Panzer Leader
Page 6
Apart from the Light Divisions four Motorised Infantry Divisions were also formed; these were normal Infantry Divisions which were fully motorised and which required a very considerable complement of M.T. Thus the XIV Army Corps for the Motorised Infantry Divisions, and the XV Army Corps for the Light Divisions came into existence, while the Armoured Troops Command became the XVI Army Corps with under it the three Panzer Divisions. Finally, these three corps were all subordinated to Group Command 4 with headquarters at Leipzig and commanded by General von Brauchitsch, who became responsible for all further training and development.
The various arms of the service each had its own particular colour, which was worn on the shoulder tabs, etc. Up to this time the colour for all panzer troops had been pink, and pink remained the colour for the Panzer Regiments and the Anti-tank Battalions. The Armoured Reconnaissance Battalions were changed, first to yellow and then to brown: the Rifle Regiments and the Motor-Cycle Riflemen in the Panzer Divisions received the colour green: the Cavalry Rifle Regiments in the Light Divisions wore the cavalry yellow: while the Motorised Infantry Regiments continued to wear the infantry white. And of course all this led to much argument with the Weapon Inspectorates of the infantry and of the cavalry.
I deeply regretted this splitting up of our motorised and armoured strength but there was nothing I could do at the time to prevent events following this course. The damage then done could only be partially put to rights later on.
Our limited resources in the sphere of motorisation were further squandered owing to various organisational errors committed by other arms of the service. For example, the Chief of the General Army Office, General Fromm, ordered that the 14th (anti-tank) Company of all Infantry Regiments be motorised. When I maintained that these companies, since they would be working with foot soldiers, would do better to remain horse-drawn, he replied ‘The infantry’s got to have a few cars too.’ My request that, instead of the 14th Companies, the Heavy Artillery Battalions be motorised was turned down. The heavy guns remained horse-drawn, with unfortunate results during the war, particularly in Russia.
The development of tracked vehicles for the tank supporting arms never went as fast as we wished. It was clear that the effectiveness of the tanks would gain in proportion to the ability of the infantry, artillery and other divisional arms to follow them in an advance across country. We wanted lightly armoured half-tracks for the riflemen, combat engineers and medical services, armoured self-propelled guns for the artillery and the anti-tank battalions, and various types of tank for the reconnaissance and signals battalions. The equipment of the divisions with these vehicles was never fully completed. Despite all increases in productivity the limited facilities of German industry never succeeded in catching up with the vastly expanded requirements of the motorised Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS formations and of industry itself. Despite all the warnings of the specialists, the supreme command never imposed limitations to the greed of certain politically powerful individuals. I will have occasion to refer to this matter again when I deal with military events in 1941.
Meanwhile I was with my division in Würzburg and only indirectly concerned with these problems. My work consisted of the setting-up and training of my new formation whose component units came from such diverse military backgrounds. The winter of 1935-36 passed uneventfully. I was accepted in a friendly fashion by the old Würzburg garrison, under General Brandt, and also by the inhabitants of the town and of the surrounding countryside. I managed to procure a small house in the Boelckestrasse with a wonderful view over the town stretched out below in the valley of the Main: we could also see from our windows the Marienfeste and the Käppele, one of the pearls of the baroque period.
In the spring of 1936 we were surprised by Hitler’s decision to re-occupy the Rhineland. Since the occupation was intended simply as a military gesture, no tank troops were to be employed. It is true that my division was alerted and transferred to the troop training area at Münsingen, but without its Tank Brigade, which remained behind at its normal station in order to avoid unnecessary increase of tension. After a few weeks we all returned to our peace-time station.
On the 1st of August of that year I was promoted Major-General.
The only panzer unit to take part in that year’s autumn manœuvres was the 4th Panzer Regiment from Schweinfurt. The employment of this single regiment within the framework of an infantry division failed to give any clear idea of our combat capabilities.
One of the guests at these manœuvres was Colonel-General von Seeckt, recently returned from the Far East; I had the honour to tell him about this new armoured force, which was something previously quite unknown to him. Also I was able to speak to the representatives of the Press, who had been invited, concerning the organisation and combat methods of this new arm of the service.
