Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Officers of the Reichswehr had noted the lessons of the First World War. They concluded – correctly – that they had been defeated strategically by the Royal Navy’s blockade, having to fight a war on two fronts and the industrial muscle of the United States and Britain. Tactically they had been beaten by the adoption by the British of all-arms manoeuvre warfare in 1918, where tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers and aircraft combined to produce shock on the battlefield, probe for weaknesses and bypass strongpoints that could be mopped up later: this was something to which the usual stout German defence had no answer. The German officers of the 1920s concluded that a war on two fronts must be avoided; that a long war would allow blockade and industrial might to slowly strangle Germany, and that the German army must adopt and refine the tactics used against them in 1918 – tactics which came to be known as Blitzkrieg. The possibility of a war on two fronts was a long-term German concern, and it was largely for politicians to avoid it, but the German army should prepare for short, sharp wars, using mechanized units to effect rapid and deep strikes into the flanks and rear of enemy formations. The old insistence on the need to hold ground come what may must be forgotten, and tactical withdrawals in order to concentrate and counter-attack should become normal practice.

  In 1932, the year before Hitler gained power, the United States military attaché, Lieutenant-Colonel Jacob Wuest, observed the Reichswehr’s autumn manoeuvres – based on a supposed invasion of eastern Germany by Poland – and thought it an army of ‘thinking individuals with a sense of freedom of action arising from good team training’. The officers, he thought, were ‘serious-minded and keen… quiet with a natural sense of dignity’.22 In a document entitled ‘Points for Training 1932–33’, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Colonel-General Kurt Freiherr* von Hammerstein-Equord, summed up the lessons of the training exercises and looked forward to the following year. He emphasized the importance of concurrent activity, with warning orders sufficient to get troops on the move issued well in advance. He thought there was too much detail in many operational orders, which as far as possible should be verbal, not written. Rather than telling a subordinate exactly how to carry out his task, commanders should lay down a clear mission, and then allow subordinates to get on with it – in other words, tell them what to do, not how to do it. The speedy passing of information up and down was stressed, but also the need for commanders at all levels to be able to cope with the ‘fog of war’. Proper appreciation of the terrain was vital, particularly when faced with enemy armour, and tanks were not to be parcelled out but concentrated to make maximum use of their mobility and shock action. Surprise was the key and tanks were never to be used in less than battalion strength.* Much the same points can be heard after today’s military exercises, showing that, while the assets change, the basic principles do not.

  Umpiring† methods came in for some criticism, particularly for not insisting that units move at realistic speeds. It was accepted that umpiring dummy tanks (plywood bolted on to wheeled vehicles or motor cycles) was not easy but umpires were not to allow them to exceed 20 kph (12.5 mph).‡ Within the German army all were agreed as to the importance of anti-tank defence, but there was much discussion as to the best method of achieving it. Hammerstein thought that enemy tanks should be engaged well before they reached the defence line, but he accepted that there was merit in the contrary view, which held that, when faced with tanks, the infantry should go to ground, allow the enemy armour to pass through to be dealt with by friendly tanks and anti-tank guns in the rear, and then deal with the enemy’s infantry following their tanks. What no one doubted was the importance of having lots of anti-tank guns, and when war came it was German anti-tank guns, rather than tanks, which were the main killers of Allied tanks.

  What had not yet been resolved was the role of horsed cavalry, of which the Germans still had eighteen regiments, albeit partially motorized. Should cavalry be used in the reconnaissance role or could they be used in combat? Some cavalry officers believed in what the French called the‘oats and oil’solution, where horsed cavalry and light motorized units could work together, while a few still considered that what they called heavy cavalry could be used in attack. A larger number, not all cavalry officers, thought that armoured vehicles would be unsuitable for war in the mud of Poland and Russia, should it come, and that only horsed cavalry could cope with the terrain. By 1939 the Germans had reduced their horsed cavalry to one brigade, although later on horsed cavalry units were raised for service in Russia, where they did prove effective. Huge numbers of horses were still used, and would be used, by the Germans in logistics units and to pull the artillery of non-armoured or non-motorized units, and in 1939 the German army had 400,000 horses on the establishment.

  Looking ahead to 1933, the army commander announced test exercises for every combat unit of the Reichswehr, including one of seven days for each infantry battalion. Thus, by the year Hitler came to power, and by 1935, when he was ready to announce publicly that Germany would no longer be bound by Versailles and would rearm, the groundwork had already been done. Armoured tactics had been thrashed out in Russia; the army knew exactly what sort of armoured vehicle it needed; every serving soldier and officer was a highly trained professional well capable of instant promotion; there was a general staff in disguise and senior commanders were highly experienced veterans of the first war. Military aviation too was well advanced thanks to experimentation in Russia and the proliferation of ‘gliding clubs’, while the navy was a thoroughly proficient service, albeit one not capable of much more than coastal defence and commerce raiding.

