Nevertheless Guderian had railed, on 8th April 1920, against ‘lack of energetic action’ in the aftermath of the Kapp putsch and ‘… the cowardice, stupidity and weakness of this lamentable Government … when at long last will the Saviour come … ? I am becoming more and more pessimistic with regard to the hope for peace. We are in the middle of a Thirty Years’ War. It is sad but cannot be altered. Our children will only know the word peace by its name’. Soon he was answered by a ruthless killing of Communists in the Ruhr by units of the Army and the Freikorps of Ritter von Epp.
In the reorganisation of the Reichswehr, Seeckt’s aim encompassed, in addition to political isolation, the creation of a defence force which could be so constructed that it laid the foundation for the resurrection of the German Army when the time was ripe. The 100,000 men it was to recruit, many of whom would be of commissioned or non-commissioned officer calibre, would form a strong foundation of leadership in the event of expansion. Though the General Staff was proscribed, its function and existence were to be preserved in a special Truppenamt (Troop Office) with responsibility for defence, organisation, intelligence and training. In addition a civilian department, guided by ex-General Staff officers, carried out research into history and future military developments. In the shadow of defeat the new organisation was dedicated to the analysis of what had gone wrong and to the development of every feasible scheme of modernisation which could be studied or carried out within, or just beyond, the fringes of the Versailles Treaty. The officers of the German Army performed their task in an atmosphere absolutely different from that enjoyed by their predecessors. Guderian stated that They had to relinquish many privileges and forego many cherished traditions, and they did so to save their Fatherland from inundation by the flood of Asiatic Bolshevism then already threatening. The Weimar Republic did not suceed in turning this marriage of convenience into a love match.* No genuine attachment evolved between the officer corps and the new State.’
Until the end of 1921 Guderian was committed to a solitary function -lowly but fundamental: that of training a company of infantry. Since this was almost his first spell of duty in command of soldiers since 1914 (apart from the brief month as a temporary battalion commander in September 1917) and a considerable diminution of responsibility, he threw the most terrific energy into the task and drove his men hard. This was his first opportunity to become involved with exercises at the lowest level in consolidating the lessons of 1918. In 1921 there were exploratory manoeuvres with mechanised troops in the Harz near Goslar. The task was dear to his heart since it enabled him to experiment with the closer officer-man relationship that to him was so important – as it was to Seeckt whose policy sought a closing of the gap between the ranks. He could be rough with the men, even rougher with the officers, and his caustic tongue would lash and hurt. Yet he was fair and, as a trainer, systematically progressive, meticulously thorough, and always careful to explain the reasons for whatever demands he made. Only a company of the finest skill, morale and polish could be the product of such inspired and relentless leadership by a man who believed as much in persuasion as brute compulsion. They never forgot him and always welcomed him back.
When the time came to leave, his men expressed their feelings in a piece of verse which perfectly sums up his impact upon ordinary soldiers:
It is you, Hauptmann Guderian
Who not merely saw an instrument in man,
Who taught us the ‘why’ of such unavoidable toil.
If things were sometimes severe, then duty is harsh!
What fears the Warrior!
The company is grateful.
*Not all of them, it must be pointed out. Wheeler Bennett, for example, states that Seeckt looked on von der Goltz’s schemes as ‘pure fantasy’.
*Hermann Balck, who was close to Guderian at this time, says that Guderian had to be in the 100,000 man army from sheer virtue of strength of character. ‘He was like a coiled spring.’
*A quaint irony when one recalls that, in 1921, the Germans were about to embark on another rriage of convenience – co-operation with Red Russia through the Rapallo Treaty.
