take a look at the German forces and how they are modeled into FAB Dubno ’41.

The Germans

The German army that began Barbarossa was at its peak as a fighting machine; after nearly two years of great victories and campaigns all over Europe, the tools for the long time sought Vernichtungsschlacht (Decisive victory) seemed ready at hand. The traditional German way of waging war fast and victoriously seemed to have achieved its peak in 1939-40 with the use of the tank, motorization, and air force. Germany was a surrounded land that needed fast and victorious wars to prevail over its enemies, so the German way of war tried to fight wars fast and furious to conclusion. The Great War brought Germany to its knees due to being a Materialschlacht (war of attrition) that Germany never could win. In 1939, Germany went to war hoping not to repeat the same mistakes that had been done in 1914-18. Traditionally, the German army fought using Auftragstaktiks (mission-oriented tactics), giving subordinate commanders ample room for decision-making and maneuvering within the overall intent of his superior commander. Twentieth century warfare enlarged the battlefield beyond any commander’s grasp and made it totally impracticable to exercise real control over the battle as a whole—thus began the reign of Chaos. So, independence of decision, swiftness, boldness, and correct judgment were the necessary qualities for any commander at the decisive point. The German tradition also stressed the concept of Schwerpunkt (Point of maximum effort): every battle has a point (not necessarily geographical) where the right decision becomes THE DECISIVE one that achieves victory, a point where maximum force is needed, a point that makes other parts of the front or other forces present irrelevant… Both German concepts (Auftragstaktiks & Schwerpunkt) converged in the era of mechanized warfare that began in 1939. Tanks, the motor transport, and the air strike gave the Germans the tools they lacked in 1918 when they pierced the Allied front in their final offensives. During the campaigns of 1939 and 1940, the Panzer Divisionen earned their famed invincibility defeating two of the best armies in the world: the Polish and the French. Mobility, swiftness, and striking hard were the weapons the German army used to break the enemy defenses, breakout into their rear areas, and breakthrough to victory by encirclement (Kesselschlacht) and annihilation (Vernichtungsschlacht). The Soviet Union would not stand the powerful onslaught that was to come.

And all this is really amazing as, after the Great War, the Soviet Union and the Republic of Weimar Germany began the path to develop the weapons and doctrine for the next war side by side, by signing the secret Rapallo Treaty for military cooperation between them. Officers and engineers from both countries worked together developing tanks, planes, and other weapons and the tactics and doctrine for using them. In the first part of this article, I wrote about how the Soviet Union dismissed the “Deep Battle” theory for mechanized warfare due to misinterpretation of events. Deep Battle was the Soviet version of Bewegungskrieg (maneuver warfare) that Germans sought to fight to avoid another war of attrition. The ascension of the Nazis to power in Germany cut Soviet-German collaboration, and both nations took their own path to war. The Germans were right: mechanized warfare was capable of avoiding the trench deadlock of the Great War. Now it was the final battle: destroying the Soviet Union would put an end to all wars.

Nevertheless, the Panzer and motorized forces were a minority in the Wehrmacht (German army). The 1^st Panzer Gruppe had only 5 armored divisions and 5 motorized divisions. The 6^th German Army had to lend some infantry divisions to the tanks to give them the manpower needed to seal the pockets the mobile elements would create. Even with such a small number of mobile units, their impact on the battlefield was disproportionate. Putting into practice the concepts explained above to implement Bewegungskrieg, the aim of the mobile forces was always to advance into the depths of the enemy deployment. Once the infantry broke the enemy’s defenses, the mobile elements struck objectives deep inside the enemy’s rear area, aiming to depots, command centers, airfields, hospitals, cutting frontline units from their rear area, and isolating them from relief forces and reserves. Disruption of the enemy deployment was the key to victory, much more than its physical destruction. After France, the Germans learned to use their Panzer units forming all-arms teams, Kampfgruppen; usually they formed the group around the two main units in a Panzer division, the armor brigade and the motorized infantry brigade, adding companies or battalions of tanks to the infantry and infantry to the tanks, also with artillery, engineers, antitank guns, antiaircraft artillery… In FAB Dubno ’41, each Panzer division is depicted by three blocks: one armored, one motorized infantry, and one armored recon—including the armored car battalion and the motorcycle battalion. This allows players to use historically the divisions with greater flexibility than if they were only one block. The FAB system allows for a simple recreation of the Kampfgruppen system as you can add assets to your units so they can be supported by engineers, artillery, AT guns, etc. as needed.

