Panzer Leader

by Heinz Guderian

  Although Guderian could do little to check the downslide he had done enough earlier, when in a nominally lower position, to establish his military fame for all time. With men of action, the place they fill in history is usually determined by the extent to which they have shaped history. Guderian’s achievements—his effect on the Second World War, and on warfare—put him on the top level as a soldier. Although he never enjoyed the nominal qualification of independent command, he applied the idea of the independent use of armoured forces so fully and decisively that he brought about victories which, measured by any standard, have hardly been matched in the records of warfare.

  It is clear, too, that he possessed most of the qualities that distinguished the ‘Great Captains’ of history—coup d’æil, a blend of acute observation with swift-sure intuition; the ability to create surprise and throw the opponent off balance; the speed of thought and action that allows the opponent no chance of recovery; the combination of strategic and tactical sense; the power to win the devotion of troops, and get the utmost out of them. It is not so clear, because of differing evidence, whether he had another of the classic qualities: a sense of what is possible. But Guderian had an amazing knack of making ‘the impossible’ possible.

  Beyond these qualities Guderian had creative imagination—the basic characteristic of genius, in the military sphere as well as in others. Most of the recognised masters of the art of war have been content to use the familiar tools and technique of their time. Only a few set out to provide themselves with new means and methods. Developments in weapons have usually been due to some ‘outside’ inventor, often a civilian. Developments in tactics have usually been due to some original military thinker and his gradually spreading influence on progressive-minded officers of the rising generation. Innovators have rarely had the chance to put into practice themselves the theories they have expounded. Guderian, however, was able to gain that opportunity. And as he coupled creative imagination with dynamic energy he was able to exploit the opportunity—with revolutionary results.

  1. BACKGROUND AND YOUTH

  I first saw the light of day at Kulm on the Vistula, one Sunday morning, the 17th of June, 1888. My father, Friedrich Guderian, was at that time Senior Lieutenant in the 2nd Pomeranian Jaeger Battalion: he had been born on the 3rd of August, 1858, at Gross-Klonia in the district of Tuchel. My mother, née Clara Kirchhoff, was born on the 26th of February, 1865, at Niemczyk in the district of Kulm. Both my grandfathers were landed gentry and, for so far back as I can trace my family, all my ancestors were either landowners or lawyers in the Warthegau or in East or West Prussia. My father was the only regular army officer to whom I was at all closely related.

  On the 2nd of October, 1890, my brother Fritz was born.

  In 1891 my father’s military duties took him to Colmar, in Alsace, and from the age of six, until his transfer to Saint-Avold in Lorraine in 1900, I attended school there. Saint-Avold, however, is too small to boast a high school of its own, so my parents had to send us away to boarding school. My father’s limited means, and the expressed wishes of both his sons to become officers, made him choose a cadet school for our further education. So my brother and I were sent to the Karlsruhe cadet school in Baden, on April 1st, 1901, where 1 remained until the 1st of April, 1903, on which date I was transferred to the chief cadet school at Gross-Lichterfelde, near Berlin, my brother following me thither two years later. In February of 1907 I took my final examinations, the Reifeprüfung. When I remember my instructors and teachers from these formative years it is with emotions of deep gratitude and respect. Our education in the cadet corps was of course one of military austerity and simplicity. But it was founded on kindness and justice. Our course of studies was based on that of the up-to-date civilian schools, the Realgymnasium, the main emphasis being on modern languages, mathematics and history. This provided a good preparation for life, and the standards reached by the cadets were in no way inferior to those of similar civilian institutions.

  In February 1907 I was sent, as ensign-cadet, Fähnrich, to the 10th Hanoverian Jaeger Battalion at Bitche in Lorraine, which my father commanded until December 1908. This was a stroke of good fortune, since I could now once again enjoy the pleasures of living in my parents’ home after my six years’ absence at the cadet schools. After attending the War School at Metz from April to December 1907 I was commissioned Second Lieutenant on the 27th of January, 1908, with seniority as of the 22nd of June, 1906. From then, until the beginning of the First World War, I lived the happy life of a junior officer. On October 1st, 1909, our Jaeger Battalion was sent to its home district, the province of Hanover, and was employed on garrison duty at Goslar in the Harz mountains. It was there that I became engaged to Margarete Goerne, my dear wife. We were married on October 1st, 1913, and she has been a true helpmate to me ever since, sharing with me all the pleasures and the pains of a long, eventful, and by no means always easy military career.

  Our newly found happiness was rudely interrupted by the outbreak of war on August the 2nd, 1914, and during the next four years it was only very occasionally that I managed to spend a short leave with my wife and our little family. On August 23rd, 1914, God gave us a son, Heinz Günter, and on the 17th of September, 1918, a second son, Kurt.

  My dear father died at the beginning of the war as the result of a serious operation that he had had to undergo the previous May and that had necessitated his leaving the service as physically unfit. With his death I lost a man whom I regarded as a model of soldierly and human virtue. My mother survived him for over sixteen years. She departed this life in March of 1931 after a life filled with kindness and love.

