Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  Operationally, the panzers had inverted French doctrine by keeping the Cavalry Corps fixed in place instead of the other way round. On the night of May 14, Gamelin considered pulling it out of the line and turning it against the right flank of the German spearhead coming from Sedan. It was a mission well suited to the DLMs’ tactics and training—before the losses inflicted by the panzers, and before the corps was integrated directly into the Gembloux position. Instead the cavalrymen were ingloriously drawn into the general retreat to Dunkirk, just like any second-line foot-marching division caught in one of history’s greatest envelopments.

  The panzer groups’ operational mission was clear: drive northwest between Arras and the Somme, then cut off the Allied forces withdrawing from Belgium. But by now Halder, in the best opportunistic tradition of the General Staff, was considering swinging the bulk of the panzers south into France, fulfilling the original Schlieffen Plan by means of the internal- combustion engine while Army Group B, reinforced by the rest of the armor, mopped up what remained north of the penetration. Hitler, still anxious for the security of the southern flank, rejected this prospect out of hand in favor of halting the mobile forces west of Arras and giving the infantry time to close up.

  Meanwhile the panzers rolled on and their opposition dithered. General Alphonse Georges, commanding the French Northwest Front, collapsed in tears when informed of the breakthrough at Sedan. Gamelin called for a decisive counteroffensive against a German spearhead whose vulnerability increased with every mile it traveled. A newly organized armored division commanded by an obscure colonel with something of a reputation as a military theorist, nibbled at 1st Panzer Division’s rear echelons on May 17. But Charles de Gaulle was unable to work a miracle. A report from 1st Panzer Division described a lone B-2 trundling down the road with no obvious intention, shrugging off repeated hits from Panzer IIIs. “We observed that our [37mm shells] were not penetrating,” sagely noted the company commander. The French vehicle was then engaged by a 20mm antiaircraft gun and by pioneers and infantrymen with hand grenades. Nothing. The captain then took on the B-2 from the rear with three Panzer IIIs. At around 250 yards the purportedly armor-piercing rounds continued to bounce harmlessly off the turret and the rear plates. The French responded by shooting up a passenger car, and then abandoning the tank and surrendering when a 37mm round—finally, one might add—knocked out the engine.

  This event epitomized the nature of the Allies’ response to Sichelschnitt. Either formations assigned to counterattacks shed pieces on the way, or the mission was given to improvised forces lacking the cohesion to develop any local success they might gain. Gamelin was dismissed with ignominy on the nineteenth. His replacement, seventy-four-year-old Maxime Weygand, planned a pincer attack on both sides of the breakthrough. The southern arm never got beyond the preliminary orders stage. An attempt to mount a corps-strength attack from the north on May 22 was seen off essentially by the Luftwaffe alone. British Expeditionary Force commander John Vereker, Viscount Gort managed to assemble two British tank battalions, a couple of infantry battalions, and some field and antitank guns on the old World War I battlefield of Vimy Ridge, with ephemeral promises of French support and concrete orders to strike the Germans when they came within range.

  The resulting counterattack gave Rommel and 7th Panzer Division a few bad quarters of an hour around Arras on August 21. The operational effect was the military equivalent of throwing a handful of boiled peas at a wall. But whether gallant thrust or forlorn hope, the move focused what Roland Friesner describes as a “flank psychosis,” a “crisis psychosis” that produced a layered controversy in the German high command.

  V

  AT 2 AM on May 21, 1940, the first German troops reached the Channel coast, west of Abbeville. Appropriately enough they were infantrymen, from 2nd Panzer Division’s 2nd Schützen Regiment. If any aspiring clas sicists in the ranks cried “Thalassa!” in imitation of Xenophon’s 10,000 Greeks, history is silent. Second Panzer Division had advanced 60 miles that day. More than a million men—the entire BEF, a Belgian army that had fought better than anyone expected, a French army group plus bits and pieces of several more—were cut off in Flanders, 80 or 100 miles at best from the coast that offered a still- ephemeral salvation. The German infantry that would decisively close the corridor were still advancing. A lot of ground remained free from German boots or treads. But real-world prospects for a successful mass breakout to the south were finished.

