Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  The operation was still high-risk. It involved more than 130,000 men and more than 1,500 armored vehicles—many of both nose-to-tail from the border all the way back to Koblenz. No tank-and-truck force approaching that size had ever been deployed before. Could it fight through a forest, breach prepared defenses, and cross a major river without sacrificing its fighting power?

  As much to the point, could Panzergruppe Kleist keep out of its own way once the fighting started? Ewald von Kleist was a cavalryman whose first experience with armored troops had been as a corps commander in Poland. He had done well enough handling two panzer divisions, but his current assignment reflected less his operational skill than his emotional steadiness and mental toughness. He had a reputation for bringing subordinates to his point of view without pulling rank. If the Panzergruppe was the Schwerpunkt of Case Yellow, the Schwerpunkt of the Panzer Group was Guderian’s XIX Corps. “Der schnelle Heinz” (“Hurrying Heinz”), as the men called Guderian, far overshadowed the other two corps commanders in terms of talent and charisma. They would take their leads from Guderian. He could make the sickle cut work—but like a fine-tuned engine, he needed a governor to prevent overheating. That was Kleist’s job, much as in World War I Hindenburg had acted as the nitrogen to Ludendorff ’s oxygen in the duo’s best days.

  Army Group A’s headquarters rejoiced in its new role but was less pleased with the instrument for achieving it. Nothing like Panzergruppe Kleist had ever existed in the German command structure. Armies and corps, yes, but a “group” was generally understood as a temporary organization for secondary missions. Rundstedt left no doubt that the Panzergruppe as a concept was on trial by keeping it organically subordinate to one of his field armies during the campaign. This was anything but a vote of confidence, and proved a constant source of confusion, friction, and bad temper. It also served to galvanize Kleist’s professionalism and his professional ambition.

  Since the First World War, French military authorities had routinely described the Ardennes as impenetrable to armored vehicles—“Europe’s best tank obstacle,” in the words of French commander in chief Maurice Gustave Gamelin. The impenetrability was not taken literally, but the French were convinced that even a full-scale offensive would take no fewer than five days—more likely nine—to push through the Ardennes, and about two weeks to attempt a crossing of the Meuse. Prewar intelligence reports of German intentions to attack through the Ardennes were processed as referring to no more than a secondary offensive. Initial reports of massive tank columns seemingly everywhere in the forest were dismissed as first-battle jitters. Besides, even if the Germans made it through the trees, they would surely be stopped by the river.

  In Belgium, Army Group B did its job to near-perfection. A day’s initial delay due to blown bridges only encouraged the Allies to rush into Belgium and assume defensive positions along the Dyle River, reinforcing and supporting the Belgians. It was according to plan—the Dyle Plan. French generals and staff officers were students and creatures of a doctrine emphasizing the importance of a firepower and management. They had no intention of playing to the German army’s obvious strength by seeking an encounter battle of the classic sort, as opposed to using armor in defensive contexts along a line offering a shorter and stronger position than the one defined by the Franco-Belgian frontier.

  Arguably the Germans’ greatest success at the strategic level, however, was achieved in Holland. Gamelin was committed to—one might say obsessed with—fighting as far away from French soil as possible. In pursuit of that design, he had reconfigured the employment of the mobile strategic reserve created with considerable effort during the 1930s. Originally it was projected that reserve would be deploying around Reims for use against a German invasion anywhere from Switzerland to the Low Countries. The final “Breda Variant” of the Dyle Plan, adopted in November 1939, projected using it, organized as the 7th Army, to drive into Holland and extend the left flank of an Allied position Gamelin expected would stop the Germans in their tracks—or close enough to that for military purposes. And then one would have most of Belgium to establish a killing ground for the managed battle that would decide the war.

  Instead German airborne and motorized forces already well stuck into Holland enmeshed the French mobile reserve in a morass of streams, woods, and soft ground. And when, on May 16, 1940, Britain’s new premier Winston Churchill asked, “Where is the mass of maneuver?” the French could only reply, with a suitably Gallic shrug, “Aucune” (“There isn’t any”).

