Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  Rommel rode with the leading tanks—into a counterattack by two of the French army’s best divisions: 1st Armored, with its two battalions of B-1s, and 4th North African, which included a number of long-service professional soldiers, among the best fighting men in France. The French had had a long, hard day on the fourteenth. Advancing through swarms of refugees, constrained to move at slow speeds and in low gear, their fuel tanks were nearly empty and their crews tired. For convenience their commanders bivouacked in the open to await the gasoline trucks. No one bothered to dispatch even a few motorcyclists to screen the roads to the east.

  Seventh Panzer Division took the French by surprise. Panzer IIs and 38(t)s concentrated on the thinner side armor of the French tanks, on ventilators, tracks, and suspension systems. The Panzer IVs used high-explosive rounds against the fuel trucks that began arriving just as the German attack started. Coordinated resistance foundered as French tank commanders found their radio batteries had been run flat. Crew after crew ceased fire, waving rags and handkerchiefs from their turrets to indicate surrender. Thirty-five tanks, including 19 heavy Char Bs, went under in a matter of minutes.

  Leaving the rest of 1st Armored to the just-arriving 5th Panzer Division, Rommel led his own tank regiment westward at forty miles per hour. By the end of the day the panzers had reached the edge of the northern extension of the Maginot Line. Officers and men from rear-echelon French units, confused and shaken, were surrendering in masses, responding to any orders they received, even if the language was German and the content was “Drop your weapons! Hands up.” Seventh Panzer Division nevertheless found heavy going on the seventeenth, grinding through the fortified zone against stubborn resistance that seemed to intensify as the day waned. The moon was up and the long European twilight had set in by the time the last roadblocks were cleared, and Rommel saw his chance. There was still enough light for the panzers to drive forward and break out. A risk, yes—but preferable to a night’s delay and an enemy further reinforced.

  The tanks rolled forward in a long column, impelled by the hammering of their own guns, picking up speed as the confidence of the lead drivers increased. French soldiers and refugees abandoned the road for its ditches. No time for prisoners—just fire a few bursts as warning and deterrent. An occasional brief position report to his increasingly confused, increasingly anxious division headquarters was Rommel’s only contact with the rear. Still no resistance—and then it was clear that 7th Panzer Division was through the Maginot Line and on its way to the Sambre River.

  By then the tactical situation had dissolved into chaos. Seventh Panzer Division’s men and vehicles intermingled with refugees and soldiers, some anxious to surrender and others looking for a chance to fight. Rommel personally led an improvised battle group of tanks and motorcyclists through Avesnes and into Landrecies, where an intact bridge over the Sambre pointed the way deep into the rear of the Allied forces in Belgium. The 7th Panzer Division had advanced more than 50 miles, made a night march unprecedented in the history of armor, captured 10,000 prisoners and 100 tanks—and recorded losses of 35 dead and 59 wounded.

  By the standards of the campaigns of Frederick the Great, the Wars of German Unification, and the trenches of 1914-18, the achievement was almost beyond comprehension—but not beyond exploitation. At midnight orders came through from Hoth: continue the attack, direction Cambrai. On May 18 the 25th Panzer Regiment, with its fuel and ammunition replenished and most breakdowns repaired, shot its way into Cambrai across country where during the Great War advances had been calculated in hundreds of yards and casualties counted in tens of thousands. And then Hoth ordered a halt.

  Hoth’s caution was more than conditioned reflex. Rommel’s was not the only panzer division running miles ahead of the rest of the army. The 6th was keeping pace, its columns tangling with Guderian’s until the two generals worked out the routes of advance. By now the three divisions of Guderian’s corps were even deeper into France than their stablemates, though the advances in miles had not been as far. Seen in hindsight, this was the beginning of nonlinear operations, with gaps in one’s front less important than forward progress, and flanks best covered by keeping the enemy confused and off balance. To Guderian and Rommel, speed was the new mantra; rapidity of movement and thought was the key to modern battle. The panzer force was capable of commanding itself all the way to the English Channel. Seen on a map, however, the panzer spearheads looked like fingers thrust out from a hand—and were correspondingly vulnerable to being seized and broken one by one. As early as the fifteenth, Rundstedt considered halting the motorized forces rather than risk even a local defeat that might throw the German advance off balance. He had his staff prepare a stop order just in case. Then the army group commander received a call from the Wehrmacht High Command, Hitler’s mouthpiece: shut the panzers down.

