To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  that false doctrines, springing from personal experiences of the Great War, should be avoided. All the lessons of that war were thoroughly and systematically studied. New principles of training and instructional courses of all kinds were introduced. All the existing manuals were rewritten…

  Unlike the French with their vision fixed upon the static warfare of the Western Front, too gratified by the fact of final victory to study the military mistakes which had come so close to compromising it, Seeckt, together with many other German staff officers who had fought on the Russian front, enjoyed the advantage of having seen that there were other ways of waging war. He himself had helped devise the tactics of the great sweeping operations in the east, and had directed the breakthrough at Gorlice, leading to a depth of penetration such as was never to occur in the west. From these war-time experiences, he concluded as early as 1921:

  The whole future of warfare appears to me to be in the employment of mobile armies, relatively small but of high quality, and rendered distinctly more effective by the addition of aircraft…

  Guderian and the Panzer Corps

  Seeckt retired for political reasons in 1926, and died ten years later. But he left solid foundations for his successors to build upon. In 1922, a thirty-four-year-old staff captain called Heinz Guderian was appointed to the staff of the Army’s Motor Transport; a signals specialist, it was the first time he had had anything to do with mechanization. During the Great War, Guderian, as an Intelligence officer at the Crown Prince’s H.Q., had been at Verdun throughout the German offensive of 1916. What he had seen there had been enough to convince him that the senseless carnage of this kind of static warfare should never again be indulged in. Encouraged by the ideas of Seeckt, he began ardently to study the effect of motorization on mobility, and at an early stage fell under the profound influence of the writings of the British military thinkers, Liddell Hart, Fuller and Martel. After eighteen months in the Inspectorate of Transport, Guderian was selected to assist Lieutenant-Colonel von Brauchitsch3 at exercises in co-operation between motorized troops and aircraft. He did so well that he was next given a job lecturing on tactics and military history, which provided him with an admirable opportunity to develop his ideas further. By 1929, Guderian himself claims that he had become ‘convinced’ of the fundamental importance of integrated armoured divisions, in which tanks would assume the primary role instead of being subordinate to the infantry. In 1931 he received his first motorized command – of a battalion equipped with dummy tanks and dummy anti-tank guns. Meanwhile, in Britain, during 1934 some advanced experiments on deep penetration had been carried out by General Hobart’s 1st Tank Brigade. Guderian kept abreast of these manoeuvres by employing at his own expense a local tutor to translate Liddell Hart’s articles about them the moment they were printed in England. By the following year his own thinking had reached the point where he could both give utterance to it in an astoundingly prophetic book, and put it into practice. As has often been the humiliating story with British inventions and discoveries, the development of armour was now left to another, unfriendly country.

  Guderian began his book, Achtung – Panzer!, by examining the causes underlying the success and failure of Allied tank operations (the Germans missed the boat and hardly employed any tanks at all) during the First War. He listed the following fundamental errors: the Allies did not attack in sufficient depth, and were never backed up by sufficiently powerful mobile reserves, so that they ‘broke into’ the enemy front, but never through – where they would have been able ‘to knock out his batteries, his reserves, his staffs, all at the same time’; the full potential of the tanks was sacrificed by their being yoked to two such slow-moving components as foot-infantry and horse-drawn artillery; they were thrown in by ‘penny packets’, instead of powerful concentrations; and they were the wrong kind of tanks.

