For Jünger it was artillery and machine-guns which represented the technological side of modern warfare, not the tank. For him, as for the tactical analysts of the nineteenth century, the answer to more difficult battlefield conditions seemed to lie in improving the individual qualities of the fighting man himself. The more each man was cut off from his neighbour by increasingly dispersed formations, the more he would need a high standard of morale and training. This was not a reaction based upon pure theory or ‘military spiritualism’ it was an empirical finding derived from hard experience. Jünger was quite specific about what he thought should be done to foster the required qualities in the soldiers:
Above all, I devoted my efforts to the training of a shock troop, as it became more and more clear to me in the course of the war that all success springs from individual action, while the mass of the troops give impetus and weight of fire. Better command a resolute section than a wavering company.10
This view gained ready acceptance in many other quarters, for by the end of 1918 the new infantry tactics had been spectacularly demonstrated once again by the Germans in their spring offensives, and to some extent copied by the allied armies after that. The allies had taken longer than the Germans to reform their methods; but by the time of their late summer attacks they had little still to learn. They were also able to incorporate large numbers of tanks into their offensives, which in fact strengthened them considerably for as long as the tanks did not break down.
After the war the British fully recognised the imperative need for greater initiative and independence at the level of the private soldier and his NCO. In 1932 an official War Office pamphlet was stating that training should be designed to encourage ‘Our riflemen and light automatic gunners to be formidable fighting men, fit, active, inquisitive, and offensive, confident of making ground with their own weapons.’11This was precisely, and consciously, a reflection of what the German storm troopers had been trying to achieve.
Another example of a similar reaction came from Tom Wintringham, who for a short time led the British Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. He felt that the value of tanks in 1939 had not improved since 1918. They could sometimes be a useful auxiliary, but could not achieve decisive results:
The exponents of mechanisation say that the tank is the solution of the problem of how to make attack easy and profitable. The tank is no such thing. It is a weapon of opportunity to be used rarely and by keen-eyed men who know its limitations. It is short-sighted, noisy, necessarily nervous even if manned by brave men, and a bad gun-platform when moving. When stationary it is a good target for artillery, and if within reach of opposing infantry it can be stalked.…12
The verdict of Spain – which I believe will also be the verdict of the next great war – is not that the tank is an utter failure, but that it has restricted use as a weapon of opportunity. Tanks cannot possibly – whatever size you make them, or however many you make – replace infantry as the basis of the army, because they cannot hide as infantry do, go to ground, become dangerous vermin hard to brush out of the seams of the soil.13
Wintringham concluded, as Jünger had before him, that it was still infantry infiltration tactics under NCO’s of initiative which held the key to offensive warfare. In the defence an ‘elastic’ line with strong local counter-attack elements was required. Both Wintringham and Jünger had seen the face of modern war at close hand, and to both it was the training and morale of the individual fighting man which appeared to be of paramount importance. Tanks and aircraft held few terrors for either of them.
In France it was paradoxically an enthusiast of armoured troops, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, who pointed out the need for improved moral qualities in the circumstances of modern war:
Even in the gloomy hecatombs to which the exclusive system of the nation-in-arms led during the Great War, the superiority of good troops was abundantly clear. How else is one to explain the prolonged success of the German armies against so many different opponents? … Witnesses of the final engagements have not forgotten those proud picked troops, broken to every test, who in every action led the ‘main effort’14 … or again; … as the danger and desperation of fighters on the battlefield increases, moral cohesion becomes more and more important.15
De Gaulle’s vision of modern war was a fairly close echo of Ardant du Picq’s. In both cases there was a realisation that battle was becoming more difficult and dangerous, and that this imposed unbearable strains upon troops who lacked careful training or the ‘military spirit’. A small élite force would therefore be preferable to a mass of reluctant conscripts. It would alone remain manoeuvrable, aggressive and able to use modern weapons to good effect. Technology certainly had a place in this picture; but it was man himself who provided the most important element.
In the event it was found that neither man nor the machine was capable of achieving a break-through on the Western Front. On many occasions a successful ‘break-in’ took place, led either by tanks or by stormtroops; but the principal difficulty was always one of exploitation. Time after time it was found to be impossible to press forward once the initial bound had lost momentum. Just as in 1877 the first line of trenches at Plevna had usually fallen to the Russian attacks, so in the First World War it was almost always possible for an attack to make headway through the forward parts of an enemy position. In both cases, however, it was very difficult to renew the impulsion after the original success had run down.
The transition from break-in to break-through is a ticklish problem at the best of times, and even the highly manoeuvrable armies of Napoleon had achieved it but rarely. In the conditions of the Western Front it was made very much more difficult by a combination of the ground, the weapons, the poor signals equipment and the transport facilities available. Taken together, these factors meant that it always took an attacker longer to fight through an enemy defence zone than it took the enemy to bring up significant reinforcements:
This problem is, broadly, how to maintain a continuous and sustained effort throughout an attack, so as to take instant advantage of initial success and to achieve complete victory before the enemy reserves can intervene. It really resolves itself into a time problem between the onrush of the attacker and the enemy reserves.