The year 1937 passed peacefully. We were busily engaged in a training programme which culminated in manœuvres at divisional strength in the troop training area Grafenwöhr. Under the instructions of General Lutz I prepared a book during the winter of 1936-37 which was published with the title Achtung! Panzer!; it told the story of the development of armoured forces and outlined our basic ideas as to how the German armoured force should be built up. We hoped by this book to interest a wider public in our plans than could be reached through normal Service channels. In addition I took some trouble to see that our point of view was made clear through the specialist military Press and thus to counteract the arguments of the very vocal opposition. Shortly afterwards an article expressing our views appeared in the journal of the National Union of German Officers, dated the 15th of October, 1937. I should like to quote this, since it gives a good picture of our efforts and of the differences of opinion that were rife at the time.
Tank Attack by Fire and Movement
‘The layman, when thinking of a tank attack, tends to envisage the steel monsters of Cambrai and Amiens as pictured in the war reports of that period. He thinks of vast wire entanglements being crushed like so much straw; he remembers how the tanks crashed through dug-outs, smashing machine-guns to splinters beneath their weight; he recalls the terror that they inspired as they ploughed through the battlefield, flames darting from their exhaust pipes, and how this “tank terror” was described as the cause of our collapse on the 8th of August, 1918. Such steam-roller tactics are one—though not the most important—of the things tanks can do; but the events of the last war have so impressed themselves on the minds of many critics, that they have built up an entirely fanciful idea of a tank attack in which vast numbers of tanks massed together roll steadily forward to crush the enemy beneath their tracks (thus providing a magnificent target for artillery and anti-tank fire) whenever and wherever ordered by the high command, regardless of the nature of the ground. The fire-power of the tanks is under-estimated: the tank is thought to be both blind and deaf: it is denied the ability to hold ground that it has captured. On the other hand every advantage is ascribed to anti-tank defence: it is alleged that the defence will no longer be susceptible to surprise by tanks; anti-tank guns and artillery always find their mark regardless of their own casualties, of smoke, fog, trees or other obstacles and ground contours; the defence, too, is always located exactly where the tanks are going to attack; with their powerful binoculars they can easily see through smoke screens and darkness, and despite their steel helmets they can hear every word that is said.
‘As a result of this picture it follows that tank attacks have no future. Should tanks therefore be scrapped and—as one critic has suggested—the tank period be simply by-passed? If this were done all our worries about new tactics for old arms of the service could be scrapped at the same time and we could settle down comfortably once again to positional warfare as practised in 1914-15. Only it is not very sensible to leap into the dark if you have no idea where you are going to land. It follows that until our critics can produce some new and better method of making a successful land attack other than self-massacre, we shall continue to ma
intain our belief that tanks—properly employed, needless to say —are today the best means available for a land attack. But in order to make it easier to judge the prospects of tank attacks, here are some of the significant characteristics of tanks today.
Armour Plating
‘All tanks intended for serious action are at least sufficiently armoured to be impervious to armour-piercing bullets fired from machine-guns. For fighting against anti-tank weapons and enemy tanks, such protection is insufficient; therefore the tanks so far ordered by the so-called victorious nations of the World War are considerably more strongly armoured. For example, to penetrate the shell of the French Char 2C a gun of at least 75 mm. calibre is required. If an army can in the first wave commit to the attack tanks which are invulnerable to the mass of the enemy’s defensive weapons, then those tanks will inevitably over-come this their most dangerous adversary: and this must lead to the destruction of the enemy’s infantry and engineers, since the latter, being shot at by tanks and with their defensive weapons eliminated, can easily be mopped up even by light tanks. However, should the defence succeed in producing a defensive weapon which can penetrate the armour of all the attacker’s available tanks, and should he manage to deploy such weapons at the right time and in the decisive place, then the tanks will have to pay heavily for their successes or may even fail altogether if the defence is sufficiently concentrated and sufficiently deep. The struggle for mastery between missile and armour has been going on for thousands of years, and panzer troops have to reckon with it even as do fortress troops, sailors and, recently, airmen. The fact that such a struggle exists, with results that continually vary, is no reason for denigrating tanks as a land weapon: for if we do, we shall be reduced to sending men into the attack with no more protection than the woollen uniforms of the World War which, even then, were regarded as insufficient.