  When the armistice of 1918 was signed I participated in frontier defence in the East, first in Silesia and later in the Baltic States. At the end of this book will be found a detailed list of my various military appointments together with relevant facts concerning my personal life. From this it can be seen that my career up to 1922 alternated between regimental and staff duties, that I was by training an infantry man, but that an attachment to the 3rd Telegraph Battalion at Koblenz and an assignment involving work with radio during the early months of the First World War enabled me to acquire a certain knowledge of signal matters which was to stand me in good stead in the years to come when I was to be engaged in building up a new arm of the service.

  2. THE CREATION OF THE GERMAN ARMOURED FORCE

  My main activity during the period between the two wars was connected with the creation of a German armoured force. Although originally a Jaeger (light infantry) officer and without any technical training, I was destined to find myself deeply involved in the problem of motorisation.

  After returning from the Baltic in the autumn of 1919, I was for a short time employed with the 10th Reichswehr Brigade at Hanover. In January of 1920 I was given command of a company in my old Jaeger Battalion at Goslar. I had no thought at that time of returning to General Staff work, on which I had been engaged until January 1920; in the first place, my departure from the Baltic had been in circumstances not of the happiest, and, in the second, the small size of the 100,000-man army made any rapid advancement extremely unlikely. I was therefore all the more surprised when, in the autumn of 1921, my deeply respected regimental commander, Colonel von Amsberg, asked me if 1 felt any inclination to go back to General Staff duty. I replied that I did, but for a long time I heard nothing more on the subject. It was not until January 1922 that Lieutenant-Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel telephoned me from the Truppenamt (the General Staff of the Army) of the Defence Ministry (RWM) in Berlin to ask why I had not yet reported to Munich. I learned from him that I was to be transferred to the Inspectorate of Transport Troops, Motorised Transport Department, since the Inspector, General von Tschischwitz, had requested the assignment of a General Staff officer to his staff. My transfer was to become effective on April 1st, but it was considered advisable for me to acquire some practical knowledge of regimental duty with transport troops before taking up my staff appointm
ent, and I was therefore to be attached at once to the 7th (Bavarian) Motorised Transport Battalion, Munich; I was to leave immediately.

  Delighted with my new job, I set off and reported in Munich to the battalion commander, Major Lutz. In the years to come I was to work closely with this officer, for whom I was to have great respect and who was always most helpful and kind in his attitude towards me. I was stationed in Munich and assigned to the 1st Company, which was at that time commanded by Wimmer, an ex-air force officer who was later to fly again. Major Lutz explained to me on arrival that I was eventually to work at the Ministry in connection with the organisation and employment of motorised transport troops. My activities in Munich were to be primarily a preparation for this assignment. Major Lutz and Captain Wimmer did all they could to teach me something about their branch of the service, and I learned a great deal.

  On April 1st, 1922, I reported to General von Tschischwitz in Berlin, very keen to receive his instructions concerning my new General Staff duties. He explained that he had originally intended to assign me the employment of motorised transport troops as my field of work. But meanwhile his Chief of Staff, Major Petter, had ordered otherwise: I was to be engaged on the problems of M.T. workshops, fuel depots, constructional work, and technical officials, my duties ultimately to include also road and other communication facilities. I was astonished by this and I informed the general that I was in no way prepared for such primarily technical work and that I did not believe that I had sufficient specialist knowledge of these subjects for employment at the Ministry. General von Tschischwitz replied that he had originally wished to employ me along the lines of which Major Lutz had spoken to me. His Chief of Staff, however, had produced an order of procedure originating from the Royal Prussian War Ministry, dated 1873 and of course amplified by a small pile of amendments and corrections; the Chief of Staff had pointed out that according to this document it was the responsibility of the Chief of Staff and not of the Inspector to decide on the employment of Staff Officers; the Inspector therefore regretted that he was unable to effect any alteration to his Chief of Staff’s instruction; he would, however, do his best to ensure that I participate in the studies that he had planned. I requested that I be returned to my Jaeger company: my request was refused.

  So there I was, embarked on a technical career in which I must try to find my way about. Apart from a few documents in his pending tray, my predecessor had left nothing worth mentioning behind. My sole support consisted of a number of elderly employees of the Ministry who knew their way about the files, who understood how our business was transacted and who did their best to help me. My work was certainly instructive and what I learned in that office was to be useful to me later on. However, its principal value consisted in a study undertaken by General von Tschischwitz concerning the transport of troops by motorised vehicles. As a result of this study, which had been preceded by a small practical exercise in the Harz, I became for the first time aware of the possibility of employing motorised troops, and I was thus compelled to form my own opinions on this subject. General von Tschischwitz was a highly critical superior; he noticed the slightest mistakes, and he laid great stress on accuracy. Working for him was good training.

