Guderian: Panzer General

by Macksey, Kenneth

  Tank soldiers had to learn new lessons like everybody else; learning became swifter when time was cut to the bone. It had taken a year for Allied recognition of the need for concentration of tanks in attack: it took a mere three months for it to be seen that, since the tank was essentially a weapon of offence, its employment in defence must be conditioned by the principles of attack – of the same need for concentration in force instead of dilution by ‘penny packets’, the acceptance of what was an age-old principle of orthodoxy. Even so, until 144 tanks were used along a broad front by the French on 12th June, the tendency had been for them to be employed in handfuls: the Germans put in five at St Quentin on 21st March (their first use of tanks), the British mostly used them in twos and threes; at Villers-Bretonneux on 24th April 13 German tanks had an encounter with 10 British tanks and the honours in this first tank-versus-tank engagement were about even. Against the French, the Germans scattered 15 machines along the front with scant success at Soissons and Reims on 1st June: they merely copied the French who themselves rarely committed more than six at a time throughout April and May. Not that the first more concentrated use of tanks by the French at the Matz was an enormous triumph. Of the 144, 70 were lost because insufficient care was taken to neutralise German artillery which killed the scattered French machines at will. Nevertheless where tanks were not available or were destroyed the French infantry stuck: when tanks were present they advanced.

  These things Guderian may have noticed in spare moments between his normal duties so that, when he came to write of the 1918 tank battles in the course of his crusade for tanks, he was aware of them. But his primary duties came first and nobody pointed him in the tanks’ direction at a moment when the claim of the tank upon attention was irresistible. Massed tank counter-attacks became the rule. Sixty went in with the French at Cutry on 28th June; another 60 on 4th July; 471 spread over various sections between 18th and 26th July to reverse irrevocably the final effort by the Germans to break through on the Marne. In this battle there began to appear a degree of mobility unseen for years, for the ‘delaying defensive’ practised by the Germans stimulated the resurgence of open warfare. Allied tanks and infantry, supported by artillery and aircraft, drove deep among German infantry who were mainly defended by artillery in the anti-tank role. Losses up to 80 per cent were sometimes incurred by the tanks when the guns fought them over open sights, but somehow the attackers kept going and the defending infantry fled once their guns were lost. Into this cauldron was thrown XXXVIII Reserve Corps to stabilise the right flank of the German Army as it fell back in the first week of August. In due course its frontage rested upon the original alignment between Soissons and Vesle. Of this period Guderian significantly records his operations as involved with ‘mobile defence Marne-Vesle’. Five days later he, and the rest of the German Army, were shaken by reports of the heaviest tank attack of the war, one which had been launched opposite Amiens and had achieved such concentration that the artillery defence was, in places, saturated by tanks. The infantry had given way and though Ludendorff might attempt to denigrate a tank threat which he could not match, the fact remained that the German Army from this moment onward was jittery whenever these machines were supposed (let alone known) to be present. What the British regarded as a means of destroying machine-guns and barbed wire was looked on by the Germans as a ‘Terror Weapon’. The withdrawal that was to become endless until an Armistice was signed in November now began. For Guderian it was a period of endless toil with little rest, made no easier because his commander came in for criticism: ‘He makes life very difficult and is pretty demanding compared with good old Hofmann.’ But in those days, as he wrote, ‘Always there is somethin to worry about … The whole Army is exhausted.’ Tersely he traced the battles:

  ‘4th to 16th August. Oise.’ (Here XXXVIII Corps fell back under flank leverage caused by the defeat at Amiens and the subsequent pressure exerted against the Germans on an ever widening frontage until the decision was taken to withdraw to their starting point in the Siegfried Line.)

  ‘17th August to 4th September. Aisne.’ (XXXVIII Corps was covering the withdrawal in a period when increasing war weariness and obvious disaffection made it all the more apparent that even a delaying defensive was unlikely long to avail and, to Ludendorff, that the war had to be ended.)

  ‘5th to 18th September. Siegfried Line.’ (The final ‘backing’ into the Line in which XXXVIII Corps fought at the hinge of the German manoeuvre, first in Ninth Army and then in Seventh when it took over the Ninth.)

