Guderian: Panzer General
Page 1
GUDERIAN:
PANZER GENERAL
GUDERIAN:
PANZER GENERAL
Kenneth Macksey
A Greenhill Book
Published in 1997 and 2003 by Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited
www.greenhillbooks.com
This edition published in 2017 by
Frontline Books
an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS
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Copyright © Kenneth Macksey, 1975
This edition, with new material © Kenneth Macksey, 2003
Guderian: Panzer General was first published in 1975 (Macdonald and Jane’s London) and reprinted in hardback in 1992 and paperback in 1997 by Greenhill Books exactly as the original edition, with the addition of a new introduction by the author. A revised hardback edition was published by Greenhill Books in 2003 with a new introduction, pictures and updates throughout. It is reproduced here from the 2003 Greenhill edition.
ISBN: 978-1-52671-335-3
eISBN: 978-1-52671-337-7
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-52671-336-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library
Contents
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS/MAPS
INTRODUCTION
1 A PECULIAR FELLOW
2 FACTORS FOR THE FUTURE
3 THE BLACKEST DAYS
4 THE SEARCH FOR A SAVIOUR
5 THE CREATION OF THE PANZERTRUPPE
6 VINDICATION IN POLAND
7 THE GREEN LIGHT THROUGH FRANCE
8 THE FATE OF A HERO
9 THE ROAD TO LÖTZEN
10 THE LAST IN THE LINE
11 THE FINAL STAND
12 SEER, TECHNICIAN, GENIUS OR GERMANY’S BEST GENERAL?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Comparative Table of Officers’ Ranks in the German, British and American Armies
ILLUSTRATIONS
Between pages 116 and 117
1. Leutnant Heinz Guderian – 1908
2. Guderian in 1915 with Gretel and Heinz-Günther
3. A wireless station of the German Army, 1914, of the type commanded by Guderian
4. Driving the Swedish derivation of the German LK II tank in 1928
5. The Inspectorate of Motorised Troops, 1932
6. The demonstration at Kummersdorf, 1934
7. The demonstration at Kummersdorf, 1934: Blomberg, Hitler, Göring, Guderian
8. The parade of exoneration for von Fritsch in August 1938
9. The Polish Corridor, 5th September 1939
10. A German PzKpfw IVD
11. The Command Group in operation
12. Guderian with his radio and Enigma operators at work
13. During the drive to the Swiss frontier
14. Action in France
15. Products of the Panzertruppe
16. Sturmgeschütz III of 1940 with short, low velocity 75mm gun
17. Franz Halder
18. With von Rundstedt after the French campaign
19. Prestige portrait of Guderian, 1941
20. Action in Russia: after a journey to the front
21. Guderian emerging from a ditch after Russian bombs have exploded
22. The shock at Tolochino: first sight of the T 34s
23. ‘Anger gives you a thirst!’
24. Creators of panzer communications
25. With Panzer Regiment 35, August 1941
26. Kluger Hans and Schneller Heinz
27. Sturmgeschütz III F (Jagdpanzer)
28. Jagdpanthers with 88mm gun
29. Tiger
30. Panther
31. Guderian with Hitler Youth in 1944
32. Guderian discussing operations with Wenck, autumn 1944
MAPS
The Campaign in Poland
The Attack through the Ardennes
The Drive to the English Channel
The Drive to Switzerland
The Advance to Smolensk
Kiev and Tula
Introduction
It is with immense pleasure that I welcome this revised edition by Greenhill Books of my Guderian Panzer General, which was first published in English in 1975 and since then has been republished in many different languages, world-wide. For the advance of history always is an inexorable one and that of the Second World War has, since 1970, been almost unprecedented in the scale of its enormity as vast new sources of information have been released to the public gaze from official archives. Needless to say these revelations have had some impact on the life story of Generaloberst Heinz Wilhelm Guderian – and much more than that of the vast majority of German General Staff officers.
To begin with, there has recently come to my attention fascinating information concerning Guderian’s involvement with certain people who organised the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. I refer in particular to his remarkable relationship with his great friend General Erich Fellgiebel and his wonderfully brave efforts to protect the lives of that great man’s menaced family in the aftermath of the events of 20 July 1944. Efforts which, for some incomprehensible reasons, he chose to retain to himself even though that was to be detrimental to his own reputation.
Nevertheless, it may be claimed to this day that, without his influence, the war could easily have followed a very different course to the highly dramatic and disastrous one that it did – and in so doing might never have brought upon the German General Staff the fierce condemnation which befell that exalted body from the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. Even though, in fact as an organisation, it had been acquitted of War Crimes.
‘They have been a disgrace to the honourable profession of arms. Without their military guidance the aggressive ambitions of Hitler and his fellow Nazis would have been academic and sterile.’ These structures of high moral tone related, of course, only to a small minority, to the ruling clique of the Army General Staff who had occupied posts of the highest responsibility. Eventually several senior commanders and staff officers, who were not in the dock at Nuremberg, would stand trial in various European courts and be found guilty. Some of them would be executed. Yet the most celebrated of this group, the creator of the Panzertruppe which, of all the elements in the Wehrmacht, had made feasible conquests that were economically swift and withdrawal prolonged, and whose battlecraft was most feared of all in the days of its mastery, was never arraigned.