  During the First World War there had been very many examples of the transport of troops by motorised vehicles. Such troop movements had always taken place behind a more or less static front line; they had never been used directly against the enemy in a war of movement. Germany now was undefended, and it therefore seemed improbable that any new war would start in the form of positional warfare behind fixed fronts. We must rely on mobile defence in case of war. The problem of the transport of motorised troops in mobile warfare soon raised the question of the protection of such transports. This could only be satisfactorily provided by armoured vehicles. I therefore looked for precedents from which I might learn about the experiments that had been made with armoured vehicles. This brought me in touch with Lieutenant Volckheim, who was then engaged in collating information concerning the very limited use of German armoured vehicles, and the incomparably greater employment of enemy tank forces during the war, as a staff study for our little army. He provided me with a certain amount of literature on the subject; though weak in theory it gave me something to go on. The English and French had had far greater experience in this field and had written much more about it. I got hold of their books and I learned.

  It was principally the books and articles of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave me food for thought. These far-sighted soldiers were even then trying to make of the tank something more than just an infantry support weapon. They envisaged it in relationship to the growing motorisation of our age, and thus they became the pioneers of a new type of warfare on the largest scale.

  I learned from them the concentration of armour, as employed in the battle of Cambrai. Further, it was Liddell Hart who emphasised the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army. So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Since nobody else busied himself with this material, I was soon by way of being an expert. A few small articles that I contributed to the Militär-Wochenblatt (‘The Military Weekly’) served to enhance my reputation: its editor, General von Altrock, visited me frequently and encouraged me to write more on the subject. He was a first-class soldier and was anxious that his paper should publish material dealing with contemporary problems.

  These activities also brought me the acquaintance of the Austrian, Fritz Heigl, the author of the Taschenbuch der Tanks (‘The Handbook of the Tank’). I was able to supply him with a certain amount of information concerning tactical matters, and I learned to value him as an upright German gentleman.

  During the winter of 1923-24 Lieutenant-Colonel von Brauchitsch, who was later to be Commander-in-Chief of the Army, organised manœuvres to test the possibilities of employing motorised troops in co-operation with aeroplanes: this exercise attracted the attention of the Army Training Department, and resulted in my being proposed as an instructor in tactics and military history. After passing a test, I was sent on a so-called ‘instructor’s tour of duty.’ As part of this tour I was assigned, in the autumn of 1924, to the staff of the 2nd Division at Stettin, now under General von Tschischwitz, who thus became my commanding officer for the second time.

  Before going there, however, I had been responsible, under Colonel von Natzmer, Tschischwitz’s successor as Inspector, for a whole series of exercises, both on the ground and on paper, intended to explore the possibilities of the employment of tanks, particularly for reconnaissance duties in connection with cavalry. All we had for these purposes were the ‘armoured troop carriers,’ a clumsy vehicle which the Versailles Treaty had allowed us to keep. It was provided with a four-wheel drive, but owing to its weight it was to all intents and purposes road-bound. I was satisfied with the results of my exercises, and in a closing address I expressed the hope that as a result of our efforts we were on the way to transforming our motorised units from supply troops into combat troops. My inspector, however, held a contrary opinion, and informed me bluntly: ‘To hell with combat! They’re supposed to carry flour!’ And that was that.

  So I set off for Stettin in order to instruct the officers destined for future staff work in tactics and military history. My new post entailed a great deal of work; my audiences, too, were highly critical in their attitude, so that the exercises I set them had to be very thoroughly thought out, the solutions most carefully considered, and the lectures I gave clear and thorough. So far as the military history went, I concentrated on Napoleon’s 1806 campaign, a campaign which in Germany at least had never received the attention it deserved, doubtless on accoun
t of the painful German defeat in which it culminated; as regards the command of troops in conditions of mobile warfare it is, however, a very instructive campaign. I also dealt with the history of the German and French army cavalry in the autumn of 1914. This thorough study of cavalry tactics in 1914 was to prove very useful to the development of my theories which were becoming ever increasingly preoccupied with the tactical and operational1 use of movement.

  Since I had frequent opportunities to propound my ideas in tactical exercises and war games, my immediate superior, Major Höring, became aware of them and referred to these interests of mine in his report on me. As a result of this I was, after three years as an instructor, transferred back to the War Ministry, where I was assigned to the Transport Department of the Truppenamt under Colonel Halonels Wäger and Kähne, and which at that time formed part of the Operations Department. My post had been newly created: I was to deal with the subject of troop transportation by lorry. Indeed that was then all we had at our disposal. My studies along these lines soon made plain the difficulties involved in troop movements of this sort. It is true that the French, particularly in the First World War, had achieved great successes in this field—for example at Verdun—but then their problem had been one of movement behind the cover of a more or less static front: in such conditions a division does not need to have all its horse-drawn and mechanised transport immediately available, and notably not its artillery transports. But in mobile warfare, when the whole of a division’s equipment including its artillery horses would have to be loaded on lorries, the number required would be enormous. There were many heated discussions of this problem, and more sceptics than believers in the possibility of finding a workable solution.