4 The Search For a Saviour
At the heart of the task of military reconstruction facing Germany, as Hans von Seeckt saw it in 1921, was the restitution of the ancient and traditional codes of honour and obedience and their fusion with a modern, forward-looking outlook in the fields of strategy and tactics as conditioned by burgeoning technology. Seeckt, like so many of his predecessors and contemporaries, was a man of maxims. Concerning the soldier’s honour which demanded of an officer, for example, that he defend to the utmost not only his own character but that of his wife also, he was unbending: ‘Herein lies the new and serious duty of the commander, the duty of severity for honour’s sake’, he wrote. The requirement was not so very new but he felt it had to be said over and again. Nor was he pronouncing startling originalities when he wrote:
‘The more efficient this [regular] army, the greater its mobility, the more resolute and competent its command, the greater will be the chance of beating the opposing forces’ and demanded:
‘High mobility, to be attained by the employment of numerous and highly efficient cavalry, by the fullest possible use of motor transport and by the marching capacity of infantry; the most effective armament and continuous replacement of men and material’. He did not actually exclude tanks from his inventory, even though they were not mentioned: these he regarded as ‘developing into a “special troop” besides Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery’ – an important distinction which was to cause much controversy later on.
In addition to the Truppenamt and related central organs of the Reichswehr, command Inspectorates were set up to control and probe into matters which Seeckt deemed essential for the future. Among them was the Inspectorate of Transport Troops, under General von Tschischwitz, whose wide-ranging task encompassed both their tactical employment and the widespread complexities of their administration – such matters as fuel supply, repair and maintenance and road construction, none of which had been seriously tackled except from the angle of logistic supply of a fixed front prior to 1918. It was to this Inspectorate that Guderian was nominated in 1922. But the manner of his posting clearly, and for sufficient reason, undermined his confidence in what the future held. A vague enquiry by his colonel in the autumn of 1921 as to his feelings about rejoining the Staff, was followed by a long silence until January when he received a telephone call from Oberstleutnant Joachim von Stülpnagel of the Truppenamt, asking why he had not reported to the 7th (Bavarian) Motorised Transport Battalion at Munich. There had been a breakdown in staff duties. Immediately, however, a suspicious Guderian was demanding explanations. What was going on? How stood his prospects? At a time when promotion was stationary a job in a lonely Bavarian Transport Battalion far from represented a staff appointment with sound prospects. The appointment sounded all too much like a side-track, remote from a place at the centre of things to which Guderian was accustomed and which an ambitious officer required as a springboard for advancement.
Stülpnagel hastened to explain that he was destined to become the General Staff officer to Tschischwitz but that the posting to Munich was to enable him to obtain prior, first-hand experience of transport troops. He followed this with a letter on the 16th January which was a mixture of placation and sound advice:
‘… your employment with the Inspectorate of Motorised Troops is intended to be a special recognition for your performances up till now. To speak in confidence, you are supposed to transmit the intentions of the General Staff to the motorised troops … You can imagine that some specialists will not like your coming. All the more important it is for you to break through with tact and understanding for the larger interests and gain the recognition of the specialists.’
At that time, in every army, there yawned a gulf between specialists and regimental and staff soldiers, a gulf that was exceptionally wide in the German Army due to a common contempt for ‘rude mech
anicals’. With Guderian no such snobbery existed. His service with the signallers had eliminated any there might have been and so his selection for this task was admirably made. He was, as he wrote, delighted and made happier still by Major Oswald Lutz, the battalion commander in Munich, whose task it was to give him all the experience possible in less than three months. Lutz was a railway engineer by training, a man of remarkably clear mental aptitude and thoroughly receptive to new ideas. He also possessed the sort of whimsical humour that was compatible with Guderian’s kind of banter: he once ordered the cadets at the training school to climb into the trees and when they returned to the ground explained that he had done so in order to see ‘if their platoon leader would go up into the trees for me’. He had!
