Panzer Leader

by Heinz Guderian

  Speer possessed sufficient courage to speak his mind to Hitler. At an early stage he explained to him clearly and fully why the war could no longer be won and why it must therefore be ended. This brought down Hitler’s anger upon him.

  Even before the war Darre had opposed Hitler. He was eliminated, no doubt due to machinations by some competitor within the Party.

  But taken all in all it must be regretfully admitted that the Cabinet was not in a position to exert any influence worth mentioning on events during the period of the Third Reich.

  14. THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF

  The General Staff was Scharnhorst’s and Gneisenau’s progeny. Its godparents were the spirit of Frederick the Great and the national desire for freedom from the yoke of Germany’s oppressor, Napoleon. After the war of liberation against the French Emperor had been successfully concluded, Europe settled down to a long period of peace. The national economies, weakened by years of war, had to be built up anew; the states were therefore compelled to limit their military expenditure. In this peaceful Europe the continued existence of the Prussian General Staff was hardly noticeable. It was during the period of calm that one of the most important works of military science was composed, Vom Kriege (‘On War’), by the director of the Prussian War Academy, Carl von Clausewitz.

  This little-read but much-criticised book contains the first attempt to create a philosophy of war and to analyse its characteristics from a detached standpoint. It played a great part in forming the attitude of mind of several generations of German General Staff Corps officers. From it derives that striving to observe both men and affairs coolly and sensibly which has been the foremost quality of all outstanding members of the German General Staff. It served also to strengthen the patriotism and the idealism which inspired such officers.

  If Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Clausewitz are to be regarded as the spiritual parents of the Prusso-German General Staff, Field-Marshal Graf von Moltke must be regarded as its greatest and most finished son. It was Schlieffen who coined the apothegm: ‘Great achievements, small display: more reality than appearance,’ and this was a recognition of the qualities of Moltke and of his school. As a result of Bismarck’s outstanding statesmanship he was enabled to fight and win three wars and thus to assist in the unification of the German nation and people. By so doing he simultaneously enhanced the authority of his organisation, the General Staff.

  After Moltke’s death the German General Staff did not, perhaps, avoid being influenced by the conditions prevailing at the turn of the century. The growing prosperity of Germany after the successful completion of the struggle for unity affected both the Officer Corps and the General Staff. At last Germany had achieved its position as a first-class power in the comity of European nations, and this created a state of military self-confidence which was most highly developed among the officers of the General Staff Corps, the intellectual élite of the Army. It was with this attitude that the General Staff went to war in 1914. During that war it performed its duty. If in those four years it was, in relationship to the generals, more in evidence than heretofore, this was less the responsibility of the General Staff Corps than of the generals themselves who, partly through age and partly through a failure to grasp military technique and a correspondingly one-sided preoccupation with troop service, allowed themselves to become increasingly overshadowed.

  It has been maintained that the General Staff under Ludendorff assumed an entirely disproportionate importance, that it suffered from hypertrophy. But without Ludendorff’s powerful creative energy it is doubtful if the General Staff, and indeed the German Army, would ever have been capable of the great efforts that it made. Ludendorff can hardly be blamed for the fact that in that war Germany finally went down before the enemy’s vast preponderance of strength, since he only assumed a position of authority in 1916; indeed, had it not been for the emergence of himself and of Hindenburg the war would surely have been already lost that year. Those two great soldiers undertook an almost superhuman and utterly thankless task. It would be unjust to blame them for what later happened. Despite the unfortunate outcome of the war and the post-war dissensions that followed the defeat, Hindenburg and Ludendorff remained the two outstanding representatives of all that was best in the German General Staff Corps. The difficulties of the war we had to wage often, it is true, forced Ludendorff to make harsh and even ruthless decisions. Many of his pupils were later to believe that this attitude of his, dictated in his case by necessity, was in fact an essential element in the character of a good General Staff Corps officer; it was specifically this least amiable quality in his waging of war that they chose to copy; thus there arose a type of officer distinguished for his ruthless determination and pushing energy, which was not attractive and which did the General Staff Corps’ reputation no good either among the general public or among the troops. But when considering the long sequence of individuals who were typical of the Prusso-German General Staff, this last type plays a very insignificant and unimportant part.

  Scharnhorst was the son of a peasant. Born in Lower Saxony he was taciturn, deliberate, selfless, brave, unassuming, incorruptible, and unselfish. He organised the Prussian Army during the War of Liberation, founded the General Staff and died as a result of severe wounds received on the field of battle.

  Gneisenau, Blücher’s chief of staff, defended Kolberg in 1806. By nature he was vivid, fiery, and extremely brilliant and he advised his commander during many battles, some successful, some unsuccessful. After the defeat at Ligny on June 16th, 1815, he urged Blücher to march towards the allied English Army; it was this action that led to the victory of Waterloo on June 18th, 1815, and the defeat of Napoleon by the allied armies.