  Guderian saw the remedy to all this lying in the fully mechanized Panzer divisions, all the components of which would collaborate closely together, and which had to be capable of moving at equal speeds. The Panzer division was to be built around the tank itself – not the slow, short-range ‘infantry escort’ tank to which the French Army was still wedded,4 but a medium ‘breakthrough’ tank possessing ‘armour sufficient to protect it against the mass of enemy anti-tank weapons, a higher speed and greater cruising range than the infantry escort tank, and an armament of machine-guns and cannon up to 75 mm.’ From the beginning, these tanks’ commanders would be trained to ‘fight in large units’, thus providing maximum concentration of firepower. Close behind the ‘breakthrough’ tanks would follow motorized infantry with the role of mopping up and exploiting the successes of the armour, and interspersed with them would be mobile anti-tank guns. These were to be rushed offensively forward, to hold the vulnerable flanks of the Panzer salient against any counter-attack by enemy tanks. The unwieldy horse-drawn artillery of 1914–18 would be replaced by self-propelled guns mounted on tracks. But here Guderian, writing in 1936, was able to provide a solution which he admitted to be only partially satisfactory. The essence of the Panzer thrust, he stressed, must be surprise. Yet a prolonged softening-up bombardment, even from highly mobile artillery, was always liable to give the game away, as happened repeatedly during the set-piece offensives of the Great War. The full answer was only to come with the development, later, of the Stuka dive-bomber.

  Guderian stressed the advantage of tanks attacking in mass, and, if possible, at early dawn, on account of the difficult targets they would present to the defender’s anti-tank guns. He also stressed the need to strike with such speed that the tanks would get into the enemy’s main defence zone before these guns could be properly sited. But he regarded ‘the most dangerous opponent’ of the Panzer division to be the enemy tank. If the attacker

  cannot succeed in beating them, then the breakthrough can be considered as having failed, because neither the infantry nor the artillery will be able to get through any longer. Everything depends on delaying intervention of enemy anti-tank reserves and tanks and encountering them as early as possible with powerful units, i.e. Panzer units capable of taking part in a tank battle in the full depths of the battlefield, in the area of the enemy reserves and command centres.

  The intervention of the defender’s reserves was to be delayed by the tactical air force, which Guderian already saw as working in close co-operation with the Panzers; this delaying task would be one of air power’s principal functions in the battle. He also mentions the employment of airborne troops in capturing important points in the enemy rear to open routes for the oncoming Panzer thrust.

  Once the attacker had succeeded in breaking through into the enemy’s defence area,

  the crushing of the enemy batteries and the mopping-up of the infantry battle zone can be achieved with relatively weak Panzer units. The infantry can then exploit the successes of the tanks…

  The endeavour to strike the enemy defence simultaneously in its whole depth [continues Guderian] must therefore be regarded as highly justified. This lofty goal is only to be achieved with numerous tanks in the necessary deep deployment, with Panzer units and Panzer leaders who have been taught to fight in large units and to break any unforeseen resistance rapidly and decisively. Apart from its depth, the breakthrough attack must also be on so great a width that the outflanking of a centre of the attack is made difficult… We thus sum up our demands for a decision-seeking Panzer attack in these terms; suitable terrain, surprise and mass deployment in the necessary width and depth.

  Here lay an astonishingly accurate blueprint of how, four years later, Guderian himself would effect the breakthrough at Sedan. In Mein Kampf Hitler had already broadcast to the world his intentions to obtain Lebensraum by conquest in Europe; now, in detail, Guderian revealed the technique by which these conquests were to be made. Despite the admonition contained in its very title, Achtung – Panzer! was ignored by French and British leaders even more completely than Mein Kampf had been. It was never translated into either Fren
ch or English, and appears never to have been properly studied by anyone in a key position in the General Staffs of either country. Yet already by February 1935, the Deuxième Bureau (so its chief, General Gauché, tells us) had warned the French High Command of the potential of Germany’s embryo Panzer divisions; moreover, by the time of the publication of Achtung – Panzer!, Guderian was already a well-known military figure who had published his theories in professional magazines for all to read, and was now commanding Hitler’s 2nd Panzer Division.

