Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  In 1935, Erich von Manstein, newly appointed head of the General Staff ’s Operations Section, prepared a memo consolidating previous discussions and recommending the development of a self-propelled “assault gun” to work directly with the infantry, with each division having its own battalion. What the gunners described, and what the Weapons Office turned into a development contract in 1936, was to a degree a throwback to the original Allied tanks of World War I: a vehicle with a low silhouette for concealment “not to exceed the height of a standing man,” all- round armor protection, and a 75mm gun with both high-explosive and armor-piercing capacity. Putting those requirements together made a turret impossible; the gun would instead be mounted in a fixed superstructure with a limited traverse of 30 degrees. Initially, as in the later US tank destroyers, the top was open to facilitate the observation considered necessary for tactical effectiveness at infantry ranges. Before going into production, however, the vehicle was given a roof and a panoramic sight enabling it to employ indirect fire. After all, assault guns were artillery weapons.

  Guderian, the armored force’s designated pit bull, argued that the concept was a mistake. Turreted tanks could do anything assault guns could do; the reverse was not the case. A subtext amounting to a main text was that the projected assault gun would use the chassis of the Mark III tank and the gun intended for the Panzer IV. Guderian and his tanker colleagues were not placated by projections indicating that rising production would avert serious competition for chassis. A disproportionate number of officers in senior army appointments had begun their careers in the artillery—Fritsch, Beck, and Halder, among others. It has been suggested that a “gunner mafia” thwarted Guderian out of branch rivalry. More to the point was the fact that the light tanks that were expected to become surplus as the IIIs and IVs entered service were too small and fragile to carry a three-inch gun even in a hull mounting, while the artillerymen wanted every active infantry division to have its assault gun battalion by the fall of 1939.

  In practice, assault guns never became a high-priority item. The first soft-steel experimental models were not completed until 1938. The first production run was only 30, and those were not delivered until May 1940. Only a half dozen six-gun batteries saw action in France. Later orders placed in early 1940 were for only 120 vehicles—hardly evidence of either branch or institutional commitment to the concept. Not until the Sturmgeschütz III proved its worth beyond question did the contracts expand and the assault gun begin to take its place beside the panzers in Wehrmacht history and military lore.

  Light tank chassis were nevertheless good for something. The towed antitank gun was still considered satisfactory as the backbone of antitank defense. The army’s offensive mind-set, however, encouraged active defense to the point where the initial title of Panzer Abwehr (tank defense) was changed prewar to Panzerjäger (tank hunter). The 37mm gun was easily handled, but against the up-armored tanks coming into service, its days were numbered. The more powerful designs on the drawing boards were also significantly heavier. But the Czech army had possessed a very effective 47mm antitank gun and the armored force had an increasing number of Panzer Is becoming surplus to requirements. Remove the German turret, mount the Czech gun behind a three-sided shield, and the result was the first tracked, armored antitank gun to enter service. The design was patchwork and its numbers were small, but as with the assault gun, its relative success in 1940 made the 47mm Panzer I combination the first in a long line of similar improvisations in all armies.

  In the interim between the fall of Poland and the attack on France, the armored force confronted another kind of technological problem. How best could the commander of a mobile formation built around the internal- combustion engine be at the critical point of a battle while at the same time continuing to command his whole force effectively? The panzer division included an “armored radio company,” but its vehicles were as a rule attached to division and brigade headquarters. Events in Poland had demonstrated the practical limits of radio communication under field conditions. “Leading from the front” invited the dispersion of effort as commanders seeking to exploit presumed opportunities wound up directing isolated actions that eventually devolved to skirmishes with limited tactical results. Guderian’s familiar mantra “klotzen, nicht kleckern” (“slug, don’t fumble; keep focused on an objective”) was sound enough. The problem was implementation.

  Erwin Rommel, newly appointed commander of the freshly minted 7th Panzer Division, addressed the problem by developing a mobile headquarters based on an electronic command system mounted in a cross-country vehicle: a network of radios allowing him to contact both subordinate formations and his own main headquarters. He sought as well to develop a common way of doing things—not as a straitjacket, but rather as a framework for structuring the behavior of subordinates in the constant emergency that was the modern mobile battlefield. Commanders at all levels were to exercise independent judgment, with the division commander using his sense of the battle and the information provided by his headquarters to select points of intervention, ideally to refine and complete the efforts of the men on the spot.

  Rommel made clear to his senior staff officers that he depended essentially on them to process and evaluate information in his absence, and to act on it, should that seem necessary. By later American standards, German divisions had small headquarters whose officers were relatively low ranking. That reflected exigency more than principle; the army after 1933 was never able to keep pace with its own expanding need for troop staff officers. The often-praised “lean and mean” German structure meant everyone worked constantly. Vital information could be overlooked by busy men. Fatigue and stress led to errors in judgment and to problems of communication as tired, frustrated alpha-male subordinates snapped pointlessly at each other. Especially in a mobile division, success depended heavily on a commanding general willing to support the decisions of even junior staff officers in whose ability, toughness, and loyalty he had confidence.