  Hitler may not have given that order personally, but during a visit to Rundstedt’s headquarters on May 17, he emphatically supported it. A successful counterattack, he declared, might encourage both the Allied generals and their politicians. Rather than a helter-skelter push to the English Channel, a solid defensive shoulder in the south should be the next step. The Führer, for the first time since assuming power, encountered overt, coherent, and cohesive resistance among the soldiers. Chief of Staff Franz Halder executed a neat political flanking maneuver, first convincing the Army’s commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, to order the offensive renewed, then confronting Hitler to insist the panzers’ southern flank was not a problem. Hitler, according to Halder’s diary, raged, screamed—and in the end, acquiesced.

  Early on May 17, Kleist took a plane forward to pick his own bone with Guderian. The day before he had issued an order establishing a stop line, only to learn Guderian’s spearheads were already more than 20 miles beyond it. Apart from the winds starting to blow from above, for Kleist the question was exactly who was commanding the panzer group. Guderian’s conscience for once was clear. He had only received the order after midnight, correctly believed it outdated, and acted accordingly. Kleist upbraided Guderian in language more expressive than polite. Guderian’s equally heated reply concluded with a request to be relieved. Kleist accommodated him, then wisely left before someone said something that could not be overlooked. Rundstedt immediately restored Guderian to his command with a slap on the wrist requiring him to keep his headquarters temporarily in place. Guderian got around that by using telephones instead of radios. Kleist had no serious problem with the decision. Guderian had forced his hand, but he was soldier enough to sense a developing opportunity. Hermann Hoth also recognized hot dice when he saw them—especially when they came up “promotion,” as the High Command on May 17 created Panzer Group Hoth from XV Corps and XVI Corps redeploying from Belgium.

  That put what amounted to Germany’s entire mobile force—nine panzer and four motorized divisions and several smaller formations, plus elements of the still-embryonic Waffen SS—under Rundstedt’s command for a killing stroke: a drive to the English Channel that would cut off the British Expeditionary Force and an entire French army group still facing east and north, still embedded deep in Belgium.

  The Germans owed that situation to the panzers. Army Group B might have been a strategic matador’s cloak, but its operational sword was tempered steel. The XVI Panzer Corps headquarters had long experience handling tanks, and Erich Hoepner was second only to Guderian as a panzer general. A cavalryman who was an early supporter of mechanization, he commanded 1st Light Division, took over XVI Panzer Corps from Guderian before the Polish campaign, and showed the kind of skill making it possible to overlook a well- known distaste for Nazism. Hoepner’s two divisions—3rd Panzer Division from Berlin-Brandenburg and 4th Panzer Division, with its home base in Würzburg—were first-class, well-trained, experienced men manning a total of more than 600 tanks, including 130 Mark IIIs and IVs. Hoepner could also call on the ground-attack specialists of VIII Air Corps, and on the 300 bombers and 500 fighters as the other Luftwaffe units
supporting the army group.

  The panzers’ immediate and most formidable opposition was the French Cavalry Corps of General Rene Prioux. Its core was the 2nd and 3rd Light Mechanized Divisions. On paper these formations resembled the panzer divisions, each with two tank and three motorized battalions, and a total of around 240 tanks. Sixty of them were light vehicles armed only with machine guns and distributed among the dragons’ ports. Ninety more were 12-ton Hotchkiss H35s and H39s. Though well armored, the older models carried only a short-barreled 37mm gun dating back to the Great War, which was essentially useless against armor. The H39 had a modern 37mm gun, but 3rd DLM had only two dozen of them. The remaining 90 French tanks, however, were better than anything in the German stable—better, arguably, than anything in any army’s order of battle in 1940. The SOMUA S35 had its design faults: radios only for platoon commanders and a one-man turret forcing the tank commander to serve also as gunner and loader—multitasking ahead of its time. It also featured a well-shaped cast hull—albeit in two pieces riveted together—armor that reached a maximum of more than 50mm, internal fuel tanks giving its 21 tons a range of 150 miles and a maximum speed of 23 miles per hour, and best of all, a high-velocity 47mm turret-mounted main gun, able to outrange any German tank and penetrate its armor from any angle.