  As early as 1933, when Hitler had attended a demonstration of Germany’s earliest tank prototype, he exclaimed repeatedly to Guderian: ‘That’s what I need! That’s what I want to have!’ Hitler’s own technical grasp was a constant source of astonishment to his advisers; mechanical details fascinated him, and among other things it was reputedly he who first suggested (in 1938) that the 88-mm. anti-aircraft gun be used in an anti-tank role, thereby giving birth to a weapon which was perhaps the most successful to be used on either side in the Second World War. But above all, Guderian and his theories were just what Hitler needed to execute his policy of lightning conquests effected with minimum force. With that visionary intuition of his, he had remarked to Hermann Rauschning shortly after coming to power: ‘The next war will be quite different from the last world war. Infantry attacks and mass formations are obsolete. Interlocked frontal struggles lasting for years on petrified fronts will not return. I guarantee that. They were a degenerate form of war…’; and later, even more prophetically: ‘I shall manoeuvre France right out of her Maginot Line without losing a single soldier.’ Although Guderian had to face opposition from conservative elements in the German Army almost as tough as anything encountered by the French and British reformers, under Hitler’s patronage he received the utmost support. In October 1935, the first three Panzer divisions were formed; Guderian, still only a colonel, receiving command of one of them. By the beginning of 1938, Guderian was promoted lieutenant-general and placed in command of the mobile corps which played a leading role in the march into Austria. At the end of that year, now a full general, he received the key post of Chief of Mobile Troops on the General Staff. Guderian and the philosophy of Blitzkrieg had arrived.

  The ‘Revolutionary’ Wehrmacht

  In Achtung – Panzer! Guderian describes the highest human quality called for by the Panzer Corps as being ‘a fanatical will to move forward’. It was this very quality which the strange and terrible creed of National Socialism was instilling into the new Wehrmacht as a whole. How difficult it is at this range to recapture, let alone explain, the instant magic that, in the 1930s, Hitler wielded over German youth – sublimely unaware as it was of the dark tunnel of unprecedented horror into which he would eventually lead them and all Europe! On to the fertile stock of German childhoods cast over by the miseries of hunger, crazy inflation followed by depression and mass unemployment, the humiliations of defeat and occupation, the apparent injustices of Versailles and the seeming pointlessness of life under Weimar, Hitler was able to graft the bud of intoxication. As Nietzsche said of the Germans, ‘Intoxication means more to them than nourishment. That is the hook they will always bite on. A popular leader must hold up before them the prospect of conquests and splendour; then he will be believed.’ Hitler was believed, and his early bloodless conquests confirmed and re-confirmed that belief. Satisfying some elemental need for mysticism in the German soul, the gigantic Nuremberg Rallies with their pageantry and colour, their hysterical, chanting masses of assenting humanity, filled young Germans with a kind of revolutionary fervour which they carried with them into the Wehrmacht. Among the older generation, for all those whose nightmare memories of the shellholes on the Western Front, implanted as deeply as in French minds, caused them to wonder fearfully where Hitler’s rearmament would lead, there were many who could think only of one word – revenge! Visiting Germany in 1934, Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply shocked by the fanaticism of an ex-sergeant of the Great War: ‘ “If there’s another war,” he said, “we shall not be defeated this time. We shall retrieve our honour.” ’ Sartre replied that there was no need for a war; everyone ought to want peace. But ‘ “Honour comes first,” the sergeant said. “First we must retrieve our honour.” ’ As Hitler’s successes brought his promises to reverse the Diktat of Versailles ever closer to fulfilment, so did the numbers of those sharing the views of Sartre’s ex-sergeant multiply. Patriotism rekindled, the Army became imbued with a new glory. A military career satisfied the young German’s inherent yearning for Kameradschaft, as well as his passion for mechanical matters, canalizing all that tremendous fund of technical skill and imagination latent in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. At the same time, the Wehrmacht’s programme of expansion promised swift promotion. Here, at last, was something that imparted to life a new meaning! Seeckt and Guderian had provided the Wehrmacht with a revolutionary doctrine, Hitler and Nazism a revolutionary spirit to go with it.