  Guderian for one had no doubts. He proposed to turn his divisions north, to the channel ports: 1st to Calais, 2nd to Boulogne, and 10th to Dunkirk, and the sooner the better. In desperation the British threw sacrificial garrisons into Calais and Boulogne. But the road to Dunkirk, designated as the main evacuation port, lay virtually open for 10th Panzer Division—or rather, it did until Kleist responded to high-echelon anxiety over the abortive British attack at Arras by pulling the division into reserve.

  Not until May 22 was Guderian allowed to resume his advance. By then the British had settled in. It took 2nd Panzer Division three days of street fighting to take Boulogne. Calais held out until the twenty-sixth in one of the campaign’s epic stands. By then the nerves of Hitler, and those senior generals still awaiting the grand Allied counterattack, were strained to breaking point. The situation was not helped by the Führer’s recurrent presence at various field headquarters, his anxieties trailing like a cloak. The panzer generals, the bit between their teeth, wanted to press the attack. Army Group A preferred a brief halt to sort out the mobile forces and allow the infantry to catch up and secure the corridor opened by the tanks. Halder and the High Command advocated a bold advance in a strategic context—arguably even the “Schlieffen option” mentioned earlier. Hitler sought a Verschnaufpause, a breathing space, partly to evaluate a situation that had outrun even his imagination, but also to demonstrate that he was supreme commander in practice as well as by title.

  The situation was tinder for what Carl von Clausewitz called “friction.” Kleist provided the spark when, on May 23, he complained to Rundstedt that his group was so dispersed and had suffered such heavy losses, including more than half its tanks, that it was too weak to mount an attack against strong forces. Halder dismissed the message as an attack of nerves. Rundstedt, however, responded by shutting down the panzers for a day, with the advance to resume on the twenty-fifth. The High Command in turn reassigned both panzer groups to Army Group B—as drastic a reaction as possible short of ordering Rundstedt’s outright relief. Order, counter order, disorder—and in the midst of it, Hitler appeared at Rundstedt’s headquarters. He promptly reversed the transfer orders, which had been issued without his knowledge. He then declared himself completely in agreement with Rundstedt’s perspective. Army Group A at 12:45 PM confirmed the shutdown of the panzers. Hitler complemented this with a directive establishing the next objective as the destruction of Allied forces in Flanders. He also gave Rundstedt a free hand in the conduct of operations—a factor that had significant consequences.

  Halder on one end, and Kleist and his commanders on the other, reacted with varying combinations of fury and bewilderment. Even Guderian, seldom at a loss for words, declared himself speechless. Efforts by Halder and Brauchitsch to change the Führer’s mind were predictably futile. Noteworthy in that context is Hitler’s reiterated denunciation of what he described as challenging his authority by transferring the panzer groups without permission. That was arguably more significant than such generally cited factors as hope for peace with Britain, worry about the boggy Flanders terrain, concern with sparing the panzers for future operations, or even desire to give Hermann Göring and his “National Socialist Luftwaffe” the glory of finishing off a trapped enemy. Not until May 26 did Hitler rescind the “halt order”—and even then only at Rundstedt’s urging. By that point it was hours too late to make a difference.

  Gerd von Rundstedt gave Hitler all the backup he needed by using his free hand to hold the tanks firmly under his thumb. Only on the
morning of the twenty-fifth did he allow Kleist and Hoth to change his mind. Not until the morning of the twenty-seventh were panzer divisions able to shift from refueling, repairing, and relaxing to combat readiness—with, just possibly, a slight loss of cutting edge. In that interval the German infantry were unable to reach Dunkirk before the withdrawing troops established a defensive perimeter stronger than anything at Sedan or Gembloux, and even more resolutely manned. The Luftwaffe was unable to shut down the evacuation, as overcast skies and calm seas facilitated movement off the beaches. Nor were the panzer divisions exactly eager to come to grips with Dunkirk’s defenses. Writing darkly of tank strength reduced by half and soft, rain-saturated ground impassable for those remaining, even Guderian recommended Dunkirk be left to the infantry and artillery while the panzers refitted for the coming battle of France.