  Five years of war would demonstrate that in armored war, quality could go far to compensate for numbers. “Quality” however, was more than statistics. It involved training and doctrine. The SOMUA was slow coming on line, thanks in good part to chronic labor troubles in a unionized, Communist-influenced armaments industry. Ideally the light mechanized divisions would have had twice as many SOMUAs as they did. Only about 250 were available by June 1940, with corresponding effects on crew and unit training. That was especially true in the 3rd Division, which had only been organized in January. French concepts for using the DLMs initially reflected the traditional cavalry missions of reconnaissance and screening. By 1939 more attention was paid to offensive capabilities, but these involved exploitation rather than penetration. From the High Command’s developing strategic perspective, the optimal initial use of the light mechanized divisions was to cover the move into Belgium. Advancing rapidly and independently, they could conduct a cape-and-sword defense against a projected German armored spearhead as the main force deployed behind them.

  That kind of close synergy among doctrine, force structure, and strategic planning is usually and legitimately praised highly in military writing. In 1940 it comprehensively structured the behavior of Prioux and his troopers—for good and ill. Their specific mission was to screen the “Gembloux gap,” a 25-mile-wide stretch of country free of significant natural barriers and only partly screened by rudimentary, hastily constructed tank obstacles. Then, the final orders ran, they were to hold until the motorized divisions could establish a defense line. Hold until the morning of May 14.

  Rene Prioux had nothing of Joachim Murat or Jeb Stuart in his professional makeup. He was too worried about the Luftwaffe and his own lack of air cover to undertake even the limited spoiling attacks originally enjoined by his superiors. The result was a head-on, two-day encounter battle that began around the village of Hannut on May 12. In a fashion prefiguring the behavior of Israeli armor in the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 4th Panzer Division attacked with more energy than tactical sense, and took heavy losses from French artillery fire and armored ripostes. The SOMUAs in particular, boldly handled in company strengths, proved an unpleasant surprise as the greenhorns of 3rd Light Mechanized Division came away victors on points from a good day’s work. Fuel shortages also hampered the German deployment to the point that Hoepner, instead of continuing to probe oppor tunistically for weak spots, decided to reorganize, resupply, and mount a two-division set-piece attack the next day.

  A ball-peen hammer is a good tool. A nine-pound sledgehammer is also useful. Guderian might have done it with more finesse, but beginning a little after noon on May 13, 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, around 560 tanks all told, struck 3rd Light Mechanized Division on an eight-mile front. There was bitter fighting in defended villages, with riflemen clearing strong points and tanks bypassing them whenever possible. Survivors of disabled French tanks fought on with pistols against armor plate. A captain of the 35th Panzer Regiment described two observers in a water tower engaging tanks with rifles until “shot full of holes like sieves.” It was not until around 3 PM that the German tanks reached open ground, only to face a series of armored counterattacks. French tanks seemed to be everywhere at once, bypassing the panzers and engaging the infantry, forcing the tanks to turn around and bail out their comrades. The close-gripped, seesaw fighting featured small German armor-piercing shells ricocheting harmlessly off French turrets and hulls. The 6th Panzer Regiment and a company of antitank guns hit every tank in a retiring French column with everything in the inventory, including 75mm rounds. The vehicles just kept moving, with one crew eventually counting 15 antitank hits and 42 bullet scars.