  One of the overlooked ironies of 1940 is that the 7th Army’s initial staging area was close behind the Ardennes. Whether the elite 1st Light Mechanized Division, two first-line motorized divisions, and four infantry divisions committed in the event to the Breda Variant could have stemmed the tide flooding out of the Ardennes on June 12 is debatable. But they would have helped—and matters could hardly have been any worse for their presence.

  Army Group A pushed through the Ardennes undeterred by air strikes that proved unexpectedly vulnerable to small- arms fire, and barely detained by bicycle-riding Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais and French cavalry divisions whose horse-mounted and motorized regiments proved an unfortunate mix of “manure and gasoline.” French and Belgians achieved some impressive local successes. Confusion developed regarding operational zones and lines of march, with the 1st and 10th Panzer Divisions in particular briefly getting tangled. The Germans nevertheless drove relentlessly. Advance elements were constantly rotated, with fresh crews brought up on trucks to take over tanks in place. The Germans took hair-raising chances. On the first day of the attack, 400 men of Grossdeutschland were successfully airlifted behind Belgian lines in 100 light airplanes, German counterparts of the Piper Cub. The Germans improvised almost at random, finding fords under fire when bridges blew up almost beneath the treads of the lead tanks. It required not nine days, not five, but only three for the mechanized spearheads to emerge from the forest and roll toward Sedan.

  Kleist, the old cavalryman, might be a few miles per hour behind the pace of modern war, but he knew opportunity when he sensed it—or perhaps when it was forced upon him. He differed with Guderian about the exact axis of the attack and its precise timing. Nevertheless, on May 12, Kleist informed Hitler that he proposed to “bounce” the Meuse—cross it with his own resources even though most of his artillery was still tangled in the Ardennes. The High Command responded by allocating its heaviest tactical hammer—Wolfram von Richthofen’s retitled VIII Air Corps, 300 Stukas, and 40 ground-attack biplanes with a crack wing of Messerschmitt 109s—as escorts to reinforce the effort. Altogether, 1,500 aircraft would support the crossing: Stukas, bombers, and fighters.

  Guderian’s spearheads reached the Meuse late on the twelfth and spent the night organizing assembly areas. The main event began on the thirteenth. The narrative framework is familiar: middle-aged French reservists, poorly trained and motivated, hammered into the ground by dive-bombers and artillery; German infantry improvising crossings, knocking out surviving positions as pioneers bring up bridges and ferries for the tanks; French communications cut, French artillery immobilized, and finally, French infantry cracking and panicking as the panzers sliced into their country’s heartland.

  Up close and personal, the story was different. French infantry withstood a long day under air attacks whose scale and intensity made even the Germans say “hell had broken loose.” French artillery stopped the Germans in their tracks on the far side of the Meuse until midafter noon. French machine guns shot up rubber boats and their occupants. The XIX Panzer Corps attempted six major crossings on May 13. Three failed completely. Not until dawn on the fourteenth did the first tanks cross the Meuse. In the interim the infantry, as always, took heavy losses in what became essentially a storm trooper fight in the style of 1918: taking pillboxes with a combination of minor tactics and major courage against defenders who failed to read the script calling for them to run away. It was satchel charges and grenades at close quarters, pistols, somet
imes bare hands. The Stukas set the table, but May 13 was the Day of the Rifleman—the lieutenants and sergeants and rear-rank privates of Hermann Balck’s 1st Regiment, of Grossdeutschland and their counterparts who took XLIV Panzer Corps over the river at Monthermé and opened the way for Hoth’s divisions further north at Dinant. Never again would panzer commanders—successful ones at least—treat the truck-riders and motorcyclists as a supporting cast.

  By the morning of May 14, the panzer divisions had torn a hole 50 miles wide in the French lines. It was a tactical opportunity and an operational one—if the Germans could develop it. Guderian demanded a breakout. He did not want to lose time building up the bridgehead—and giving the French a chance to contain it. Better to keep moving, despite resistance from the rear as well as the front. Guderian wanted at least a 12-mile bridgehead as a first step. Kleist was satisfied with five miles, and made it an order. He had ample company. Halder noted in his diary that Hitler was “frightened by his own success, afraid to take any chances.” The High Command in principle favored exploiting victory, designating the Somme as the next objective, but sought as well to control the pace of the advance. Rundstedt was sufficiently worried about the prospects of a French counterattack that when he visited Guderian’s commands post on the fourteenth, he insisted Kleist’s directive must stand. A solid shoulder beat a broken neck.