Generaloberst Heinz Wilhelm Guderian remains an enigma who frightened the armies of Europe to death and who deeply disturbed the conservative, disciplined circle of the German military profession. On the one hand he rejected the conduct of anonymity demanded of a member of the General Staff by becoming an arch publicist of radical ideas, one who was in the forefront of a furious debate that introduced schisms into the political, as well as the military sphere. To the world at large he came to personify the archetypal, single-minded Prussian bent upon war. To the German people, however, in his heyday, he was a hero – and worshipped by the soldiers too. On the other hand, powerful adversaries within the Wehrmacht regarded him as a threat to the sanctity of their caste, while to influential members of the Nazi hierarchy he represented much that was repugnant to them about Army officers, even though, at times, he seemed closer to their way of thinking
than most of the General Staff. And of them all, nobody seemed more confused in his relationship with Guderian than Adolf Hitler himself.
The recording of Guderian’s activities has been warped by the prejudices that were generated by his impulsive and persuasive maverick spirit. Inevitably the predispositions of orthodox people were hostile to him and jealousy was nursed by the casualties of a fierce internecine struggle that took place within a revolutionary German hierarchy. In the aftermath of an epoch of violence and hatred, what sort of convincing personal defence could be made by a general who had been kept behind bars, without trial, for three years?
In the pages of Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (hereafter called by its English title of Panzer Leader), Guderian wrote what was, in effect, an account of the raising of the Panzertruppe interwoven with a defence of his activities in the years that followed. Since its publication it has become a standard reference work in connection with the Panzertruppe and Guderian, though it is wide open to criticism as all autobiographies must be. Apart from its omissions it measures up well by standards of accuracy because the complete Guderian family archives were preserved. As a balanced description of the man, however, it is strangely deficient. Partly this is explained by the non-availability, at the time of composition, of official records from which he could refresh and widen his knowledge, and partly by the lack of other men’s memoirs. But to some extent Guderian proved his own worst advocate in that he denied the reader insight into his background and a sight of the fundamental evidence which displayed the man in the making and in his true colours. He chose to reduce the story of his first thirty-five years to a mere couple of pages and thus concealed the cause of so much that came to pass. The reasons for this are not entirely obscure. There seems to have been a certain presumption on his part of an unchallengeable integrity – a reasonable notion, as it happens, but one that, at times, makes him sound almost too good to be true. Although family documents lend support to a strong case in his favour, he rarely bothered to produce them and, in explaining a few contentious matters, such as various accusations against him or the circumstances of certain intrigues, relapsed into oblique or even devious replies instead of giving blunt retorts such as were characteristic. Even to his tormentors he extended an almost exaggerated generosity that weakened his own case.
However, it must be realised that Guderian assembled the memoirs under conditions of peculiar stress. Largely the material was collected while he was a prisoner of the Americans, by whom he was interrogated in the search for evidence against both himself and his old comrades. The early days of his incarceration were spent in discomfort, sometimes in humiliating circumstances, and always in the expectation of indictment. Even when the Americans and British absolved him the Poles endeavoured to bring him to trial in connection with the Battle for Warsaw in 1944. Later he became involved in a legal wrangle with Fabian von Schlabrendorff whose book, Offiziere gegen Hitler had appeared in Switzerland in 1946 and was, in 1948, to be serialised in a West German newspaper. Sections of that book were harmful to Guderian: they not only stimulated the distaste of those who already detested him but drove Guderian to defend himself at law. Although Schlabrendorff was induced to recant publicly in 1948, the damage had been done. Schlabrendorff’s first edition was quoted – and still is. Despite the appearance of a second edition in 1951 with all references to Guderian deleted, and his The Secret War Against Hitler (published in 1956, long after Guderian’s death) in which Guderian is hardly mentioned at all, Schlabrendorff is still read with a strong measure of credibility. In Panzer Leader Guderian denied everything that Schlabrendorff had written in connection with his activities concerning the anti-Hitler plotters, though he by no means clarified the story to complete satisfaction as he so easily could with considerable credit.
Family documents, particularly the correspondence with his wife, help sharpen blurred passages in Panzer Leader and fill some of the gaps. One begins to discern the man’s basic loyalties, his humanity and brimming patriotism – and here, too, a professed honesty of purpose is made apparent, for sometimes he expressed himself with startlingly dangerous clarity. These contemporary letters – so at variance in many respects to the hindsighted memoirs of so many German generals – render a service to history and provide an essential understanding of the circumstances and the factors which conditioned and confused the Germans. It is well to know about urgent people of creative ability at moments of sudden change and to understand the idealists of vision and power, men who, in days of disaster, may infer, as Guderian quoted in 1919 at the depths of a shattering revolution: ‘May the day be dark, may the sun shine bright. I am a Prussian and a Prussian I will be’, adding ‘Everything now depends upon keeping the oath. Germany would go under if everybody were to say: ‘Not I, others can do it’. Everybody who has the smallest sense must say instead, “I will help”.’