The two German Higher Echelons present in the game are the 1^st Panzer Gruppe and the 6^th Army, so assets are divided between them. They have to help each other (they are not side-by-side but intermingled) in order that each motorized corps will have some infantry divisions nearby to cover their advances. Most of the time, the German player will only have 4 Panzer divisions in play as the fifth (9^th Pz) only comes in at the end of the game to secure the Southern flank of the German offensive. Usually a Panzer division had up to 150 tanks and 14,000 men. With only 5 of them in play, the numerical superiority of the Soviet armor is evident to all… Two assets present in Dubno ’41 deserve attention: the armored infantry battalions of the 110^th and 10^th motorized infantry regiments, the only units fully armored in halftracks in the battle. Germany never had enough armored carriers to fully equip their motorized infantry.

14 of the 19 German divisions present in the game are infantry. Two of them are motorized, so they can follow the tanks’ wake in a hurry, but they fight like the other infantry. However important the tanks and mobile forces are, the foot infantry was the real winner in this battle. Foot infantry was prepared to fight head-on battles. German infantry divisions had been mobilized in waves, so not everyone had exactly the same organization. They muster between 17,000 and 15,000 men and have artillery, mortars, and machine guns in abundance at the origin of their wave. So, in FAB Dubno ’41, all the German infantry divisions are blocks with four steps plus one asset with another step for a total of 5 steps of strength. Some of the divisions have only one step of green quality; others have two. In addition, as the foot infantry’s role was to cover the tank flanks, I have added a Special Rule to allow German foot infantry divisions to detach some of their steps of strength by creating a breakdown block in the area they occupy, spending one Special Action counter or block. German infantry are strong units needed to absorb the Soviet counterattacks, and, historically, when the big Soviet armor push came, they went to the rescue of the isolated 16^th and 11^th Panzer divisions.

As Auftragstaktiks was not a privilege of the mobile forces but the whole German army, some events in the game represent the ability of the German troops to create gaps in order to envelop defensive positions and overwhelm defensive lines by creating breaches to be exploited. In DUBNO ’41, you will notice the abundance of one-use Special Action events so the German army will be very reactive and responsive to opportunities and threats in the field of battle.

The German troops have plenty of elite troops as many of them were veterans of several campaigns at this point in the war.

Army Group South—the higher organization on the German side—had not a single squadron of the famous Stuka plane. All the allotted bombers were level bombers, so in CAS (Close Air Support), the air cover was not as effective or decisive as in Operation Barbarossa. In fact, during the first week, most of the air attacks were devoted to neutralize the Soviet Air, air strikes and fighter sweeps that took their toll on the Soviet Air Force. The 350 airplanes of V FliegerKorps were able to contain the numerical superiority of the Soviet Air Force and interdict the movement of Soviet reserves towards the battlefield, though its direct impact on the battlefield was weighted only later in the campaign.

You will lead a very good army, but Germans won by taking risks and making the right decisions, not only by having a better grasp of mechanized warfare than their Soviet adversaries. The battle was a tactical victory for the Germans, but the offensive in Ukraine was stalled for a whole week…

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Previous Articles:

Inside the Opposing Armies of Dubno ’41 (Part 1): Soviet Army – The Stumbling Colossus

Dubno ’41: The Little Known Battle of Dubno