  Guderian had nothing if not the courage of his convictions. His intention was to leave 10th Panzer Division and Grossdeutschland to secure his southern flank, pivot 1st and 2nd Panzer southwest, then west, link up with XLIV Panzer Corps, and keep going. He issued the appropriate orders on the evening of the fourteenth. Around midnight Kleist confirmed them—and for two more days ran interference with his superiors. This was “mission tactics” in the true sense: a subordinate as yet without relevant orders acting on his own situational awareness, supported by the next echelon of command. Ewald von Kleist did not lack professional courage. His head no less than Guderian’s was on the chopping block—perhaps literally—should anything go irreparably wrong. And the operational analysis of Panzergruppe Kleist handsomely acknowledged that Guderian’s “unauthorized measures . . . resulted in a great success . . . for the entire course of operations and averted a major threat.”

  Much of the thanks was really owed to 10th Panzer and GD. By nightfall on the fifteenth, the Germans were in defensive positions on the high ground around the village of Stonne. Infantry forward, antitank guns in support, the panzer brigade in reserve: it reads easily on paper. On the ground it was the consequence of the first day of a battle both sides compared to Verdun. Stonne changed hands seventeen times between the fifteenth and the seventeenth of May as desperate Allied air strikes on the Meuse bridges were accompanied by equally desperate French efforts to break through to the river on the ground.

  The main counterattack was built around the 3rd Armored Division. These were new creations, designed to be part of the “managed battle” as opposed to conducting independent operations. They had only a single battalion of infantry. Their logistic support was limited. But with four tank battalions, including two of B-1s more heavily armed and armored than anything in the German order of battle, a division cuirassée was reasonably suited to an at-all- cost effort—especially when, like the 3rd, it was paired with a first-rate motorized division and under the command of France’s leading light in peacetime armored maneuvers.

  In the end, the French effort fell prey to order-counterorder-disorder. General Jean-Adolphe Flavigny had since noon on the twelfth to prepare the operation. He folded when confronted with the real thing in one of those command disconnects that occurs in any transition from peace to war, yet is virtually impossible to predict specifically. Flavigny’s intention was to stop the Germans, and only then attack: managed battle epitomized. But the 3rd Armored, which had been organized only in March, was handicapped by comprehensively bad staff work centered on fueling problems. French tanks were seriously short-legged compared to the German ones; range was a low-priority consideration in bataille conduit. Flavigny had planned to attack before noon on the fourteenth. He postponed until the fifteenth, and then postponed again, when his divisional commanders reported a general attack would be impossible because of the dislocation of their formations.

  Flavigny, in sharp contrast to Guderian, did nothing to take control. Instead French resources were frittered away in company-and battalion-scale lunges toward Stonne that nevertheless gave the Germans all they could handle. The B-1s, weighing in at more than thirty tons, heavily armored, with a turret-mounted 47mm antitank gun and a 75mm in the hull, frightened some of Grossdeutschland’s infantry into blind panic, and with good reason. One B-1 took 140 hits—all ricochets—and accounted by itself for more than a dozen German tanks. Another caught a column of German infantry and literally overran them, entering Stonne with blood on its tracks.

  The antitank gunners held their ground as their 37mm rounds bounced away like tennis balls. Only by waiting for a close-range shot at the more vulnerable sides, a near-ultimate exercise in nerve and discipline, did the Germans manage to knock out or discourage enough of the B-1s to maintain the moral balance of a fight that eventually turned Stonne into a tank graveyard, with more than fifty of them—French and German—derelict in the streets and on the outskirts.

  There was nothing wrong with French heart. The failures lay in command and communications systems that left tanks, infantry, and artillery putting in small-scale, uncoordinated attacks, which eventually gave the Germans time to support and relieve the mobile troops with infantry from the follow- up waves. The straight-legs repulsed final French efforts at Stonne as the tanks and trucks turned westward with the rest of Guderian’s corps.