  This did not represent some sudden change of heart or loss of confidence. For Guderian, timing and momentum were the keys to mechanized victory. Both had been lost. Continuing to play out the changed scenario was more reckless than folding the hand and awaiting the next round of play. His sudden apparent pessimism silenced those voices still talking of an all-out armor-tipped effort to break through the Allied perimeter. The tankers more or less contentedly turned south, leaving an unanswered question: Could the Dunkirk evacuation have been prevented, or even significantly disrupted, had the Führer and his generals ridden a hot hand and kept the tanks rolling towards the beaches?

  Wars may not be won by evacuations. It is nevertheless incontestable that the way Dunkirk was evacuated contributed vitally to Britain’s continuing the fight. Not only did the country’s only significant force of trained soldiers survive to fight again; they returned in archetypi cally British fashion: brought home by the Royal Navy and the British people, in organized formations, ready at least in public “to have another go.” Dunkirk lent moral and material substance to the famous image of a defiant Tommy proclaiming, “Very well, then! Alone!” What might have been the reaction had Britain confronted a demoralized rabble of stragglers and survivors?

  The BEF of 1940 did not lack courage. But initiative, flexibility, and tactical skill were not among its strong points. Hew Strachan accurately describes it as “outthought and outmaneuvered.” The rains that softened the ground around Dunkirk did not begin to fall until after May 24. Had the panzers caught up with the British retreat, it is not too difficult to imagine replications of the situations created after the breakthrough at Sedan, of men giving up the fight from simple confusion. The risks were clear, but Hitler’s Reich and German blitzkrieg had in common a bottom line of opportunism. Eventually both would decay into choosing what seemed to be the easy way as a preferred option. And in that context it is worth remembering the words of another soldier, this one from the seventeenth century, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose: “He either fears his fate too much/Or his deserts are small/That puts it not unto the touch/To win or lose it all.”

  Such apocalyptically gloomy thoughts were far from the minds of most of the tankers, privates to generals, taking position for Case Red, the conquest of France. The high command’s assumption that the French no longer possessed any significant reserves produced a decision to distribute the panzers across the sectors of Army Groups B and A, using infantry and artillery to secure multiple simultaneous breakthroughs, then directing and combining mobile forces as opportunities for exploitation developed.

  Despite the short time available, the French had established a solid defense in depth along the Somme and Aisne, integrated by checker-boarded strong points based on farms and villages. Many units had been ordered to hold sans esprit de recul—to the finish. They fought with grim determination and improved finesse. Crossing the rivers cost the Germans time and lives. Stuka strikes had limited success neutralizing mutually supporting networks, as opposed to knocking out individual positions. But once the zone of resistance was penetrated, there was nothing much behind it—certainly nothing that could stop panzers on the loose.

  The French were still in the process of reconstructing their shattered mobile divisions when the Germans struck. Army commanders continued to distribute their remaining tanks by battalions, so closely behind forward positions they were easily bypassed. Britain provided its only armored division: around 300 rivet-shedding deathtraps that broke down about as quickly as German gunners could disable them. German armored columns fanned out across central France, overcoming dozens and hundreds of small-scale stands by improvised task forces, brushing aside counterattacks by “provisional companies” of surviving tanks from broken units and “independent companies” equipped with tanks fresh off production lines. Their monuments were a few helmet-topped crosses alongside country roads.

  Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had been dubbed the “ghost division” for its speed and flexibility: “Now you see it, now you don’t.” The Ghosts went cross-country to capture Le Havre, set an army record by advancing more than 160 miles in a single day to seize the city and fortress of Cherbourg in an urban blitz, and finished the war on its way to the Spanish frontier. Third Panzer Division reached Grenoble. Second Motorized finished the campaign in the Loire Valley. The chief laurels of Case Red, however, fell to Guderian. Given his own panzer group of four armored and two motorized divisions, he shouldered his way across the Aisne, then swung southwest in the rear of the Maginot Line, isolating the area as Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s infantry-based Army Group C attacked the fortifications from the front. In the autumn of 1939, Manstein had discussed forcing the French to fight on the wrong side of their vaunted fortifications. On June 16, Guderian—who, parenthetically, was officially under the command of 12th Army—made the concept work. He swung his tanks and riflemen 90 degrees east for a broad-front thrust into Alsace. Executed so smoothly that its difficulty has gone unnoticed, the movement completed the encirclement of almost a half million French soldiers in the historic battleground and killing ground from Nancy to Belfort. That other elements of the panzer group reached the Swiss border the next day was a bonus for the journalists—and for Hitler, who at first refused to believe the dispatch. And all of this was achieved, moreover, without the massive air support Guderian enjoyed in the breakout from Sedan.

  In those contexts it made little difference that Italy entered the war on June 10, or that Paris, declared an open city by a fugitive government, was occupied—by a straight- leg infantry division—on June 13. Marshal Philippe Petain, aged hero of the Great War and newly appointed prime minister, requested an armistice on June 17, while something remained to be salvaged. On June 22 the agreement was signed, in the same railroad car that had been used for the armistice of 1918. Adolf Hitler lacked an ironist’s subtlety, but he had a keen sense of history.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CLIMAX

  FOR HITLER’S PANZERS the summer of 1940 was a time of high celebration. The sun had never shone so brightly—literally, in the near-perfect weather, and metaphorically in the favors showering from an ostensibly grateful Führer. The tankers were not yet sufficiently well positioned to share in the cornucopia of gifts, decorations, and promotions at the very top that produced so many new field marshals that Rundstedt grumbled his new rank had been cheapened. They nevertheless finished well up in the victory sweepstakes. Kleist, Guderian, Hoth, and Hoepner were all promoted Generaloberst (General) with the same date of rank: July 19.

  With a major expansion of mobile forces in the works, opportunities were opening at every level of command from division to platoon. The two Armored Troop Schools at Münster and Wuensdorf were well into their wartime stride as officer training establishments. Cadets were assigned after basic training with their unit—if they had no combat experience—followed by eight weeks of officer training. The branch school provided sixteen weeks of specialized technical and tactical instruction. Cadets then returned, usually to their original units, for a probationary period prior to being commissioned. In contrast to the Americans and to some degree the British, the German army beli
eved that anyone unable to command and lead those he had served among as an enlisted man was unlikely to make a good officer. At higher levels there were training courses for new battalion commanders, second chances for salvageable officers with blotted copybooks, and useful training and staff appointments for those a bit long in the tooth or slow in reaction to be useful for field operations

  Napoleon once said soldiers are led with baubles. For officers with “sore throats,” army slang for anyone seeming interested in the higher decorations worn around the neck, Rommel and most of his senior counterparts were as generous with recommendations as the High Command was in accepting them. And many an enlisted Panzermann could return home on a hero’s furlough with an Iron Cross on his chest.

  The price of all this? Around 700 tanks permanently lost—most of them obsolescent, eminently expendable Panzer Is and IIs. Fewer than 50,000 killed in the entire Wehrmacht during the whole campaign. In most of the mobile units, losses had been low enough to foster nostalgia for absent friends rather than mutual speculation on who would be next.

  The tankers stood down. Fifth and 7th Panzer Divisions prepared desultorily for an invasion of England that the High Command projected as a large-scale river crossing. The project was treated with appropriate seriousness at regiment and company levels—which is to say the Landser generally enjoyed themselves splashing in the water and messing around with boats. Other divisions, like 4th and 10th Panzer, drew duty in occupied France: deferential men, accommodating women, and ample sightseeing. Still more fortunate outfits went home promptly: 3rd Panzer to Berlin and 9th to Vienna, where their receptions were a good deal more enthusiastic than they had been when marching out in 1939.