  Then he was sent to Italy as la (Chief Operations Officer) to the German Military Mission, just in time to be caught in the backwash from the Austrian defeat at Vittorio Veneto which was to put Austria out of the war. Yet the nature of this ephemeral appointment cannot be glossed over in consideration of the development of Guderian’s career. It indicates that he had made a considerable impression upon his superiors both before, during and after the Sedan General Staff Course as an eager, imaginative and earnest staff officer who, sometimes, perhaps breached Moltke’s rule: ‘Accomplish much, remain in the background, be more than you appear to be’. Guderian liked that maxim, however.

  Fate ordained that he should experience the Revolution in double measure with a double shock. On 20th September he could not envisage an immediate end to the war, writing to Gretel that The peace efforts of the Austrians … seem utter nonsense to me. The time chosen was unfortunate – in the middle of a battle which gives only hope to the enemy … I believe we will achieve more by dignified waiting and actions than through all this twaddle about peace. Nobody wants the war to last longer than necessary. In my opinion we will not achieve an endurable peace the way it is sought now’. He was ever the supreme optimist and this passage simply illustrates an attitude which was to both buttress and undermine his efforts in two world wars.

  Comprehensively he was disabused. On 30th October he found himself the junior member of a two-man German delegation that was sent to Trent to act in negotiations between the Austria-Hungarian Armistice Commission who were dealing with the Italians. They travelled in a railway coach without windows or heating and arrived to find the Commission had already left. Next day they caught up by motor, crossing into the Italian lines under the protection of the White Flag and preceded by a trumpeter. But the Italians at XXVI Corps were not interested in having the Germans present and so Guderian and his companion were returned to their own lines, ‘… with our bright blue eyes blindfolded’, there to find scenes of the greatest turmoil.

  Indignation poured from Guderian in his letter to Gretel in description of a hair-raising and shameless scene in which Germany’s allies behaved without honour’. The regiments were coming back singing, without weapons but with red flowers in their place. The mob demonstrated in front of the Dante monument. All stores were plundered and burnt. Russian prisoners of war were released and took part. Soon shooting and stabbing began while the population happily joined in.’

  He was fortunate to escape and return to a Germany that was in even worse case.

  ‘Our beautiful German Empire is no more. Bismarck’s work lies in ruins’, he wrote to Gretel from Munich on 14th November. ‘Villains have torn everything down to the ground … All comprehension of justice and order, duty and decency, seems to have been destroyed. The Soldiers’ Council still suffers from teething troubles … and makes ridiculous regulations … I only regret not having civilian clothing here in order not to expose to the jostling mob the clothes which I have worn with honour for twelve years.’

  Almost overnight the highly disciplined Army abandoned its cohesion and ceased to be reliable as Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Councils took the law into their hands and the old order degenerated into a whirl of putsch and counterputsch. At the end of November Guderian returned to Berlin, to a city of violence and fear, and in the knowledge that the Army no longer counted as a factor of stability in the affairs of the nations. In the knowledge, too, that Germany herself was threatened not only
by Communism from within but from the encroachment of Bolshevik and Polish armies approaching the eastern frontier, while the victorious but less predatory powers in the west closed upon the Rhine. In the New Year he was given his next assignment on the staff of Central Headquarters of the newly formed Eastern Frontier Protection Service, the organisation brought into being by Hindenburg as an agency to co-ordinate the emergency defence bands which were to spring into existence to combat the Bolshevik and Polish menace. The General Staff would run it as a symbol of its abiding integrity, but in chaos the Regular Army was of far less account than the freshly raised groups of dedicated fighting men known as the Freikorps, the invention of Major Kurt von Schleicher. With a mammoth task before it the Eastern Frontier Protection Service would allow none of its staff much time to think about the immediate future, let alone long-term problems connected with tanks. Guderian was committed to the defence of German soil and the very territory in the east from which his family had sprung. At the same time the ugly conditions he had witnessed within Germany prompted a changed attitude of mind – the need to save Germany from herself – which pervaded his political philosophy thereafter. He spoke of Bismarck who had created modern Germany and, by omission, discarded Kaiser Wilhelm II who failed his nation. Subconsciously, perhaps, he began to yearn for a new Bismarck, a strong man who would save Germany.