  Abraham Lincoln once described a Union general as reacting to defeat “like a duck hit on the head.” The metaphor applies equally well to French commanders trying to decide what to do next as the Germans poured across the “impassable” Meuse. Again the French fought well at the cutting edge, with some of the finest performances given by their African and North African soldiers. On May 15, at a village called La Horgne, a brigade of Spahis—Algerian and Moroccan cavalry still riding horses—held up part of the 1st Panzer Division for eight hours. Balck, no stranger to close combat, later declared that rarely did he see men fight as well as these, who stood to the last for France and for honor.

  Much of the key to the French dilemma lies in a noun in the above paragraph. “Part” of the German division was blocked—one of its two battle groups. The other group was able to keep moving. So was the rest of XIX Panzer Corps, as the French proved unable to concentrate forces sufficient to block the spearheads, let alone counterattack them effectively. “A day late and a hundred francs short” comes to mind as another trope for a French High Command still expecting the main German attack through Belgium as the panzers drove dead into France, toward ground hallowed by the Great War, and deep into the Allied rear.

  IV

  THE PANZERS FACED problems in their own rear. When XLI Panzer Corps had difficulty breaking out of its bridgehead around Monthermé, Rundstedt ordered the task turned over to infantry. Kleist turned Nelson’s blind eye, the 6th Panzer Division overran the last French positions, and its commander turned loose an improvised battle group. Its tanks and motorcyclists, a battalion of each, covered 35 miles in five hours. The former cavalrymen drove through and over French formations that were unable to believe the Germans were where they were, and were unable to react to their presence. Eighth Panzer Division came up the next day and finished the job. When the shooting was done and the prisoners interrogated, the Germans discovered XLI Panzer Corps had destroyed the French 2nd Armored Division, which had been caught in the process of moving into position and hamstrung by a series of contradictory orders. Rundstedt’s headquarters backed off and restored Kleist’s freedom of movement—at least until next time.

  Further north, Hermann Hoth’s XV Panzer Corps had the original mission of covering Kleist’s right flank by p
assing through the Belgian Ardennes and crossing the Meuse around Dinant. More than its French counterpart, the terrain was a nightmare of hills and valleys, unimproved regional roads, and trails leading nowhere in particular. But the Belgians defended only a few of their obstacles. Allied aircraft were conspicuously absent. Hoth, a former infantryman whose men nicknamed him Vati (GIs would have called him “Pop”) knew how to “pick ’em up an’ put ’em down,” whether boots or treads; and he had Erwin Rommel. In three days the 7th Panzer Division advanced almost 60 miles. Make them keep their heads down; go through them and past them; mop them up: it was blitzkrieg pur. Hoth gave Rommel his head: cross the Meuse and keep going. With the bridges at Houx and Dinant blown, motorcyclists used a weir and a lock gate, both unguarded, to get a foothold on the west bank. Rubber boats carried across a company’s worth of reinforcements by the time the defenders came fully alert, a little before daybreak on May 13.

  As casualties mounted under French artillery and machine guns, Rommel started a fresh wave of riflemen across the Meuse—and took a place in one of the leading rubber boats, to find himself caught in a French tank attack. He ordered the infantry to open fire with rifles and machine guns. With bullets glancing off their armor and sparks and fragments ricocheting through firing ports, the tanks fell back. Returning across the river, the general lent a hand with building a ferry heaving timbers while under fire in waist-deep water. He was first across in his command vehicle. Not only did Rommel seem to be at every vital spot exactly when he was needed; to the men of 7th Panzer Division, he seemed as well to be bulletproof.

  By the early morning of May 15 the crossing was secure, a pontoon bridge was in place, and 7th Panzer Division’s combat elements were ready to roll. Rommel established a “thrust line” on the division’s maps, divided into sectors. To call in air support or artillery fire, all Rommel needed to do was refer to one of the sectors. The recipient’s job was to note the target area, bring it in, and keep it coming. By the elaborate standards of the Great War, this was near-random improvisation. The division’s artillery commander was nevertheless delighted to be able to provide the kind of instant support that artillery had been able to deliver when guns galloped into battle behind six-horse teams.