The Second World War

by John Keegan

  The test of the Westheer’s loyalty – also designed to produce a strategic reversal of the military situation in the west – was to be a counter-attack with all available armour into the flank of the American spearhead which was driving south from Saint-Lô between the bocage country and the sea towards the interior of Brittany. On 2 August an emissary from Rastenburg, Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of OKW’s operations staff, reached Kluge’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, believing he was to discuss with the field marshal the question of withdrawing to a defensive position deeper within France. On his arrival, however, he discovered that Hitler had meanwhile sent in orders to begin a counter-offensive as soon as possible, to start from Mortain and drive to the sea, and that he expected its results – as Warlimont discovered when he returned to Rastenburg on 8 August – to lead to a ‘rolling up of the entire Allied position in Normandy’.

  The Mortain counter-attack began on 7 August. It involved, immediately, four Panzer divisions, the 116th, 2nd, 1st SS and 2nd SS, and was intended to draw in four more, the 11th and 9th from the south of France, which Hitler had already promised to Kluge on 27 July, and the 9th and 10th SS from the Caen sector. Together these eight divisions, deploying 1400 tanks, would lead the Westheer, in an operation codenamed Lüttich (Liège), towards a great counter-encirclement of the invaders, the consequences of which would match Ludendorff’s breakthrough into the rear of the French armies at Liège exactly thirty years earlier to the day. As Hitler had told Warlimont on the eve of his mission to Kluge, ‘The object remains to keep the enemy confined to his bridgehead and there to inflict serious losses upon him in order to wear him down and finally destroy him.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Tank Battle: Falaise

  The battle of which Operation Lüttich marked the opening stage was to develop into the largest clash of armour in any of the campaigns fought on the Western Front, if not the largest of the war. Only the Battle of Kursk, fought the previous July, had assembled a larger number of German Panzer divisions – twelve, against ten in Normandy; but at Kursk the German offensive had been defeated by minefields and anti-tank guns rather than by mobile riposte. The Battle of the Falaise Gap, by contrast, took the form of a gigantic manoeuvre of twenty armoured divisions (ten German, ten Allied), tank against tank, over 800 square miles of countryside and extending through the two weeks of frenzied movement and violent combat.

  By the summer of 1944 the mystique of Blitzkrieg had been long overlaid. In the summer of 1940 Kleist and Guderian had been able to count on the mere appearance – or even rumour – of tanks to panic infantry into flight or surrender. Now commanders could no longer have such expectations. Green or shaken infantry would, of course, still run at the approach of tanks, and had done so on numerous occasions in Normandy; but experienced infantrymen had learned for themselves, as they had been taught, that flight was even more dangerous than keeping to their positions in the face of armoured attack. For by 1944 tanks did not operate, as they had in their palmy days, as independent spearheads; they advanced only in close concert with specialist infantry of their own, the Panzergrenadiers, and under the protective bombardment of supporting artillery. Defending infantry who left their trenches to make for safety thus exposed themselves to several sorts of fire: that of the tanks themselves, that of the tanks’ foot soldiers and that of their associated gunners. In the face of this most terrifying of all assaults, therefore, the defenders struggled to hold their ground, counting on their own anti-tank weapons to hold the attackers at bay while calling for their own artillery support and air strike – if that were available – and hoping that friendly tanks would come forward to do battle with those of the enemy. In short, by 1944 the tank had ceased to be an autonomous instrument of strategy but had taken its place in an elaborate machinery of tactical attrition, which achieved its effects by a cumulative wearing-down of resistance rather than by a rapier-like penetration of the enemy’s front.

  The dethronement of the tank from the status of revolutionary ‘war-winning’ weapon to that of workaday tool of tactics followed a pattern long established in the history of armaments. The ironclad, the torpedo and the machine-gun had each at first appearance been hailed as making defence, even war itself, ‘impossible’; to each, in turn, an antidote had been found and the ‘revolutionary’ weapon subsumed within a slightly altered and more complex system of war-making than had prevailed before. However, although the tank had undergone a similar displacement, its autonomy had been doubted from the outset and disputed energetically between the two great theorists whose names will always be associated with its development. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, who had masterminded the first great tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917, saw no future place for any but the tank arm on the battlefield; Basil Liddell Hart, his friendly rival in their paper debates of the 1920s and 1930s, argued that the tank would not win battles single-handed and that all arms, including infantry and artillery, would in future be mechanised, to produce armies which would resemble fleets of larger and smaller armoured and mobile ‘land ships’.