  The training of German youth, both within the new Wehrmacht and, earlier, in various para-military organizations, was in itself revolutionary. Their regimented education began at a tender age. At ten they entered the Jungvolk, pledging ‘to devote all my energies and my strength to the saviour of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him so help me God.’ At twelve, the most outstanding members of the Jungvolk were picked out to be dispatched to special schools for the instruction of élite cadres. The emphasis here, as everywhere else under the Nazis’ educational system, was strongly on physical culture and disciplined teamwork; among other preliminary military training, the boys also received courses in parachute jumping. At fourteen young Germans became eligible to join the vast body of the Hitler Youth itself. In 1936, a law was passed closely co-ordinating the Hitler Youth with the Wehrmacht; from local units, its members received instruction in marksmanship and leadership, visited Army barracks and were taken to watch manoeuvres. One of the liaison officers organizing these programmes was a certain Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Rommel. At eighteen, youths became of age for conscription into the Wehrmacht or the Arbeitsdienst (Labour Service). Inside the Arbeitsdienst, while young Germans served their country by building roads and barracks, the work of inseminating corporate consciousness and para-military discipline and of preaching the essential classlessness of the New Order continued. Then, for vacation times, there was the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ welfare organization to provide still further regimented Kameradschaft. There was no mistaking the enthusiasm of the recipients of this massive indoctrination; even a dispassionate British journalist5 studying ‘these young Germans of 1933’ was deeply impressed (as indeed were so many other observers at the time) by the

  tremendous sense of comradeship amongst themselves. They were happy to learn together, play together, march together and to learn to fight together. They loved the open air and they flung away clothes from them with an abandon which would have horrified the Victorian generation… Their animal energy was gigantic.

  By the time they reached the Wehrmacht, these spartan, dedicated youths were already superlative material for a ‘revolutionary’ force, instinctively versed in the one craft which was to pay off in Germany’s early military operations more than any other – teamwork.

  Anti-militarism in France

  By comparison, what contrast one may glimpse in the spirit of France of the mid-1930s! The last of those rosy post-war illusions had been roughly swept aside by the revelation of her impotence during the Rhineland crisis; the urge for national grandeur, the desire for supremacy in Europe, were replaced by a deep longing simply to be left in peace. It was a longing widely diffused through all strata of French society, though of course the symptoms were paralleled in, and stimulated by, the mood prevailing in the England of Cliveden and Lansbury, the Peace Ballot and the Peace Pledge Union. But in France particularly the instinct for peace, or for what was later to become stigmatized as ‘appeasement’, remained strongly rooted in memories of the dreadfulness of the Great War, m
emories which, perhaps perversely, had become more rather than less potent with the passage of the years. This was to a large extent a consequence of the spate of anti-war literature which had swept Europe in the late 1920s, all telling basically the same tale of the horror and wastefulness of war, combined with the cynical callousness and sheer incompetence of the war leaders. In Germany, Hitler had been swift to stifle such books as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but in France the terrifying novel of Henri Barbusse, Le Feu, had an immeasurable impact. For the Verdun generation, here indeed was an indelible reminder of what it had really been like; for their juniors, a nightmare fantasy the re-enactment of which must be avoided at all costs. Wielding enormous intellectual influence were various anti-war associations formed by such giants of France’s literary Left wing as André Gide, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and Romain Rolland. But Barbusse was the torch-bearer; when he died in 1935 more than 300,000 followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery.

  With his instinctive genius, Hitler knew well how to play on French fears and hopes, accompanying each new adventure with barrages of peace propaganda and repeated pledges of renunciation of any claim to Alsace-Lorraine, aimed at making Frenchmen sleep all the more comfortably at night behind the safety of their Maginot Line. With the vileness of the concentration camps yet to come, the full menace of the New Order only apparent when it would already be too late to check, Hitler did not seem especially malignant to the average Frenchman. Besides, as will be seen shortly, there were other dangers much closer to home. What hatred and fear of the Nazis there existed were roughly balanced out by equal hatred and fear of war itself.