Achtung | Panzer, Marsch! With The 1st German Pan...

"Radio check," Kurt barked over the intercom."Clear," came the voices of his driver, gunner, and loader.

As Kurt looked back at the smoke rising from the Leningrad suburbs, he felt a sense of grim foreboding. They were the "First"—always the first into the breach, the first to the bridge, the first to see the enemy. But the vastness of the East was beginning to swallow the steel.

The 1st Panzer survived through superior coordination. While the Soviet behemoths were powerful, they were blind and uncoordinated. Kurt’s platoon used their radios to flank the giants, hitting them in the thin rear armor and tracks while the German 88mm Flak guns were rushed forward to finish the job. The "First" held the bridgehead. The Pskov Breakthrough Achtung Panzer, Marsch! With the 1st German Pan...

By August, the division could see the spires of Leningrad in the distance. The air grew cold, and the "White Nights" of the north gave the landscape an eerie, never-ending twilight.

They had covered over 800 kilometers in weeks. But as they neared the city, the orders changed. The 1st Panzer was being redirected. The high command needed their speed and hitting power for the drive on Moscow. "Radio check," Kurt barked over the intercom

By the second day, they reached the Dubysa River near Raseiniai. It was here that Kurt saw the face of a new kind of war. Emerging from the treeline was a Soviet monster—the KV-2. It was a massive, slab-sided tank that dwarfed their Panzer IIIs.

While "Achtung Panzer!" was Guderian's book title, the 1st Panzer lived by the doctrine of Klotzen, nicht kleckern ("Thump them, don't tickle them"). But the vastness of the East was beginning

As the engines turned toward the south, the radio once again crackled with the familiar, relentless command: Key Facts about the 1st Panzer Division: