Guderian: Panzer General

by Macksey, Kenneth

  He had been noting with interest the neglected French villages as a sign that French power was on the wane, and he had glorified in the buildings of Soissons and the beautiful Marne valley. Suddenly everything changed. Overnight the cavalry ceased to be a spearhead and reverted to flankguard, first at the halt and then as a rearguard in retreat, filling the gap which had opened between First and Second Armies and which was about to be entered by both British and French troops.

  About 6th September Guderian recorded, in a letter to Gretel, that he was back with 5th Cavalry Division and under artillery fire at Cerneux – which was hardly surprising since at that moment this village was in no-man’s-land! Next day he was at Bois Martin: ‘Due to over-exertion three horses died. Horses and men extremely exhausted, added to the uncomfortable feeling of retreat’. On the 8th: ‘The station under shrapnel fire for 3 km. Very uncomfortable situation.’ And on the 9th, when 5 th Cavalry Division alone filled the gap between First and Second Armies: ‘Continuation of march at first without event, quite alone. In the afternoon when we reached the division, suddenly shrapnel fire into the column, again fortunately no losses … Horses and men pretty well done in.’ Finally on the 11th, after being verbally ordered to march to Chéry via Cohan (no written orders were ever received), two horses fell and had to be replaced by requisitioning. But the delay was fatal. All at once the French were upon them, the station captured and with it all his personal belongings and a few of the less fortunate men. Guderian escaped by the skin of his teeth to finish up only with those clothes in which he stood at Béthenville, north-west of Reims. It was here that, at last, he received a letter saying that Margarete had also passed her crisis, for in his reply on the 16th he was to write:

  ‘My dearly beloved, sweet wife,

  ‘To-day I received the first anxiously awaited news of your well being from your father … He told me about the happy birth of our beloved son. With deep thanks to God who protected you in this difficult hour, I extend you my dearest wife my deepest congratulations, my thanks for your love and kindness towards me. My thoughts are with you and our child all the time. Stay healthy and fresh and if God grants me a return from this terrible war may he then bestow upon us a happy reunion.

  ‘But now I know that you came through this difficult time in good health a weight has been lifted from my heart and I shall approach the serious task which still awaits us here in a calmer way.’

  A few days later the tenderness had dispersed and he was angry, writing to Gretel: ‘The newspapers I have read make too much noise … It is cheap to joke about a brave enemy … Also that which is written about breach of promises … everybody looks after himself and might is right. I therefore consider that scribbling about treason and the Tsar and the English is ridiculous. It simply happens that it is our world position and state of existence which is inconvenient to others. In some ways it gives me satisfaction to have foreseen this development.’

  He was angry, too, with the apparent failure of General von Ilsemann who seemed to have failed to meet the highest standards he expected of him; but of his comrades in 5th Cavalry Division he had nothing but praise. These were traits which would shape his career – an unbending expectation of excellence from those set above him and a compassionate feeling, blended with hard demands, for those below.

  The war called him again almost at once, and once more to the crucial front – to Flanders with Fourth Army under the Duke of Wurttemberg. Here he was to be made aware of the fate that must almost always overtake infantry when pitted against a determined and unshaken defence, armed with what Fuller was to call ‘a nerveless weapon’ – the machine-gun. Fresh German formations were thrown against Ypres in the attempt to roll up the Allied flank and seize the Channel ports. Of the advance on 20th October, of which he was well informed since he had been appointed to 14th Wireless Section at HQ Fourth Army (where his knowledge of communications and languages was invaluable), he was to write of ‘… the young regiments, the German National Anthem on their lips’, and go on to describe in Achtung! Panzer! ‘… their losses were very heavy, the results encouraging’. Then, ‘The young troops renewed their attack after the artillery had supposedly done its work of destruction. The reserves pressed forward, filling out the depleted lines – and increased the losses … Sacrifices rose to immeasurable heights while offensive power declined … They had to dig in and call for entrenching tools.’ Mobility was at an end; trench warfare behind barbed wire had begun on the Western Front.

  Once more it was Guderian’s destiny to observe closely the most important experiments, those of trench warfare. His sense of enthusiasm instantly welcomed the value of aerial reconnaissance and he was among the few who flew as observer in the search for information. He was on the Ypres front still when the Germans made their badly prepared, halfhearted attempt at a breakthrough using gas on 22nd April 1915 – a classic example of the premature use of a ‘secret weapon’ before its potential value was assessed and a proper drill for its use worked out. On 27th January 1916, as Intelligence Officer, he was sent to join the Headquarters of the Fifth Army under the Crown Prince at Verdun where, for the ensuing six months, he helped synthesize the results of the first great attempt at reaching a decision by the brute application of force to the total exclusion of mobility. Later his conclusions were those of every thinking soldier, a condemnation of the artillery’s inability ‘… to break down enemy defences quickly and thoroughly enough to secure more than a simple incision – the prolonged time one needed to allow the guns to become effective’. Yet in the early days of the offensive he wrote to Gretel, perhaps by way of encouragement but more likely in tune with a current and general feeling of optimism, that the offensive was ‘going well’. Guderian of course always was an optimist – his survival otherwise was inconceivable.

  One important event Guderian missed. In July he was sent back to Flanders to become Intelligence Officer at HQ Fourth Army. Therefore he was not present when British tanks made their debut on the Somme on 15th September. But even had he been there it is unlikely that he would have been any more impressed than his contemporaries. A mere 32 machines had caused only local terror where they had appeared in twos and threes, but the artillery had quickly destroyed those which persisted and the integrity of the trench front had never been seriously threatened. Along with the rest of the deeper thinkers in the German Army he largely ignored the reports of front line soldiers who called the tanks ‘cruel as effective’, and looked for more subtle combinations of proven weapons to unlock the fronts for the restoration of mobility. Nor, for that matter, did the possessors of this new weapon have much hope for its prospects. Major J.F.C. Fuller was frankly sceptical of their value at the time of his appointment as senior Staff Officer to the newly formed British Tank Corps at the end of 1916. He, like Guderian, was forever seeking new methods for infantry and in 1914 had published a perceptive article called ‘The Tactics of Penetration’. Unlike Guderian, however, he pronounced (perhaps with tongue in cheek as might Guderian too when challenging the sanctity of official doctrine) that ‘… tactics are based on weapon-power and not on the experiences of military history’ and that The commander who first grasps the true trend of any new, or improved, weapon will be in a position to surprise the adversary who has not’. Nevertheless, it was the British and, later, the French, who were to thrust the tank idea to the fore and largely because they placed officers of imagination and drive in charge of their new weapon. Though the Germans were to begin preliminary efforts to build a tank, starting in January 1917, there was negligible impulse because technicians and mediocrities were placed in charge and the General Staff withheld serious interest.

  Several crucial turning points of the war were rounded in 1917 – the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the entry of the USA into the war and the final demonstration by the British of the abortive nature of an offensive based mainly upon artillery attack. For the Germans it was a year out of character. The exertions of the first two years’ combat
had so reduced their army that a period of recuperation on the defensive was obligatory. The logical conclusions of Moltke’s dictum that because ‘… the defender has decided advantage during action under fire, the Prussian Army has all the more reason to use defensive methods’ was put into practice by the construction of costly and intricate fortified zones, in addition to railways to serve them, guarding the Western Front. As a result a relatively limited industrial capacity was diverted from making primarily offensive weapons. To the concern of conventional General Staff officers, the morale of the men was undermined. More pernicious still, in the view of those who came to denigrate this development in hindsight (Guderian among them), the tactical doctrine of the ‘delaying defensive’ was virtuously adopted as a measure of economy in inherently wasteful attritional warfare – a method of defence in depth with an attendant wastage of life and material conducted by both sides with the intention of gradually inducing exhaustion. This was the inverse corollary of the Verdun type of offensive which, as Guderian put it ‘… converted the beautiful countryside into a moonscape’. Development of a method such as this, in the view of its critics, was the antithesis of a search for worthwhile conclusions in any war.