  Clausewitz was never privileged to hold high office in wartime. He wrote Vom Kriege. He was the type of quiet, retiring, scholarly man, often to be found in the German General Staff Corps. Little known during his lifetime, he was to exercise a great influence on future generations.

  Moltke was the most important Chief of the German Army General Staff. He was world-famous as a thinker and planner and proved himself to be a genius at command in war. Distinguished in manner and reticent by nature, his deliberate and very thorough intellect was his most marked characteristic. He had a great influence. He was not only a great soldier but a noble man, a fine writer and an attentive observer of foreign nations and customs.

  Schlieffen was distinguished, clever, cool, and inclined to sarcasm. He was forced to draw up plans during a period of vacillating policy and inferior chancellors. He attempted, by means of the clarity and determination of his military planning, to compensate for the aimlessness and irresolution of the politicians. Like Moltke, he possessed a comprehension for the technical requirements of the age. The clarity and convincing strength of his ideas so impressed his successor, the younger Moltke, that his plan of campaign remained, except for minor details, unaltered after his death and was indeed put into practice, in conditions different from those that he had envisaged, in 1914. The failure of the so-called Schlieffen Plan cannot therefore be blamed on him but only on his less competent successors. He never had the opportunity to prove himself in battle.

  Hindenburg was a straightforward man, clear, resolute and chivalrous. To those he trusted he allowed a very free hand. He also had a clear appreciation of events and a profound knowledge of human nature. ‘If the Battle of Tannenberg had been lost, there can be no question as to who would have been held responsible for the defeat.’

  Ludendorff was a strong-willed man with an enormous capacity for work and an outstanding talent for organisation. He was filled with burning patriotism and he fought a titanic struggle to stave off the defeat that threatened to engulf his country. His achievements, at a most difficult period, were very considerable.

  Seeckt was clear-headed, deliberate, and cool. The impression he made in public was almost one of shyness. He was as gifted a strategist as he was an organiser, though he possessed less comprehension for technical matters than
had Moltke or Schlieffen. After the collapse of 1918 he created the Weimar Republic’s 100,000-man army. By the terms of the Versailles Treaty this army was not allowed a General Staff. Seeckt had to submit to this order. But he found ways, during the period of disarmament, to maintain among the officers of the staff the old General Staff Corps spirit. His struggle to keep the army free from the influence of party politics was undoubtedly correct from his point of view; it had, however, in the long run an unfortunate result in that the Officer Corps in general, and the future General Staff Corps officers in particular, were in consequence largely uneducated in matters of internal and external politics. That was the principal weakness of his system.

  Beck was highly educated, calm and distinguished. When our right to military self-determination had been re-established, he devoted himself to reconstructing the General Staff in the spirit of Moltke. He had little understanding for the technical requirements of the age. He stood aloof from the problems of aviation, motorisation, and radio. He found the revolutionary developments brought about in warfare by technical progress disagreeable, and he attempted to hinder them; similarly, he would have no part in the political revolution represented by National-Socialism. He was by nature a conservative and a procrastinator, and it was this aspect of his character that was his undoing.

  From the above brief characterisations of a few prominent representatives of the German General Staff it is possible to draw certain deductions concerning its spirit as a whole. During its long existence the object of the General Staff Corps was to select those officers with the finest brains and characters and so to train and educate them that they could lead the German armed forces in any circumstances, no matter how difficult, in which those forces might be called upon to fight.

  Prerequisites for appointment to the General Staff were integrity of character and unimpeachable behaviour and way of life both on and off duty. Next came military competence; a man had to have proved himself at the front, had to have an understanding for tactical and technical matters, a talent for organisation and powers of endurance both physical and mental; he had also to be industrious, of a sober temperament and determined.

  In selecting officers from this point of view it is possible that intellectual ability was sometimes overvalued in comparison to strength of character and particularly to warmth of personality; but these last two qualities are much less easily estimated, particularly since they do not by their very nature tend to be spectacular.

  The great majority of the General Staff Corps officers, especially the older ones, were well aware of those traditions of their corps. But that does not mean that it was always these officers who found themselves in a position to select their successors. Even if that had been the case, it still does not follow that they would necessarily have possessed sufficient knowledge of human nature to enable them to find men with the requisite qualities.

  There can be no doubt that old traditions are in theory of great value to any army. The characters of the more eminent General Staff officers of the past, as outlined above, should have provided a younger generation with good models without, at the same time, hindering or perhaps even preventing contemporary development. But in practice tradition is not always regarded as simply supplying ideals of behaviour, but rather as a source of practical example, as though an imitation of what was done before could reproduce identical results despite the fact that meanwhile circumstances and methods have completely altered. Hardly any mature institution can avoid this fallacious aspect of tradition. The Prusso-German Army and its General Staff were not immune from making this mistake in a number of ways. In consequence there was inevitably a certain internal stress between misunderstood tradition and the new tasks that had to be performed. In my time such stress was aggravated by a number of different causes: by the new political condition of Germany, by the altered balance of power in Europe and the world, by the growing importance of technical matters, with the consequent expansion of war into ‘total war’ and also the resultant widening of the field of political action until a point was reached where it embraced the whole globe.

