Rocket Launcher Regiment 51 Part 1 - Nebelwerfer - Army Group Center - 7th Panzer Division

SUPPORT THE CHANNEL

www.Patreon.com/Military1945

This is splendid footage of a German Nebelwerfer battery made up of 6, 6 barrel rocket launchers being fired in Sept of 1943. Today we’ll look at the first reel of some private footage taken by a member of the 51st Nebelwerfer Regiment from June of 1941 as they advanced into Russia. I love this material. The photo you see here is from the footage showing the units visit to the Tannenberg memorial in East Prussia where Hindenburg was buried.

We’ll talk about the make up of the unit and its advance during the beginning of Barbarossa. Next I’ll introduce the specs of this special weapon, the Nebelwerfer, and in following videos I'll talk about how it developed during the war. The 51st was eventually wiped out in Stalingrad and as I introduce the individual reels in different videos we’ll trace their steps leading to their eventual annihilation.

The Tannenberg memorial was built in memory of the decisive battle that took place in August of 1914 when the Russian attack on East Prussia was decisively defeated. Hindenburg, who lead the German troops is buried inside and directly in front of the walls of the memorial are situated Russian graves.

The advanced elements of the Regiment arrived on June 5, 1941 early in the morning to the memorial and later that afternoon the rocket launchers, being towed by half-tracks and trucks arrived.

The Regiment had three battalions, each with 3 batteries of 6 rocket launchers. That makes a total of 108 launchers. In addition, the batteries were equipped with 37mm anti-tank guns and a machine gun mounted wagon that was used for both anti-aircraft and ground defense.

Early in the war, German vehicles were often draped with large swastika flags with the intention of being identified by friendly planes and so avoid friendly fire accidents. As the war progressed and the Germans lost control of the skies this practice reduced considerably.

The 51. Nebelwerfer Regiment was part of Army Group Center and was attached to the 7th panzer division that was made up of 30 German tanks and 120 captured Czech 38T tanks.

On June 22, at exactly 3:10 in the morning the attack commenced bombarding the fortified Russian border defenses.

In this 1941 newsreel footage the Nebelwerfer is not shown. At the time these rocket launchers were still considered secret and not until 1943, the footage we saw at the beginning of this video, was it shown openly to the public.

At 7 am the entire 7th PzD broke through the Russian lines and advanced towards Kowno. At 9 am the motorized units advanced behind the tanks in multiple columns of advance. When the lead tanks engaged enemy units the columns stopped until a new breakthrough could be achieved.

After destroying most of the Russian air force in the vicinity on the ground, the German Luftwaffe controlled the skies. It was fortunate however that the 88 batteries were present as they were necessary to take out the new and unexpected Russian T34 tanks. Only one bomber managed to get through and drop a massive bomb which left a huge bomb crater but did no damage.

The burning city is Ulita, in Lithuania.

Of course footage from private films is different than what you’d see in carefully edited propaganda footage. At first look it might seem somewhat boring, with less combat footage and action in general. But it better represents what really happened. There’s more to learn from it.

Masses of surrendered Soviet soldiers are led to the rear usually by individual German guards armed with nothing more than a rifle. They could have been easily overpowered. Occasionally, individuals or even groups of unguarded Soviets carrying white flags would pass. What was common among all the prisoners was their relief that the war was over.

During the advance, the regiment passed a seemingly infinite number of destroyed Russian tanks. Far more, In fact, than the 7th PzD had been allocated for the entire Russian operation. This lead many to believe that the Russians had been preparing an attack of their own, like had happened in 1914, but had been preempted by the German invasion. This is an interesting historical what if.

The name Nebelwefer, which means smoke launcher, was the cover name for this weapon. In addition to launching explosively charged rockets, it was developed to launch chemical weapons which was never done in combat.

Regiment 51 was the first unit to be outfitted with the new 15cm Nebelwerfer 41. The 6 tubes of the 41 were 1.3 m long, and the rocket had a range of 6000 m. The rockets travelled at 340 m/s. Approximately half of the rockets could be expected to land within an area of 130 m x 80 m. In its firing position the weapon weighed 540 kg.

Nebelwerfer-Regiment had a total of 108 launchers. With each launcher having 6 tubes, that’s a total of 324 tubes. In 10 seconds all tubes could be fired and this process could be repeated three times in 5 minutes.