This, in fact, is the story of a Prussian who was inclined sometimes to be more Prussian in outlook than the Prussians, one who mixed clear vision with precise honour and subtle flexibility in the execution of modern ideas that were the antithesis of rigidity.
At this point therefore attention must be drawn to the three major influences of record which, since the early 1970s have imposed the greatest changes to the original manuscript of his biography. They are, in chronological order of arrival:
1. The publication in 1970 of K H Wildhagen’s Erich Fellgiebel. So far as I know this compilation of articles and documents has not been translated from the German language and I am unaware of it being referred to in the English language other than in my Without Enigma. But, lacking knowledge of Wildhagen’s book which describes Fellgiebel’s activities in the Second World War, virtually all accounts in English of the Bomb Plots to assassinate Hitler can only be seriously incomplete and incorrect. As, for example, was my own story of Guderian’s part in the events of 20th July and its aftermath in previous editions of Guderian Panzer General. One of my intentions here is to correct the errors and injustices committed.
2. The decision by the British Government early in the 1970s to divulge the hitherto top secrecy of the breaking of enemy codes, and the publication in 1974 of F W Winterbotham’s famous, inaccurate The Ultra Secret, was of course the greatest reason for huge revisions to the history of the Second World War as previously written. Almost overnight, for example, every reputable history book dealing with military strategy (including Official ones) became incomplete and in need of wholesale revision. A process which was inevitably slowed by the pace at which Ultra Intelligence material was released.
a. By the rate at which the five volumes of the official British Intelligence in the Second World War was compiled and then published by HMSO
b. The measured pace of freeing the millions of documents by the Public Record Office (starting in 1977) which, of necessity to this day, remains limited by a security that continues to deny access to a number of sensitive areas.
As it happens, the fact that GC&CS at Bletchley Park, from May 1940 onwards, was breaking an ever-increasing quantity of Axis ciphers and codes, had little effect on Guderian’s own operational tasks prior to July 1944, when he became Chief of the General Staff. But the fact that I decided in 1975 not to mention or guess at the impact of Ultra in my book certainly requires some sort of comment to-day.
3. Then there is the Basil Liddell Hart saga that broke in 1988 when Professor John Mearsheimer’s sensational Liddell Hart and the Weight of History was published. An event which enabled me in the 1992 edition of my Guderian to write a short, new Introduction explaining how it came about that, in the 1975 edition, I had not drawn attention to the deception Liddell Hart managed to arrange on page 20 of the English edition of Guderian’s admirable Panzer Leader. I am referring, of course, to the insertion of a misleading, but crucial, paragraph, which had not been present in Guderian’s Erinnerungen eines Soldaten, in which it was stated that Guderian owed many suggestions to the development of the Panzertruppe. It is almost irrelevant in this
book to point out that Mearsheimer’s admirable work, to which I contributed some important evidence, brought about the virtual ruin of Liddell Hart’s reputation as a historian and military philosopher. All that matters here, in so far as Guderian is concerned, is the extent to which that deception tended to diminish Guderian’s reputation.
The effects of fresh information drawn from the three major sources above will be written, where appropriate, into the ensuing text.
I am deeply indebted to Generalmajor Heinz-Günther Guderian for making available family papers, which appear here for the first time, and for reading my drafts in his father’s spirit – that is by arguing a case with good-humoured patience, rising nobly to each challenge and, like his father, being absolutely frank when the occasion demanded. Guderian’s one-time Chief of Staff, Walther Nehring, once remarked to me that if you know the son you obtain a good impression of the father. As time went by and I came to know Heinz-Günther Guderian, I found the experience stimulatingly enjoyable.
To the German generals who contributed I am immensely grateful too – to Walther Nehring, the doyen of Guderian’s staff officers and a celebrated historian of the Panzerwaffe; to Hermann Balck, one of the staunchest and most combatant of Guderian’s old comrades who not only warned me that ‘to understand Guderian you have to understand Prussian discipline’, but wrote an essay on the subject; to Wilfred Strikfeld, Generals Chales de Beaulieu and Walter Warlimont who answered certain important questions. As on previous occasions Dr Kurt Peball of the Austrian Kriegsarchiv gave help and so, too, did Mr Dermot Bradley. I am also indebted to Generalleutnant G. Engel, Oberst H. W. Frank, Oberst G. von Below, Paul Dierichs and Major H. Wolf for memoirs about Guderian; to Generalmajors Kurt von Liebenstein, and K. H. von Barsewisch for the use of their war diaries; and, very recently, to Frau Susanne Potel (nee Fellgiebel) and Generalmajor Graf Berthold von Stauffenberg for contributing fresh information.