In the late war the race nearly always went to the defender.16
Movement over the battlefield was hampered by mud, shell holes and the heavy loads which each man carried. It could be seriously delayed by relatively small pockets of resistance or by interdicting artillery barrages. It lost cohesion as the men took cover and dispersed. Without efficient signals it was difficult to draw units back together for further operations, or even to explain the position on the ground to higher headquarters. Orders could not be issued in time, or with an adequate basis of information to make them sensible. In these circumstances the progress of any attack was bound to be slow and hesitant, even if the enemy himself had been successfully overcome.
On the other side of the coin lay the conditions prevailing beyond the battlefield. Here there were good telegraphic communications and good railway lines to bring up reinforcements very rapidly indeed. While an attacker was blundering around within a wilderness of churned-up mud, the defender could concentrate fresh formations at his leisure; deploy them behind the battle zone in a new line; and await the outcome with confidence. The real disparity in the First World War was not therefore between the attacking infantry in the open and the defending machine-gunners in cover; but between the attacking mob on foot and the defending reserves steaming up in well organised railway trains.
In these circumstances the theoretical importance of the tank lay in its ability to move men, weapons, supplies and radios quickly over a broken battlefield. It seemed to offer an attacker the chance to win the race to the defender’s railheads. In practice, however, this conception consigned the tank to too much of a ‘transport’ role for the tankers’ liking, and too little of a ‘cavalry’ role. Experiments with armoured command vehicles, armoured
personnel- or ammunition-carriers and armoured gun tractors never had quite the same visionary fire behind them as did the use of tanks for an assault role. By the end of the war, admittedly, tank officers such as J. F. C. Fuller were thinking in terms of deep penetration with ‘cruiser’ tanks rather than simply short assaults in close support of infantry. Despite copious lip service, however, not even Fuller’s famous ‘Plan 1919’ seems to have made an adequate provision for armoured carriers. It was the ‘shock’ effect of massed armour, and the psychological disruption it could cause, which was given more attention than the mundane task of passing a force of all arms safely and quickly through the combat area.
To some extent this emphasis on assault was a matter of technology. The early tanks were heavy and slow, designed for infantry support and liable to break down almost as often as they worked. To many observers it did not look as though very much could be demanded of them further afield than the enemy’s first line of trenches. At Cambrai under 40% of tank losses had been caused by enemy fire: the rest had been breakdowns or ditchings.
Another reason for the stress on assault, however, was the bitter institutional battle which the tankers had to fight within their own armies. The infantry were their natural allies in these arguments, against the cavalry who initially felt their role was threatened. It was therefore natural that the thoughts of the tank enthusiasts first moved in the direction of infantry support, and then progressed to ambitious claims that tanks could replace the cavalry. Too often the latter led them into rhetorical extremes and made them imagine that the tank could do many things which in fact it could not.
It was a matter of profound disappointment to the British Tank Corps that no genuine break-through was ever achieved on the Western Front by armour, and yet in Palestine Allenby successfully achieved one with cavalry at the Battle of Megiddo (1918). Indeed, the pattern of Allenby’s operation was full of lessons for the future, since he aimed at a truly deep penetration with close air co-operation. He was bombing enemy headquarters and supply dumps in a way that Fuller would have heartily approved. His success, however, served to strengthen the believers in cavalry rather than those who dreamed of an armoured blitzkrieg.
When the war was over and the British Army had stood down from its continental role, a strong current of opinion started to flow against the tanks. They were expensive, specialised, less than decisive on the battlefield, and apparently subversive of military spirit. Just as the French Chasseurs had been suspect in the 1830s for their over-enthusiastic officers and under-drilled soldiers, so the Tank Corps in the 1920’s appeared to be a very dubious luxury for an army dedicated to imperial policing. Fuller, its standard-bearer, came to be considered a ‘military bolshevik’ in many circles.
Part of the problem was Fuller’s apparent reversal of Napoleon’s maxim that in war ‘the moral is to the physical as three to one’. For this time-honoured formula he substituted the suggestion that ‘tools and weapons, if only the right ones can be discovered, form 99% of victory’.17 In common with de Gaulle, Fuller favoured an army composed of a small but professional body of experts; but unlike his French counterpart he did not seem to pay much attention to the moral elements in battle at any level lower than that of the commander in chief. Fuller’s view that materiel alone was decisive was certainly overstated, and indeed represented a reversal of his own earlier beliefs. Before the war he had been a keen student of Napoleon and of ‘Sir John Moore’s system of training’, while in 1913 he had written that ‘to will success is all but equivalent to victory’.18 For him the World War made a decisive break with the past whereas for many soldiers, including some of the continental exponents of armour, it had served to reinforce a good part of the accepted doctrines of morale.