Guderian was on the threshold of his last years of comparative repose in his military career. Ahead lay a decade of study, the development of revolutionary ideas and the pursuit of knowledge stimulated by the demand that he should teach. It was of small account – in fact it was to his eventual advantage – when, at the outset in the Inspectorate, Tschischwitz’s Chief of Staff, Major Petter, insisted upon overruling his general concerning the sort of work upon which Guderian was employed – as any Chief Staff in the German Army was fully entitled to do. Instead of directing Guderian’s energies upon the organisation and employment of motorised troops in a combat role he was put to work on logistics. The prospect appalled him. He protested and was overruled: he asked to be sent back to the 10th Jägers and was told quite firmly not to argue and instead to get on with his job. It could not have been better than if it had been so arranged. It deflated Guderian’s ego and cleared his mind so that he could tackle a totally new experience from first principles, working for men who were determined to be masters in their own house. The General Staff, even in its new, covert guise, was a remarkably tightly knit organisation with a talent for making the best use of its component parts. Seeckt might desire that its members should conform to a standard code of conduct in addition to standardised methods of work, but, in the final analysis, careful attention was given to putting the right men into the most appropriate employment. It is to be wondered, however, if anybody had foreseen the outcome of posting young Guderian to a rather out of the way appointment in 1922, whether they would have held back. For Guderian was bent on innovation on a scale which would leave the General Staff and, eventually, the world breathless.
By the application of that dynamic industry which now was second nature, he mastered the office work and decentralised routine subjects to the clerks. With mundane things out of the way he could turn his mind to what Tschischwitz – a hard taskmaster – had always intended he should do: study motorised troops. He entered an academic world, almost cutting himself off from the political and economic turmoil that went on outside -the upheavals of putsch and counter-putsch; the effects of allied reparations on the economy with the attendant French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and the runaway inflation of the Mark which did fearful damage to stable segments of society and crippled industry; the rise of the private armies – Stahlhelms, Sturm Abteilung and their ilk; the prevalent wavering of a weakened democracy before the threat of strong men and vested interests. Political events he carefully watched but studiously managed to avoid or deflect since his work and income remained fairly constant. Yet, in anger, he could sympathise with political aspirations and formulate political alignments even though, as an officer, he was neither allowed to take part in politics nor cast a vote. At heart he remained a patriot in search of a Saviour – a new Bismarck – for his country and, when in 1925, Paul von Hindenburg, a staunch monarchist, became Reichspresident and inaugurated, in company with Seeckt and Gustav Stresemann, a period of tranquillity, it seemed possible that the deity he longed for had been found. In a letter to his mother on 21 st September 1925 he described the great ovation Hindenburg received when he visited the annual Army manoeuvres – the enthusiasm of the people for the man, the torchlight processions and the specially composed poems recalling the glories of the past. He rarely mentioned the politician Stresemann whose achievements were, in fact, considerable, but consigned him, as a politician, to a lower place, well beneath the god-head, the President.
But the Army upon which so much glory had been built in the past, was now a feeble specimen armed with material that could have little practical use either in war or for experiments into the future. The tracked transport vehicles in the columns were neither robust nor agile enough to simulate the cross-country movement demanded of fully mobile troops. Moreover they were even more vulnerable than the cavalry and infantry who had been shot down by droves in the course of five years’ combat. Some form of protection, a vehicle with armour since men could not be personally armoured, was obviously needed and this Guderian must have realised from the start, even though in Panzer Leader he makes awfully heavy weather of describing the evolution of his mental processes. Later he was to complain that the official historical division had failed because it did not issue progressive directives to the Army Archives Office which was working on the history of the First World War, saying: The problems of modern warfare, problems arising from air and armoured operations, had deliberately been neglected, the historians not being equal to the task’. Though a trifle unfair (the historians quite reasonably tackled the war in chronological order) his remark that the history ‘had not even reached the tank battle of Cambrai by the time the Second World War broke out’ was only too true. Nor, for that matter, had the British Official History got that far by 1939. So Guderian was compelled to look elsewhere for precedents from a few German tank survivors, particularly from Leutnant Ernst Volkheim (the most experienced of German tank survivors), from a couple of German handbooks, but also from the French and, above all, the British practitioners.