  The tactical differences were coordination and cooperation. The Germans fought in combined-arms teams, with towed antitank guns supporting the panzers under a consistently effective air umbrella. The French fought exposed to the sky, in compartments, each arm on its own. The German tankers fought by battalions; the French never went beyond company levels. Even individual French tanks often failed to support each other. Their lack of radios required at least one company commander to transmit orders by running from tank to tank under fire. Their small turrets in practice made tank commanders no more than gunners once combat was joined.

  The 3rd DLM, moreover, fought alone against superior numbers. The 2nd Light Mechanized Division remained in its positions all day, facing front and fixed in place by German infantry, force- marched forward. As the Germans freed themselves from the melee and resumed their advance, Prioux, his local reserves exhausted, ordered a withdrawal to the main positions by now established around Gembloux. The cavalry corps had done its job; no reason remained to risk an elite force in an isolated forward position.

  When losses were tallied, 3rd DLM had accounted for 160 German tanks at the cost of around 100 of its own. It was true that the Germans held the field, and so were able to recover and repair a good many of their losses. It was true as well that casualties had been absurdly light by Great War standards—only 150 total in the entire 4th Panzer Division. Nevertheless the consciousness of superiority recorded in the corps war diary did not translate to immediate pursuit in a deepening twilight, where all tanks seemed to look alike.

  For Erich Hoepner it had been a good day’s work. Committing his panzers en masse had paid off despite the losses. German tanks might be inferior in a stand-up fight, but their mobility and the skill of their crews and commanders had set the stage for the next scene: breakthrough at Gembloux. Preliminary orders went out at 3 AM; the French spent the next 18 hours executing a fighting retreat that tied the panzers in knots and completed the cavalry’s delaying mission. Instead of overrunning the gap before the French could assume the position, Hoepner’s corps confronted a solid defense line manned by three first-class divisions: 1st Moroccan and 1st and 15th Motorized Divisions, with Prioux’s tanks deployed by battalions in their rear. A few tentative probes were so strongly received that Hoepner ordered his advanced units to fall back and prepare for a coordinated corps-scale attack the next day.

  The resulting engagement of May 15 was the first time the panzer divisions were used to break through a major, prepared defensive position. Both division commanders led with riflemen going in afoot under air and artillery cover, the panzer regiments following closely either to meet enemy armor or exploit the expected breakthrough. Matters unfolded differently. A French army proverb says, “Algerians are men; but Moroccans are lions.” From the first exchange of shots, the men from the Atlas Mountains proved a match and better for 4th Panzer Division’s infantry. The tanks suffered no less in trying to carry the riflemen forward against gun positions the Luftwaffe failed to find, let alo
ne silence. Particularly disconcerting was the heavy loss of Mark IVs, brought forward for their guns but all too vulnerable to antitank fire. By 4 PM nothing resembling a breakthrough was in sight, and 4th Panzer Division’s commander suggested an attack the next day would have no better prospects given the same conditions.

  The 3rd Panzer Division initially held its tanks farther back, but also wound up committing them piecemeal to support the infantry against resistance no less determined and no less effective than that confronting the 4th Panzer Division. Results were no better. The Berliners ground forward slowly, a company here and a battalion somewhere else, against constant counterattacks. Late-evening reports that the defenses had finally been breached were unconvincing. Hoepner decided instead to continue the attack the next day, but to replace the panzers with two infantry divisions, presumably better suited to the nature of the fighting and certainly more expendable. The decision proved moot as on May 16 the French withdrew, finally reacting to the breakthrough at Sedan. Hoepner’s panzers followed briefly then redeployed as part of the drive to the Channel.

  The fighting around Gembloux tends to be overshadowed by the more dramatic events to the south. Tactically, Hannut had shown the worth of spearheading an attack by using tanks in masses, even against superior material. Gembloux indicated the limitations of that approach against an organized defense. The panzers might well have broken through and broken out in another day or two. But on the morning of May 14, 4th Panzer Division reported only 137 tanks ready for action—less than half the authorized strength. Third Panzer Division reported as many as a quarter of its tanks out of action. Even with top-grade field repairs, these were not statistics calculated to inspire trying the same thing again. Crew morale might be as high as the officers said, but there were limits to the number of times men shot out of one tank could simply be assigned to another.