  Of immediate importance to the Germans, in the aftermath of 1916’s destruction, was replacement of the wastage which had been incurred since 1914. The old army had not only bled to death; it had been denied infusions of new blood by a policy which had been based upon a short war and had not sufficiently come to grips with the demands of a long one. Promotions among the officers had been made at the peacetime rate and were insufficient to replace losses; the training of a new generation, including new members for the General Staff, had been minimal. As part of the process of reconstruction, fresh staff officers were created by taking, among others, those, like Guderian, who had been at the War Academy when it was dissolved in 1914 and putting them through a modified but strictly practical course that covered every aspect of staff duties. It included attachments of a month’s duration at all levels from Army Group to Division, plus short spells with an artillery unit and, finally, a month in command of an infantry battalion in the line.

  Throughout April Guderian was with formations along the River Aisne and thus present when the French used tanks – with barely recognisable results – for the first time. Then, starting in January 1918, he spent two months as a student in a General Staff Officers’ Course at Sedan where, no doubt, in the intervals between intensive study, he took the opportunity to visit the scene of Moltke’s ‘Cannae’ of 1870 and fixed in his memory the nature of the ground where, twenty-two years later, he was to play his own great gambit. The short detachments he deplored as unsettling, but the training he received called only for praise. It was, he claimed, ‘… comprehensive and thorough. After finishing my studies in Sedan I felt capable of mastering any tasks which the future might hold in store for me. On 28th February 1918 I was appointed a regular member of the General Staff Corps.’ It was among the proudest moments of his life. Of its performance in the First World War he was to say that: ‘[Germany’s] position as a world power … called forth a military self-confidence which found perhaps its most graphic expression in the very top intellectual ranks of the officer corps, hence in the General Staff’. Not that his final judgement on the General Staff would be uncritical – far from it: on reflection he considered it ‘too narrow a concept’, though there was no such pronouncement when first he took the carmine stripe.

  Undoubtedly the General Staff’s failure to maintain fully the principles of Moltke, which Guderian claimed it tried to do, led to its lack of technical awareness in perceiving the tanks potentiality. The events of 20th November 1917 when Guderian was working at the Headquarters of Army Group C and therefore remote from Cambrai and the first victory by massed tanks, exposed the General Staff’s deficiency of foresight. That event, Guderian was to rate the moment when ‘… the tank force provided the real dynamic punch [Stosskraft] of the Entente armies since they broke through the Siegfried [Hindenburg] Line, regarded as impenetrable at Cambrai, in one morning’. Cambrai was the brain-child of Fuller, though it was hardly his fault that an initial victory should have been turned abruptly against the British within a matter of days by an equally shattering German counter-offensive which also employed new methods. Crucial to the future of warfare, as 1917 drew to its end, was the disclosure by both sides of methods which, when used in conjunction in a later decade, would revive mobility as the key to the swift decision of a campaign.

  At last the Germans were made aware that the tank posed a deadly threat and one to which they had no immediate answer due to their neglect of technology. At the same time they had proof that the new tactical methods which they had been developing since Generaloberst August von Mackensen and his Chief of Staff, Oberst Hans von Seeckt, had defeated the Russians in Gorlice in 1917, gave them the chance of a victory before tanks (and millions of Americans) appeared in sufficient numbers to make utter defeat unavoidable. Mackensen and Seeckt had achieved deep penetration of the Russian front in 1915 by superior organisation. They fed reserves through the breach in a narrow front and then maintained the logistic momentum of their pursuit in depth. The Russians had collapsed but it had to be admitted that they were already weakened by serious deficiencies in equipment and organisation. Again, at the end of 1915, the same German command team broke a weakened Serbian Army and practically eliminated that nation from the war. To Seeckt’s joy an infantry mass made cavalry exploitation possible and convinced him that horsemen still had a future on the battlefield; it was a false lesson but of importance to the unfolding history of Germany. For Seeckt, too, was a man of the future.