  The NSDAP government’s first ordered increase in the size of the army was from the Reichsheer’s seven divisions to twenty-one with a wartime reinforcement of a further fifteen divisions. This was a huge step, to be completed within two years, and was carried out, in the main, by dividing existing single units to form two and then splitting them again. There were enough officers and senior NCOs who could be promoted to provide the command structure, but the rank and file could only come from conscription, which was initially to be for one year, quickly changed to two years (in August 1936) when it was realized that one year was far too short. In 1936 the expansion was increased to forty-two divisions in the standing army with eight in reserve to be reached by 1938.In 1938 this was increased yet again, and by the summer of 1939 the German army could field 103 divisions, a fifteen-fold increase in four years.

  Such a huge expansion could not be achieved simply by splitting and more splitting – the inherent military experience and training of the longer-serving soldiers would become far too diluted to produce effective units. The reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 meant that the Rhineland Armed Police could now be admitted as being paramilitary and absorbed into the army as twenty-eight battalions of infantry; the absorption of Austria in 1938 added five divisions, and the re-designation of border guards and police formations and the inclusion of recalled veterans of the first war all helped. What is perhaps extraordinary is that, despite this unprecedented peacetime expansion, professional standards were barely compromised. Right to the end of the war, even junior German officers, few of them by then products of the pre-Hitlerian army, were highly skilled, well motivated and formidable opponents. Meanwhile, in 1935 the first three armoured (panzer) divisions were formed, based very much on the British experimental armoured division which German army observers had seen on Salisbury Plain in 1927. The difference was that, while the British put much thought into armoured organization and tactics, they were given very little money to put it into practice.

  Of course, there were difficulties: there was a shortage of staff-trained officers and the War Academy struggled to match its output to the expansion; vehicles broke down on exercises and on the drive into Austria; there were shortages of some items of equipment; organizations were not yet finalized and there was suspicion of the efforts of the SS to expand its own armed wing, the Waffen SS, but in general problems were quickly solved, doctrine was
developed, tried, tested, amended, refined and promulgated, and by 1939 the German army was well trained, well led, reasonably well equipped and large enough to engage in serious war.Versailles had certainly reduced the size of Germany’s war-making capacity, but it had totally failed to eradicate the Prussian military tradition and German flexibility and ability to improvise.

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  It is one of life’s great mysteries that the Poles have been able to keep their language, culture and religion alive despite inhabiting an area which has usually belonged to either Germany, Russia or Austria, or sometimes to all three. Napoleon Bonaparte gave them the client state of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, for which they remained forever grateful, and in the attempt to please everyone (except the defeated Germans) the Allies created the Republic of Poland in 1918. The Poles are a hardy race, but if you sit beside the school bully it is as well not to tease him, and this is doubly the case if you sit between two school bullies. Poland had taken advantage of Germany when she was weak in the aftermath of the first war, she had fought a war of aggression with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and had grabbed the Teschen area and some frontier districts in the Carpathians from Czechoslovakia when Germany claimed the Sudetenland. Long before Germany was in any position to threaten her, Poland had discriminated against and oppressed ethnic Germans living in Poland (there were around 70,000 of them). She was bound to be stamped on by somebody sooner or later. Nor do we need to feel too sorry for the Poles, or at least for their government, when their nation was invaded in 1939. The Poles were just as anti-Semitic as the Germans, the only difference being that the Germans were better at it, and the Polish government was only marginally less fascist than that of Germany. The French and British governments had no illusions about Poland, and right up to the last in their dealings with the Poles they urged conciliation. But the Poles do not do conciliation.

  It is apparent that the German government, or at least Hitler, did not believe that the French or the British would go to war over Poland, despite their guarantees. They had reluctantly acquiesced in everything else that Germany had done to nullify Versailles, so why should they bother with Poland, where neither country had a vital interest? Whatever the British might say in public, Hitler had no designs on the British Empire, Britain was a maritime power not a European one, and there was no reason why the interests of the two nations could not coexist. The big difference, of course, was that the British, and to a lesser extent the French, could justify appeasement by telling themselves that Germany was only enlarging her borders to incorporate Germans, and that Versailles was unrealistic anyway. Once Germany gobbled up the rump of Czechoslovakia, there was no longer an excuse. The British probably had no great concerns about what the Germans might do to the USSR, but they realized that France could not defend herself against a Germany that had defeated Russia, and in that case a German Europe would very quickly become a threat to Britain. It was very much in the British interest to maintain a reasonable balance of forces in Europe, and the whole aim of British foreign policy in the 1930s, including appeasement, was to maintain that equilibrium without going to war. When it became apparent that Germany could not be dissuaded from further expansion at the expense of her neighbours, war was inevitable.