In 1923 the British became unique in establishing a Tank Corps that was detached from the Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery; a separation that was the result of the expression of an independent line of thought by those among them who had built the tank force into a match-winning combination at the end of 1918 and who had devised schemes which bordered upon the suggestion that special Tank Armies ought to be created. The brain behind these ideas was Fuller’s, whose talents for analysis, organisation and penetrating expression had marked him out as a staff officer and a reforming military genius of the very first water. Immediately after the war Fuller had written highly perceptive articles expounding the future of armoured mechanised warfare dominated by the tank and by aircraft. At the same time a good book about the Tank Corps by the brothers Williams Ellis, had been published in 1919. Also at that time Captain Basil Liddell Hart was beginning to make a name for himself by his early lectures and writings on infantry tactical systems which were very similar to those already in use in the German Army. But it was to Fuller who Liddell Hart turned for guidance on tanks and to Fuller who Guderian looked for initial guidance with regard to the development of armoured warfare – notwithstanding the implication in a paragraph on page 20 of Panzer Leader that Liddell Hart provided the principal inspiration. In fact, that paragraph appears only in the English editions of Panzer Leader, for which Liddell Hart wrote the foreword, and not in the original German language Erinnerungen eines Soldaten. Moreover there is no mention of works by Liddell Hart in the bibliography of Guderian’s Achtung! Panzer! (though he is mentioned in company with Fuller, Martel and de Gaulle in the text of that book) whereas books by Fuller, Martel and de Gaulle do appear in that book’s bibliography. Guderian’s elder son, in fact, writes: ‘As far as I know it was Fuller who made the most suggestions. Once before the war my father visited him. Fuller was almost certainly more competent as an active officer than Captain B.H. Liddell Hart … At any rate my father often spoke of him [Fuller] while I cannot remember other names being mentioned at that time [before 1939] … The greater emphasis upon Liddell Hart seems to have developed through contacts after the war.’
In the simplest terms Fuller envisaged armoured mechanised armies which had the in
herent capability, supported by aircraft and artillery, to breach a fortified line and then achieve deep penetration of enemy territory, mopping up the forward artillery zones, knocking out headquarters, capturing supply dumps, cutting communications and generally causing such damage and confusion amid the least well defended parts of the enemy hinterland that a total collapse of morale, command and control and resistance could be expected. To sustain operations of this kind Fuller demanded heavy tanks for breaching the line in what, by 1918, was a conventional assault with infantry and artillery. This would be simultaneous with exploitation in depth by lighter and faster tanks that had a speed of 20 mph and a circuit action of 150 to 200 miles. They would be supported by mobile artillery, tractor-drawn infantry and cavalry ‘if [the latter] have sufficient endurance to keep up a pursuit of at least 20 miles per day for a period of 5 to 7 days’. For practical experiments the British possessed, in addition to the clumsy machines with which they had fought in the war, a new family of much more agile heavy, medium and light tanks along with armoured cars, cross-country lorries and troop transports and self-propelled artillery. Mainly these machines existed only in prototype but by the middle 1920s there was a growing number of the Vickers Medium tank – a fighting vehicle which, though so thin of skin as to be nearly pervious to ordinary bullets, achieved new standards in speed and reliability (without saying too much for the latter) along with an improved layout of the fighting compartment which allowed the crew to make best use of their single 47mm quick-firing gun, in its rotating turret, and of several machine-guns. With this sort of equipment, such as no other nation had either in sufficient quantity or quality until the 1930s, the British were able to establish a lead both in theory and practice. In the summer of 1927 they deployed a completely motorised force of all arms on Salisbury Plain and used it to such effect that a conventional horse and foot force was hopelessly outmanoeuvred – despite the motorised force being inferior in number, bereft of an established technique and almost totally devoid of wireless for command and control. The other nations of the world intently watched and eagerly began to emulate what they had seen.
Guderian: Panzer General Page 7