  3 The Blackest Days

  From first to last the Freikorps saw itself as the sole secure bulwark against Communism. Its advent coincided with revolution, its first role was in the destruction of the Spartacists in January 1919, and its subsequent expansion was arranged in proportion to the size of the Bolshevik threat both from within and from outside Germany. Where Freikorps ‘brutality stained the pages of history there was invariably a foregoing or simultaneous record of excess by their sworn opponents, for these antagonists numbered among their ranks the most deadly killers produced by the armies of the First World War. The prime elements of fanaticism and military professionalism rubbed shoulders and exchanged blows. The Communists were led by fervent ideologists and revolutionaries. The Freikorps was largely directed and officered by men for whom the overthrow of the Monarchy and the old system of life appeared outrageous, besides aiming a blow at their own status. They were the core of an essentially patriotic group which was bitterly ashamed at losing the war; at the same time they feared the elimination of their influence and wealth. The soldiers who followed them, to use Guderian’s definition, were ‘the real fighting men’, those who represented ‘Germany’s last chance’. Few who fought with or against the Freikorps would deny their military prowess, but inevitably the ruthless and, at times, depraved nature of their behaviour became a byword even when undeserved.

  Excesses, of course, were all the more likely when it is realised that each unit and formation owed direct allegiance to the men who raised and commanded them and that, initially, the Government was compelled to make do with them for want of an alternative. Largest and most efficient of all the Freikorps formations was the Iron Brigade. It had been raised by Major Joseph Bischoff – ‘an old campaigner’ – partly from the most determined elements of Eighth Army which had fought Germany’s battles in Russia from the start. As that army was brought home under the arrangements made by Generaloberst von Seeckt and his la, Major Freiherr Werner von Fritsch, the belligerent minority who wished to carry on with the fight joined Bischoff and his type. Seeckt also wished to fight. Early in 1919 he had become Chief of Staff of Frontier Protection Service, North, at Bartenstein – at the same time as Hauptmann Guderian was sent as a staff officer to Frontier Protection Service, South, at Breslau. It was in the north where the action was hottest and here that the ablest men began to congregate. Guderian was transferred to Bartenstein in March.

  Because the Bolsheviks pressed hardest into the Baltic States and closely threatened the heart of Prussian heritage, tribal sentiments were strongly aroused and the toughest of the Freikorps were attracted in that direction. Furthermore they were tempted by promises of free land, and there arose in the minds of some that what could be taken by the sword would be theirs at the peace – that the more Latvians who died the more vacant estates there would be. They did not all think this way: the genuine settler wants to settle in friendly territory. Nevertheless one of the oldest lures in history attracted the fiercest, most predatory agents of a feudal-style warfare. Bischoff’s Iron Brigade rapidly raised its strength to 15,000 men, organised into three regiments fully supported by artillery. Soon it had to be renamed the Iron Division and was in need of a properly constituted staff. Unavoidably it became a significant political force, and with redoubled effect in the hands of Guderian’s revered pre-war instructor at the War Academy – Generalmajor Rüdiger von der Goltz who had won a distinctive reputation for determined leadership in unusual situations during the war. Von der Goltz was a hero – with all the exaggeration and magnetism that invoked.

  Seeckt had mixed feelings about von der Goltz and his followers. As stopgaps prior to reconstitution of a new army, they were essential to the defence of Germany against the traditional enemy from the East. On the other hand he had to weigh the Freikorps’ impact on Germany’s internal security: their independence of mind and intention was a constant threat to a weak Government which existed under terrible pressures from all sides, pressures that would soon multiply when the terms of the Peace Treaty became known.