  There was only one Rommel, who in the 1940 campaign would deliver arguably the most outstanding division-level command performance in modern military history. But in every panzer and motorized division, men with similar perspectives were assuming senior posts. Friedrich Kirchner of 1st Panzer Division, the 6th’s Franz Kempf, the 10th’s Friedrich Schaal, and their counterparts were not water-walkers. But they were solid professionals, able to get the best out of subordinates. Some began as gunners, some as infantrymen, and some wearing cavalry yellow. What they had in common were high learning curves, fingertip situational awareness, and emotional hardness unmatched even in the Red Army. The combination would prove consistently formidable, no matter the operational considerations.

  The greater question in these interim months was how the mobile formations could best be used. At division levels the accepted pattern for an initial deployment was a wave formation with tanks leading. The rifle brigade and usually the pioneers formed the next echelon, then the artillery. The reconnaissance battalion scouted ahead, looking for enemy forces and alternate routes of advance. The attack itself went on in a relatively narrow front, no longer than a thousand yards. As a rule, the tanks led, regiments abreast or one following the other, each responsible for overwhelming a particular element of the defense. Their moral effect was considered on a par with their physical impact, both combining to carry the division through enemy defense by mass, shock, and speed. The motorized battalions, supported by the antitank battalion and the pioneers, would clear pockets of resistance along the line of advance, consolidate captured ground, and prepare to hold it against counterattacks until summoned to catch up with the tanks and repeat the process. The reconnaissance battalion would move into the lead, three or four miles ahead of the tanks, supported when necessary by the motorcyclists. The artillery supported the whole operation with direct or indirect fire as necessary—or as possible. The guns were expected to keep pace with the tanks, which waited for no one.

  The major development after the
Polish campaign involved using armored forces to conduct the initial breakthrough even against prepared defenses. On February 7, at a war game held in Koblenz, Guderian proposed concentrating the armored forces for a drive across the Meuse River around Sedan, then expanding the bridgehead northwest toward Amiens. The Chief of Staff insisted on a measured buildup, waiting for the infantry before seeking to exploit the initial success. A month later, a second war game evaluated the same issue. This time the pressure from on high for using infantry to force the crossing was even stronger. Guderian and XIV Panzer Corps commander Gustav von Wietersheim responded that the proposed conservative employment of the armor was so likely to produce a crisis that they could have no confidence in a high command that ordered it.

  These kinds of war games were intended to generate spirited debate with no hard feelings. But when two experienced senior generals flatly declared “no confidence” in a plan, it was the closest thing possible to saying “get yourself another boy.” This partly manifested the panzer troops’ new confidence. Arguably it also reflected a persisting sense at senior command levels that, for all their retraining, the foot-powered infantry of 1940 might not be the soldiers their fathers were in 1914. This was the time of the new men of the German army: the panzer troops.

  The army faced a related problem: growing shortage of motor vehicles. As early as 1938, maintenance personnel had to cope with a hundred different models of trucks. That number had been reduced, but on the outbreak of war, confusion was restored by the commandeering of thousands of trucks directly from the civilian economy. Polish roads—or the absence of them—had been hard enough on the panzers. Supply columns had suffered losses in some cases more than 50 percent, many of them permanent. By 1940, write-offs had reached a point where the General Staff was considering replacing some trucks in infantry divisions with horse-drawn vehicles. Small wonder in such contexts that the concept of putting the mobile forces up front increasingly permeated thoughts about the coming campaign.

  III

  THE GENESIS OF the German strategic plan against the Western allies is familiar. Hitler wanted the Western campaign to begin immediately after the fall of Poland. The initial date of November 12 was a compromise with a High Command reluctant to mount an offensive under any circumstances. Its foot-dragging produced no fewer than 29 postponements and a concept for Case Yellow, the Western offensive, that involved sending 75 divisions, including most of the army’s mobile formations, into the Low Countries to engage the main Anglo-French strength in what was expected to be an encounter battle in central Belgium. Even before Hitler became directly involved in the planning process, this unpromisingly conventional proposal was generating increasing criticism. It incorporated no proposals for destroying enemy armed forces, speaking rather of creating favorable conditions for future operations. The High Command’s thinking seemed to go no further than punching a hole and seeing what developed. In that sense their proposal owed more to Ludendorff ’s abortive 1918 offensive than the Schlieffen Plan to which it has often been compared.

  Interwar theorists of independent armored warfare like Fuller and Liddell- Hart tended to stress disruption—paralysis—as an end in itself. Cut an enemy’s nervous system and all that remained was rounding up the demoralized and hungry masses. By contrast, the High Command’s plan anticipated the kind of hard fighting that made decisions dependent on contingencies—including a solid probability of defeat at the hands of Allied armor. It required little more than back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine that the force-to-space ratios created by the proposed operation would invite exactly the kind of head-on engagements the army’s mechanized elite was ill- configured to fight. The consequences of defeat, or even stalemate, somewhere in Belgium were hardly likely to have involved strengthening either Hitler’s domestic position or Germany’s chances for victory.