  It is certain that by no means all General Staff officers grasped this new state of affairs. Such lack of comprehension was particularly the case with the older officers, that is to say with those who occupied the more important positions. Modern developments required reorganisation along the lines of a combined armed forces and, in particular, a unified Supreme Command for all those forces. And this most essential requirement, necessitated by political, military, and technical developments, was not initiated before the Second World War by the Army General Staff. On the contrary, the leaders of the pre-war General Staff consistently opposed and hindered the timely creation of a comprehensive and effective Supreme Command of the armed forces.

  As in the question of an Armed Forces Supreme Command, so when it was a matter of setting up an independent, operational air force or of developing the newly conceived armoured force within the Army, the Army General Staff opposed these innovations. The importance of these two technical achievements in so far as they affected the operations of the combined armed forces was neither sufficiently studied nor appreciated, because it was feared that they might result, in the one case, in a decrease of the importance of the Army as a whole and, in the other, in a lessening to the prestige of the older arms of that Service.

  Any attempt to widen the General Staff Corps officers’ appreciation of the political situation was prevented, first, by the traditional limitation of their interests to purely military matters and, secondly, by Hitler’s principle according to which every fragment of the machinery which controlled the State was kept in a sort of specialised, water-tight compartment and no man might know more than was essential for the performance of his own particular job. He regarded it as his unique privilege to be in a position where he might form a comprehensive picture; this, of course, was highly disadvantageous to the German cause as a whole.

  The younger generation of staff officers felt this state of tension and stress more acutely than did the older and did their best to resolve it. Their efforts along these lines were not looked on with sympathy by their seniors. The younger men, in opposition to the older, believed that there was no time to be lost; the representatives of tradition wanted, and so far as they were able to do insisted, on a slow and gradual evolution.

  It was this clinging to a faulty concept of tradition that primarily brought the General Staff into opposition to Hitler, that awakened his distrust for its competence and reliability and that in the long run created a state of conflict between him and it which had very grave effects on the conduct of the war.

  An ideal General Staff Corps officer might be described as possessing the following qualities: sincerity of conviction, cleverness, modesty, self-effacement in favour of the common cause, and strong personal convictions combined with the ability tactfully to present these convictions to his commanding general. If his opinions were not accepted he must be sufficiently master of himself loyally to carry out his commander’s decisions and to act at all times in accordance with his wishes. He must fully understand and feel for the needs of the troops and he must be inexhaustible in his efforts to help them. He must have operational, tactical, and technical understanding; in technical matters he must not allow himself to become swamped in details, but yet must know enough to be able to correlate technical innovations with the command of troops in war.

  It goes without saying that the General Staff Corps officer must also possess all the virtues required of every officer and soldier and must possess them in a highly developed form: courage, determination, willingness to assume responsibility, a gift for improvisation, physical endurance, as well as considerable industriousness.

  Every General Staff Corps officer should do regular tours of duty with troops, both of his original arm of the Service and of other arms, in all sorts of conditions, so that he may collect practical knowledge of various types of fighting and of actual command. In this matter p
ractice, in the years immediately preceding the war, was far divorced from the ideal. The chief reason for this was the shortage of General Staff Corps officers due to the Army’s strict adherence to the Versailles Treaty’s prohibition of the Great General Staff. This bad state of affairs became worse during the war, in this case because of the reluctance of the higher staffs to suffer the inevitable inconvenience resulting from the departure for the front of their experienced staff officers. In this, the worst example of all was that set by the OKW and the OKH. There were members of those staffs who, during a war of almost six years’ duration, never once saw the front.

  Perhaps the most important aspect of the General Staff Corps lay in the fact that its members were trained to judge events and make appreciations, both operational and tactical, according to a definite and uniform system. From this basic uniformity of reaction it was hoped to create a wide uniformity of decision. The French describe this as l’unité de doctrine. The Chief of the General Staff, in whom were vested no command powers by which he could exert his will, hoped by means of this similarity of thought-process on the part of all General Staff Corps officers to pervade all formations down to and including divisions with his influence and thus to ensure unity of tactical and operational procedure throughout the whole Army. In order that he might make his ideas known to his officers he created the so-called Generalstabsdienstweg (General Staff channel of communication), an institution which led to a certain amount of misunderstanding and which therefore was opposed by Hitler.

  The strategic concepts of the General Staff should not crystallise around definite, rigid principles, but must fit the changing political situation and the tasks arising therefrom. Germany’s geographical position in Central Europe, surrounded by strongly armed neighbours, compelled the study of a war on several fronts. Since the possibility of such a war invariably involved the prospect of fighting against superior force, this problem, too, had to be carefully examined. The operational thinking of the old General Staff was primarily continental in nature. But the introduction of operational air forces meant that the intervention by powers across the seas would have to be taken far more into consideration. In many cases this fact was not grasped with sufficient clarity.