  In the spring of 1919 Germany stagnated politically in a fool’s paradise. Apart from a handful of politicians and soldiers, her people, short of food, ill-clad and frightened, entertained false hopes (built on propaganda delusions) that her erstwhile enemies would be ‘realistically’ generous and permit the German Empire to revert to a semblance of its pre-war status: the generous settlement by the British with the defeated Boers earlier in the century gave grounds for this optimism. But Germany’s former enemies were the prey of the same hate propaganda which had sustained their war effort, and they regarded the people who had started the war as ‘criminal’ – particularly the dominant Prussians and their institutions. Some of these things Seeckt already knew (and when he shortly became Military Member of the Peace Commission to Versailles would understand only too well): he grasped at anything that might shore up German morale and which might, at the same time, embarrass the Entente. By April, von der Goltz had repulsed the Red Russians in Lithuania and from the southern part of Latvia. At the same time he delved in politics by appointing a Latvian prime minister of his own nomination, Karlis Ulmanis. His operations were accompanied by a purge, the pitiless execution of Reds, or anybody suspected of Communist sympathies, and plans for the taking of Riga.

  Seeckt favoured the Riga operation also because German presence in the Baltic States alongside White Russian troops would provide a bridge with a future Russian government, assuming that the Whites achieved their aim of advancing on Petrograd and unseating the Reds – a nebulous aim which also had the support of the Entente powers. The bridge was desirable since Germany was totally without allies and this she could not afford to be. It was a delicate situation and one demanding an almost impossibly tight supervision over von der Goltz and the Iron Division -the most aggressively German and volatile elements in the polyglot units who were endeavouring to co-operate against the Reds while retaining Entente goodwill.

  The German Government, which had no alternative but to comply with the wishes of the Entente, could not overtly support von der Goltz’s expansionist schemes. Yet a way round the problem of committing the Iron Division to the attack upon Riga on 21st May was found. To this division on 2nd June went Guderian as 2nd General Staff Officer, an appointment that was clearly intended by Seeckt and Fritsch to reinforce General Staff influence at the most sensitive spot. It was a pointer to the future and their confidence in this young officer of a mere thirty years that they reposed such trust in his judgement at a time of mortal danger when patriotic feelings could so easily overcome circumspection. If he did well his sound prospects would be vastly enhan
ced: not only was Seeckt the man of the future, so too were Wilhelm Heye (the new Chief of Staff) and Fritsch: those who were selected for high places usually carried their most favoured staff officers along with them.

  Within only a few days, on 21st June, in a battle at Lemsal, Guderian displayed, for the first time in a moment of critical importance, that tactical flair for which he was to become famous. The leading column under Hauptmann Blankenburg failed after its commander had been wounded. Guderian at once saw the danger but recognised also an opportunity. On his own initiative he alerted a reserve infantry regiment, throwing it into the fray to keep the momentum of the attack rolling. It was not his fault that the attack finally broke down due to insufficient preparation and inadequate resources.

  Already, of course, the situation was passing out of German control, and largely they were to blame. The fall of Riga had been followed by massacres to which Bolsheviks, Germans and Latvians had contributed. Guderian reported in a letter that the Bolsheviks had killed over 4,000 people, but there is enough evidence to show that as many atrocities were committed by their opponents. Standards fall low in times of desperation. A member of the Freikorps wrote: ‘Where once peaceful villages stood was only soot, ashes and burning embers as we passed. We kindled a funeral pyre, and more than dead material burned there – there burned our hopes … the laws and values of the civilised world … and so we came back swaggering, drunken, laden with plunder’. They certainly overstepped the bounds of common sense at a time when moderation might have paid. Ulmanis had already complained that the Germans were driving the Latvians towards Communism ‘… the Latvian people have found that the Bolsheviks are less cruel than the Germans’ he wrote. Von der Goltz replaced Ulmanis with a new government of his own choice under Andreas Needra and the Allies, who until now had vacillated, recognised at last the implications of von der Goltz’s ambitions. Irresistible pressure was at once applied by the Entente to halt the rape of Latvia. In May the terms of the Peace Treaty became public and on 28th June the Tuc treaty of Versailles, in all its severity, was signed. It dealt a shattering blow to Germany, her armed forces and her hopes. The Navy would be forbidden U-boats and great warships; for the Army there were to be no more aircraft, heavy artillery, gas or tanks. Moreover the Army itself was to be reduced to a strength of 100,000 by 3rd March 1920 and those institutions in which Guderian had been educated – the Cadet College at Lichterfelde, the War Academy and the Great General Staff – abolished.