  The German reason for attacking Poland was partly to reduce the Polish Corridor and regain Danzig, but also to clear the way for an eventual expansion to the East, the search for Lebensraum. Germany’s demands on Poland were not unreasonable – indeed, by Hitlerian standards they were mild: the return of the (unquestionably German) free city of Danzig and a rail link across the Polish Corridor over which Germany would have extra-territorial rights. Poland refused (the British urged acceptance), presumably because she feared being seen as acceding to German demands but not to Russian, or perhaps just through bloody-mindedness. To Germany, the obvious riposte was to take by force what could not be achieved by threats. The German plans for Poland, Fall Weiss,* dated January 1939, laid down purely defensive deployments, but in revised orders issued by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW, ‘Supreme Headquarters Armed Forces’) in March and April the operation became an offensive. The invasion would be carried out by two army groups,Army Group North with the Third and Fourth Armies and Army Group South with the Eighth, Tenth and Fourteenth.

  Those who are familiar with military organizations need not read this paragraph. But for those who do not have a copy of the Staff Officer’s Handbook instantly available, the creation of military organizations is affected by two main factors: how many men one commander can reasonably command (and what one headquarters can realistically deal with), and the need for the unit or formation to be structured and equipped to carry out whatever task may be assigned to it. Clearly one general directly commanding 200,000 individual soldiers would not work, nor would a unit equipped solely with snowshoes be of much use in the desert. An organizational pyramid is therefore developed in order that the highest level of command passes on its wishes to the next level down and so on, with each grouping having the assets it needs to fulfil its role. In the German army of 1939 the basic brick of the infantry was the ten-man section, of eight riflemen and two machine-gunners manning one machine-gun, the whole commanded by a non-commissioned officer (NCO) of corporal-equivalent rank. Three sections plus a 50mm mortar made up a platoon, which was commanded (usually) by a senior NCO. A company, commanded by an officer of lieutenant’s or captain’s rank, had three platoons and a support platoon of three machine-guns and three anti-tank rifles. The next level up was the battalion with three companies and a support company of eight machine-guns and six 81mm mortars. Three battalions plus an anti-tank artillery company, a field artillery company, a motorized reconnaissance company, an engineer platoon and a signals platoon formed a regiment, usually commanded by a colonel. A division had three infantry regiments, an artillery regiment, a reconnaissance battalion, an engineer battalion, a motorized anti-tank battalion and a transport battalion, and was commanded by a major-general or lieutenant-general. A corps had two or more divisions, plus its own supporting and logistic units, and was commanded by a lieutenant-general or general, while an army had two or more corps, plus its own support and logistic units, and was commanded by a general or colonel-general. Two or more armies formed an army group, commanded by a colonel-general or field marshal. In the infantry division outlined above, the field artillery and most of the logistic transport was horse-drawn and would remain so for the duration of the war. There were also motorized divisions, armoured divisions, light divisions and alpine or mountain divisions, but the basic structure was the same.

  All armies were, in principle, structured along similar lines, but, while the British regarded their machine-guns as being there to support the riflemen, German riflemen were there to support the machine-gun, and the Germans had much more anti-tank artillery than anyone else. Something that the Germans, unlike their opponents, were very good at was rapid reorganization when confronted by a task which the basic division or regiment was not ideally structured to carry out. A battle group (Kampfgruppe) could rapidly be thrown together from assets needed for the particular task and be sent into action instantly, despite the component parts never having worked together previously. The Germans could do this, not only because their officers and NCOs were well trained, but also because there was a common doctrine throughout the army in which everyone was trained. Thus, an infantry battalion sent off to work with a tank battalion they had never met before knew how to communicate with the tanks, how to move with them and what to do when tanks or infantry came under fire. The US Army paid lip service to flexibility and rapid reorganization but rarely managed it, while the British had little or no common doctrine and relied on battalion, regimental or brigade standard operating procedures, which could vary greatly depending upon the battalion, regiment or brigade.

  The German plan for Case White envisaged the Third Army attacking south from East Prussia towards Warsaw and linking up with the Fourth Army, which would attack eastwards from
northern Germany, cutting off the Polish Corridor. From Army Group South, Eighth Army would attack north-east towards Warsaw, while Tenth would drive due east and cut Poland in half. Fourteenth Army, attacking from Slovakia, would push north to capture the fortified area of Lvov, and also prevent the Polish forces from retreating into Hungary. To provide an excuse for German aggression, the SS would arrange for 150 concentration camp prisoners to be dressed in Polish uniforms and forced to stage an attack on German frontier positions. They would be repelled, as would a similar faked attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz.

  Poland had originally ordered partial mobilization in March, shortly after the German occupation of Prague, the Czech capital. This had adversely affected already near-to-breaking-point relations with Germany, and sparked off a number of incidents which were coyly referred to as ‘collective indiscipline’ – mutinies – in the Polish Army, mainly involving conscripts of German origin. On 19 May 1939 the French agreed that, in the event of a German attack on Poland, France would attack Germany on the fifteenth day after mobilization.