  German experiments into the restoration of open warfare continued in 1917 while the tactics of defence in depth stood prominent as the expression of their strategy. In September of that year another enfeebled Russian army received a paralysing blow when an army under Generaloberst Oskar von Hutier struck hard at Riga. This time the technique of infantry penetration had been advanced a stage further. Following a surprise bombardment which was short and sharp (not in the least like those which had rolled on for days at Verdun and were at that moment pulverising the Ypres salient) the assault was spearheaded into the enemy lines by a hardened tip of specially picked and trained ‘storm troopers’ who infiltrated the Russian defences, bypassing opposition that could not at once be eliminated, and plunged ever deeper into the undefended enemy rear, creating chaos and uncertainty by their mere presence. Later the isolated strong points which held out would be destroyed by yet another new combination – ad hoc teams of infantry, machine-gunners and light artillery combined in the forefront of the battle under a nominated local commander who made best use of whatever was locally available to him. With this there emerged a flexible devolution of the command function: the man at the front, who best understood the situation, was again given local control within an overall design laid down quite loosely from above. Flexibility of method depended heavily upon far better signal communications than those which had failed in the 1914 campaign. The Germans had industriously made use of every possible new technical device and had so reorganised that the Signal Officers were closely associated at all levels of command so that they could exert a profound influence upon operations. German communication methods had acquired recognition as the weapon system it was, but it was still technically defective, as Albert Praun, one of its most able practitioners, points out: ‘The technical problems of adequate permanent communications systems for strategic and tactical purposes during movements, of telephone connections over long distances and of the use of multiple-channel telephone cables and of wireless transmission without interference still remained unsolved.’

  Even so the elder Moltke’s cloak was once more laid upon the battlefield and at once inspired outstanding results. The Russians were routed at Riga. A month later, at Caporetto, when the same treatment was meted out to the Italians, Italy might have been thrown out of the war if only the offensive�
��s momentum could have been maintained. Here were the weakest links. Logistical failure, the exhaustion of the leading troops, and an inability to keep control at the point of action and to feed in fresh reserves, brought things to a standstill as they had at the Marne. The methods of infiltration by storm troops and battlegroups, that were employed at Cambrai in effective retaliation to the British tank, worked smoothly enough, but there a deep penetration was not sought and logistics went untested. They would not be tried again on a vast scale until 21st March when the Germans under Hindenburg and the direction of Generaloberst Eric Ludendorff launched what was intended to be the final, crushing offensive in the West, designed to complete the task of defeating the British and the French now that Russia was out of the war and immersed in the turmoil of the Bolshevik phase of the Revolution.

  The methods studied by Guderian and his contemporaries at Sedan in the winter of 1918 were those to be used in the Ludendorff offensive. They were intended to fit the students for any task that the attacking formations demanded. But so far as tanks were concerned there were less than 20 of their own manufacture available to the Germans, plus a few captured machines, and so they were hardly worth study. For his part Guderian was to find himself divorced from tactics because, in May, he became quartermaster of XXXVIII Reserve Corps and thus immersed in the world of logistics – admirable experience for one who, in the years ahead, was to tax the capabilities of logisticians to the limit. To him fell the responsibility of arranging the supplies for his corps as it provided flank protection for a subsidiary offensive across the River Aisne. It began with complete surprise on 27th May, and achieved the longest advance (14 miles) so far accomplished since trench warfare began in 1914. On that occasion his task was limited. It was tougher the next time when XXXVIII Reserve Corps was made to attack under the redoubtable Hutier on the left flank of the so-called ‘Matz’ offensive which was launched on 9th June with the intention of widening the scope of its failing predecessor on the left and expanding the threat to Paris. Unhappily this offensive lacked the surprise factor enjoyed by its predecessor. Moreover it was met by Frenchmen who kept their nerve and who retaliated with a brusque counterattack which turned the Germans about. Nor was it merely the steadiness of the French which helped them prevail. This time they used tanks with a concentration and strength such as had been absent in all the previous Allied defensive battles of 1918.