  German doctrine, both generally in the army and specifically in the armored force, was based on destroying enemy forces by breaking their will and their ability to resist. That was the principle of Vernichtungsschlacht, too often tendentiously translated as “battle of annihilation” and then interpreted literally. That was also the basis of the alternative concept put forward by Erich von Manstein, then-chief of staff to Army Group A. Manstein’s proposal was intended as much to provide a central role for his commanding general, Gerd von Rundstedt, as to furnish a program for victory. His projected thrust through the Ardennes would transform Rundstedt’s army group from a secondary player to the campaign’s focal point. Broken terrain made the option a risk—but a calculated risk, taking maximum advantage of the principal German force multipliers: leadership and technology. Hitler, disgruntled by his generals’ conventionality and angered by a security breach that put copies of the original plan in Allied hands, took advantage of Manstein’s temporary presence in Berlin to discuss his ideas. A few days later he issued a new operational plan: a Sichelschnitt (“sickle cut”) through northern France that would eventually put seven of Germany’s ten panzer divisions under Army Group A.

  The intelligence service’s conviction, repeatedly tested in war gaming, was that the French and British high commands would respond slowly to that kind of surprise. Since 1933, generals and politicians on both sides of the English Channel had failed to understand German intentions and German decision-making processes. Instead they had grown accustomed to putting unexpected events into preconceived models, from a postulate that Hitler ultimately would not risk war to a belief that Germany would attack in Belgium because it suited the Allies’ book that it do so. Both common sense and thinking outside the box were sacrificed to habit—and in the case of the French, to logic. Allied intelligence provided more than enough evidence to turn eyes to the Ardennes in the spring of 1940. Instead, the Allies believed what they needed to believe about the German operational plan, and kept on believing it during those few crucial days when the German spearheads sliced across their rear toward the Channel.

  Had Allied leaders anticipated a major offensive through the Ardennes even as a contingency, it is almost inconceivable that the catastrophe of 1940 would have taken place as it did. Indeed, the alternative of a French victory parade down Unter den Linden was a real possibility. France in 1940 was arguably in less danger of moral collapse than a Germany whose public morale was in good part a consequence of what seemed Hitler’s unbroken string of rabbit-out-of-the-hat successes. German soldiers as well as French ones panicked on the battlefields of 1940. Many of the shortcomings in training and equipment France faced in the 1930s had been addressed and overcome or moderated by the spring of 1940. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had done a good deal to improve its effectiveness since its initial deployment across the Channel. The Allies had “equipment for victory”: powerful air forces, a fully motorized BEF, and around 3,500 tanks, many of them superior to the lighter models still predominant among the 2,300 German ones. And the French expected to win when the fighting started. The French army may have been less effective than its enemy on the tactical level, and its commanders on the whole may have been a cut below their German counterparts. However, nowhere in French circles or among France’s allies was there serious doubt of the French ability at least to stop any German offensive in its tracks. That kind of confidence is itself a force multiplier not to be despised.

  The Germans thus benefited disproportionately from an obliging enemy. An obliging enemy is not an enemy that makes mistakes, but rather one that behaves as though the opposition prepared his orders. “Obliging,” however, is not a synonym for “stupid.” Chief of Staff Franz Halder was won over by Sichelschnitt at least as a calculated risk preferable to the existing alternatives, but realized its success depended on keeping the Allies’ attention focused on the Low Countries. German military planners’ focus on tactical and operational levels at the expense of strategy and policy has been so often repeated it has become a shibboleth. Halder and his subordinates were well aware that the Netherlands were reluctant to cooperate militarily with an
yone—even neighboring Belgium. Belgium had begun developing a defensive line facing Germany at the start of the war. It also briefly deployed its army on both the French and German frontiers, and the government had repeatedly emphasized the worthlessness of any Allied assistance that arrived after Belgium had been invaded and devastated, as had been the case in 1914. Immediate and convincing Allied commitment in the face of a German initiative was correspondingly imperative. The dynamics of any battle fought in Belgium would change significantly should Belgian involvement be less than enthusiastic, to say nothing of the probable consequences of the non-participation of Belgium’s two dozen divisions.

  How, then, to keep the Allies convinced that what they wanted to do was also operationally necessary? The developed German plan used almost a third of the armored force as bait. The 9th Panzer Division, with the fewest number of tanks, would cooperate with the Luftwaffe’s paratroopers and the army’s air-landing division to strike the Netherlands in a “shock and awe” operation. Two panzer and a motorized division under Army Group B would provide the mobile core of an otherwise foot-powered thrust into Belgium. A chess player might speak of a knight’s move, a bullfight aficionado might think of a matador’s cape. But the other half of the knight fork, the sword delivering the killing blow, was Panzergruppe Kleist. Five armored and three motorized divisions, plus the Grossdeutschland Regiment, would pass through the Ardennes and force their way across the Meuse River into northern France. An entire antiaircraft corps was folded into the Panzergruppe to compensate for fighter planes with other assignments. Its right flank would be covered by another two-division panzer corps under Hermann Hoth.