  Liddell Hart looked too far into the future; not until forty years after the end of the Second World War would even the most advanced states command the wealth and industrial resources to mechanise their field armies completely. It was nevertheless he, not Fuller, who saw the future true. Already by 1944 ‘land fleets’ existed in embryo. It was with a land fleet of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions that OB West had striven to defeat the Allied invasion; and it was with a land fleet of armoured and mechanised divisions that Montgomery and Bradley would achieve the encirclement and destruction of Army Group B. Allied tanks were to play the leading part in blunting the German attack which initiated the Battle of the Falaise Gap and then in making the advances which drew the line of encirclement around the enemy; but the ground they won was consolidated and held by their accompanying infantry and the work of destruction within the Falaise pocket was completed by their supporting artillery and air squadrons. Falaise was an all-arms battle, and its nature exactly depicts the extent to which armoured tactics had been rationalised since the early days of the war, when the Panzer generals had acted as if invincible.

  The diminution of the tank can in fact be traced to an early date in the war’s development. Gamelin, for all his ineptitude of decision, correctly perceived the proper riposte to the Panzer thrust immediately after the crossing of the Meuse on 13 May 1940; it was to aim armoured counter-thrusts at the neck joining tank spearhead to infantry shaft. Two such counter-thrusts were mounted by de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured Division at Laon on 18 May and by Frankforce at Arras on 21 May. Unco-ordinated in time, however, and unsupported by large resources of infantry and artillery, both counter-strokes failed. It was the Germans rather than the Allies who profited by the experience of these engagements. At Arras, Rommel, commanding the 7th Panzer Division, rescued himself from over-exposure by calling into service the heavy (88-mm) anti-aircraft guns of his flak battalion to halt and turn back the charge of the Royal Tank Regiment into his divisional centre after it had evaded his armoured screen. The eighty-eights stopped the heavy British tanks – which his lightly gunned Panzers had failed to do – and saved him from a defeat which might have extinguished his career then and there.

  Arras emphasised to the Germans that the most effective means of waging armoured warfare against an equal enemy was to use a combination of tanks and anti-tank weapons; and they were to learn in their desert war against the British that these tactics worked in offence as well as defence. At the First Battle of Tobruk in April 1941 the Afrikakorps broke the perimeter of the fortified port with its tanks, but many of these were quickly lost to Australian tank-hunting parties because the defenders closed the gaps behind the intruders and prevented the German infantry from following in support. These tactics of divide-and-win were shortly to be used by Rommel against the British desert army itself. In the open desert battles of Sidi Rezegh and Gazala, from November 1941 to June 1942, Rommel perfected a method wher
eby he engaged British tanks with his own, retreated to draw the enemy on to a screen of anti-tank guns and then advanced when the losses inflicted had robbed the British of the means to conduct a mobile defence. Motorised infantry and self-propelled artillery accompanied his advancing tanks, thus ensuring that British positions overrun could be held and consolidated.

  It was a positive advantage to Rommel in his adoption of these tactics that, for extraneous reasons, the number of tanks in German Panzer divisions had been halved since 1940. Hitler’s purpose in reducing divisional tank strengths in late 1940 was to accumulate a surplus on which new Panzer divisions could be built; the number of divisions was in fact doubled between the fall of France and the opening of Barbarossa. The indirect effect of this bisection was to force German commanders to make better use of the non-tank elements of their Panzer divisions, particularly the mechanised infantry (Panzergrenadiers) and self-propelled artillery. Out of this necessity was born a true doctrine of tank-infantry-artillery co-operation which the Panzer divisions brought to a high level of practicality in 1943-4, as they found themselves progressively outnumbered by the enemy, particularly on the Russian front. Even when divisional tank strengths fell below 200 (from the 400 that had been standard in 1940), German Panzer divisions proved themselves equal or superior to much stronger Allied formations – as, for example, the 10th Panzer Division demonstrated when it routed the US 1st Armoured Division at Kasserine in Tunisia in February 1943. British and American armoured divisions followed the German pattern of organisation from mid-war onwards, shedding tank battalions and acquiring larger complements of motorised infantry and self-propelled anti-tank artillery to achieve a better balance of arms. The Americans, out of their large automotive capacity, were actually able to put their ‘armoured infantry’ into tracked carriers, with a notable improvement in mobility. Even so, the best German Panzer formations – those of the privileged SS and such favoured divisions as the army’s Lehr and the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Goering – remained superior to their Allied counterparts until, after the battles of Normandy and White Russia, the relentless effects of attrition, imposed at the front by combat and at the rear by aerial bombardment, began to depress their strengths below the level at which losses of men and equipment could be made good from the Replacement Army and the tank factories.