It is possible that Fuller’s excessively sharp reaction to his critics, as well as his penchant for mysticism, did more damage to the cause of armoured warfare in the British Army than all the cavalry messes put together. When he subsequently embraced fascism and struck up friendly relations with Hitler and Guderian, he did nothing to atone for his earlier errors of judgment.
In Guderian, by contrast, the Germans had an officer who, although junior to Fuller and lacking any tank experience in the World War, had a much better sympathy with the military ethos. He was personally able to work well within the army and get the most out of it. For him, moreover, the problems of mechanisation had first been posed as a matter of motor transport rather than of assault. This was necessarily so, since the German Army had been forbidden to build tanks by the Versailles treaty. For Guderian the debate was not at first a conflict with the cavalry, as it had been for Fuller, but with those who regarded transport as essentially something which took place behind the lines. Thus he says that in 1924:
I expressed the hope that as a result of our efforts we were on the way to transforming our motorised units from supply troops into combat troops. My inspector, however, held a contrary opinion, and informed me bluntly: To hell with combat! They’re supposed to carry flour!’ And that was that.19
Guderian did not fritter away the 1920s in metaphysical attempts to prove that flannel shirt was inferior to armour plate as a protection against machine-guns. Instead, he read widely in all aspects of motor transport, tank tactics and mobile warfare. Unprejudiced by the debilitating committee warfare of the Western Front, he was able to look at the matter in the round. Nor did he make up his mind about the whole question until as late as 1929, after he had seen how the Swedish army employed its German-designed tanks:
In this year, 1929, I became convinced that tanks working on their own or in conjunction with infantry could never achieve decisive importance. My historical studies, the exercises carried out in England and our own experience with mock-ups had persuaded me that tanks would never be able to produce their full effect until the other weapons on whose support they must inevitably rely were brought up to their standard of speed and cross-country performance. In such a formation of all arms, the tanks must play the primary role, the other weapons being subordinated to the requirements of the armour. It would be wrong to include tanks in infantry divisions: what was needed were armoured divisions which would include all the supporting arms needed to allow the tanks to fight with full effect.20
Guderian had grasped the truth that whereas the tank was far from invulnerable in itself, its mobility could also be applied to other arms of the service to make a balanced all-arms force. What was needed was a way of bringing motor transport, in all its forms, into the fighting line. The partial successes gained by tanks at Cambrai or Amiens could then be married up to the partial success of motor transport, as represented by the Taxis of the Marne’ or the endless crocodile of lorries which had sustained Verdun. The net result would be to restore mobility to the battlefield as a whole.
This line of thinking led to the creation of the German ‘Panzer’ Division, as an all-arms force which combined the best qualities of infantry, artillery, armour and motor transport. It displayed a more complete integration of these different elements than could be found in any other army, and it was based upon a better appreciation that the tank was no more than primus inter pares. The tank was seen as a specialised machine which could help the other arms to accomplish their tasks, just as they in turn could help it. In 1939–40, indeed, the tank still had many technical deficiencies which seriously limited the scope of its action. It was not to be until the appearance of the Russian T34 in late July 1941 that anyone achieved a really good combination of armour, armament, reliability and speed. Until then all tank designs had fallen a long way short of what had been hoped.
Even with inferior tanks, however, the Panzer Divisions proved to be capable of great achievements against enemies who lacked equally flexible formations of all arms. In their great ‘blitzkriegs’ of 1939–41 the Germans overran country after country with apparent ease. By their agile orchestration of novel weaponry they turned bewilderment into panic, and by the rapidity of their advances they spread terror far and wi
de in the enemy’s rear echelons. In these campaigns they seemed to be unstoppable. Not a few observers started to believe that, after all, the infantryman had finally been superseded by the tank.
In none of the early blitzkriegs, however, did the Germans meet the sort of opposition which might have exposed the tank’s real weakness. Enemy strongpoints could generally be avoided and encircled by the use of mobility, rather than assaulted head-on. In these early battles every obstacle or fortified line which the Germans encountered was found to be either full of holes or weakly held. Thus they were able to cross the Russian fortified line on the river Bug, 22 June 1941, before it had been manned. In May 1940 they outflanked the French Maginot line and crossed the Meuse at Sedan. Facing them on this occasion was a second-rate French formation which lacked both tactical depth and moral conviction. Even so the battle was a fairly close-run thing. It was won more by air power, artillery and infantry than by the tanks themselves. As Guderian later admitted in his memoirs, ‘… the success of our attack struck me as almost a miracle’.21
When they were not crossing obstacles in extremely risky operations the Germans were often racing across relatively undefended territory to forestall the creation of fresh obstacles further to the rear. Much of the first four or five months of the Russian campaign had this aspect, with the armoured spearhead commanders constantly urging rapid advances to disrupt enemy building of new fortified lines. Far from exhibiting confidence in the assault strength of their tanks, therefore, they were actually doing everything they could to avoid a phase of positional warfare. The real strength of armour, in fact, lay not in battle but in the pre-emption of battle.
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