  The technology of armoured warfare

  Superior organisation and experience alone, however, did not explain Germany’s ability to wage armoured warfare on equal terms against a coalition of industrially superior powers from early 1942 until late 1944. The quality of German armour also counted significantly in the balance. German armoured vehicles were, with only one or two exceptions, better than their equivalents in the opposing armies. British armour in particular was lamentably inferior to the German products. Though the British had invented the tank, first deployed it in action in September 1916, and largely conceived the theoretical basis of armoured warfare, they did not succeed in building an effective tank in the Second World War. That crucial balance between firepower, protection and mobility which underlies successful tank design eluded them. Their Infantry Tank Mark I, which at Arras Rommel found he could penetrate only with his eighty-eights, was strong but almost immobile. The Churchill was equally tough but scarcely faster. Only the Cromwell, which appeared in 1944 to equip the reconnaissance battalions of British armoured divisions, had speed and protection; its gun remained inadequate. As a result the British divisions of 1944 were dependent on the American Sherman for their main tank strength, but the Sherman too had defects: though fast, reliable and easy to maintain, it burnt readily and lacked gunpower. Britain’s most successful contribution to Anglo-American armoured capability was to fit its fearsome 17-pounder anti-tank gun to specially adapted Shermans, called Fireflies, which provided British armoured divisions with their principal if not only antidote to heavy German armour in 1944-5. The great merit of the Sherman, and a tribute to America’s industrial power, was that it could be manufactured in quantity. In 1943-4 the USA produced 47,000 tanks, almost all Shermans, while Germany produced 29,600 tanks and assault guns. Britain, in 1944, produced only 5000 tanks.

  It was Russia, alone among Germany’s enemies, which matched its output of tanks in quality and quantity. In 1944 Soviet tank production totalled 29,000, most of which comprised the remarkable T-34. This tank owed much of its technology to the independent American designer, Walter Christie, from whom the Soviet Union bought prototypes at a time when fiscal stringency kept the US Army on a shoestring budget. To Christie’s chassis and suspension the Russians added an all-weather engine and sloped armour, as well as an effective gun, thus producing such a well-balanced design that in 1942, when Albert Speer succeeded Dr Fritz Todt as head of the German armaments industry, the German army actually considered copying it wholesale as a successor to the ageing Panzer Mark IV. That humiliating concession of technical inferiority was ultimately avoided by the production of the Mark V Panther. Although the new tank failed at Kursk – as late as January 1944 Hitler was calling it ‘the crawling Heinkel 177’ in an allusion to a disappointing bomber – it eventually justified the effort put into its development in Normandy, where it equipped many of the Panzer battalions of the SS divisions. Even in 1944, however, the Mark IV remained the Panzer arm’s mainstay. It had originated before 1939 as the final series in a ladder of designs, each larger than the one before. The Mark IV in particular had proved remarkably adaptable and had been progressively improved; finally, when equipped with a ‘long’ 75-mm gun as its main armament, it became almost a match for the T-34 itself.

  Its predecessors, notably the Panzer Mark III, had also been readily adaptable as self-propelled anti-tank and ‘assault’ guns, and from February 1943 onwards, when the tank pioneer Heinz Guderian became Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, it was incorporated with the tanks into a new ‘Panzer arm’. Such weapons suffered from the disadvantage that their guns fired only in the direction that the vehicle itself was pointing; but, because they lacked complex turret machinery, they were cheap to produce, and their low profile made them difficult to detect when deployed in well-chosen defensive positions on the battlefield. Their design was rational enough to be widely imitated by the Russians as well as the Americans and British, and they largely provided the mobile firepower of the Panzergrenadier divisions like the 17th SS, which the Allies found such formidable opponents in France. The German army itself distinguished little between tanks and assault guns. Indeed, Guderian’s main difficulty in reorganising the Panzer arm in 1943 lay in overcoming the reluctance of the artillery to relinquish control of its assault guns, which, according to its senior officers, provided gunners with their sole opportunity to win the Knight’s Cross, the Wehrmacht’s ultimate decoration for bravery.

  The only instrument of armoured warfare which German commanders regarded as qualitatively different from the rest was the Mark VI Tiger, which was not allotted to divisions but organised in independent battalions, kept under central control and committed to crucial offensive and counter-offensive missions. The Tiger had defects – its enormous weight was symptomatic of creeping ‘gigantism’ in German tank design which robbed it of speed while its turret traversed with ponderous deliberation: but, with its 88-mm gun and 100-mm-thick armour, it proved consistently superior, in static if not mobile operations, to every other tank of the war. The cough of the Tiger’s engine starting up in the distance was something all Allied soldiers remembered with respect.

  Tigers, Panthers, Mark IVs and assault guns were all to play their part in the great armoured battle in Normandy which, culminating in the holocaust of the Falaise Gap, was about to begin at Mortain on the night of 6-7 August. Hitler, inspired as so often at the map table by a pictorial glimpse of opportunity, had decided that the outpouring of the American armies from Normandy into the narrow corridor between Mortain and the sea laid them open to a decisive counter-stroke. ‘We must strike like lightning,’ he had announced to his OKW operations staff on 2 August
. ‘When we reach the sea the American spearheads will be cut off. . . . We might even be able to cut off their entire beachhead. We must not get bogged down in cutting off the Americans who have broken through. Their turn will come later. We must wheel north like lightning and turn the entire enemy front from the rear.’