Movement
‘It has been said, “only movement brings victory.”1 We agree with this proposition and wish to employ the technical means of our time to prove its truth. Movement serves to bring the troops in contact with the enemy: for this purpose one can use the legs of men or of horses, the railways or—recently—the automobile and the aeroplane engine. Once contact with the enemy has been made, movement is generally paralysed by hostile fire. In order to permit the relaxation of this paralysis, the enemy must either be destroyed or made inoperative or driven from his positions. This can be done by employing fire-power so superior that his powers of resistance collapse. Fire-power from fixed positions has an effective range corresponding exactly to the observed range of the mass of the weapons employed. That is as far as the infantry can make use of its covering fire; when that point is reached the heavy weapons and the artillery must change their position in order to permit a further advance under cover of their fire-power. Vast numbers of weapons and an even vaster quantity of ammunition are needed to fight this sort of battle. The preparations for an attack of this sort require considerable time and are difficult to conceal. Surprise, that important element of success, is very hard to achieve. And even if the original attack does catch the enemy unawares, the moment it is launched the attacking force will have shown its hand, and the reserves of the defence will converge on the point of attack and block it; since reserve forces will now be motorised, the building up of new defensive fronts is easier than it used to be; the chances of an offensive based on the timetable of artillery and infantry co-operation are, as a result, even slighter today than they were in the last war.
‘Everything is therefore dependent on this: to be able to move faster than has hitherto been done: to keep moving despite the enemy’s defensive fire and thus to make it harder for him to build up fresh defensive positions: and finally to carry the attack deep into the enemy’s defences. The proponents of tank warfare believe that, in favourable circumstances, they possess the means for achieving this; the sceptics, on the other hand, say that since the element of surprise can no longer be produced as in 1918 “conditions for a successful tank attack can no longer be anticipated.”2 But is it true that a tank attack can no longer take the enemy by surprise? How then does it happen that surprises have been achieved in warfare regardless of whether new or old methods were employed to bring them about? In 1916 General von Kuhl proposed to the High Command that in order to make a break-through primary importance must be attached to the element of surprise in launching the attack;3 and yet at that time he had no new methods or weapons at his disposal. As a result of surprise achieved, the March Offensive of 1918 was outstandingly successful, despite the fact that no new types of weapons were employed. If, in addition to the normal methods of achieving surprise, new weapons are also employed, then the effects of the surprise will be greatly increased; but the new weapons are not a prerequisite to those effects. We believe that by attacking with tanks we can achieve a higher rate of movement than has been hitherto obtainable, and —what is perhaps even more important—that we can keep moving once a break-through has been made. We believe that movement can be kept up if certain conditions, on which the success of a tank attack today depend, exist: these include among others, concentration of force in suitable terrain, gaps in the enemy’s defence, and an inferior enemy tank force. When we are blamed because we cannot successfully attack in all and any conditions, because we cannot storm fortifications with tanks armed only with machine-guns, then we can only say that we are sorry and point out that other arms of the service possess in many respects even less attacking power than we do. We do not claim to be omnipotent.
‘It has been maintained that a weapon only achieves its maximum effectiveness while it is new and before it need fear defensive countermeasures.4 Pity the artillery! it is already hundreds of years old. Pity the air force! Age is creeping up on it in the form of anti-aircraft. We believe that the effectiveness of any weapon is a relative quality, depending on the effectiveness of the counter weapons employed against it. If tanks run into a superior enemy—whether in the form of hostile tanks or of anti-tank weapons—they will be beaten; their effectiveness will be reduced; if conditions are reversed, then they will achieve startling success. Every weapon is dependent not only on the strength of the opposition but also on its own willingness to make immediate, maximum use of the latest technical developments and thus to remain at the summit of its period. From this point of view the tank will not admit that it has been surpassed by any other weapon. It has been said: “The shells of the defensive artillery travel faster than the tanks that are attacking that artillery.”5 Nobody, up to now, has questioned this fact. Yet as long ago as 1917 and 1918 hundreds of tanks could be moved up to a concentration area immediately behind the front lines of the infantry: could penetrate in their swarms the enemy’s line of defensive fire: could clear a way for dozens of infantry and even of cavalry divisions: and what is more could do all this without any preliminary artillery bombardment, that is to say in the teeth of an intact enemy artillery. It is only in unusually unfavourable conditions that the hostile artillery can have any serious effect on the movement of tanks: and once the tanks have succeeded in breaking through to the gun lines, the batteries will soon fall silent and will thus be no longer capable even of hurting the following infantry. Even the immutable artillery tactics of having guns registered on all localities of possible danger proved a failure in the last war. The defensive fire will throw up columns of earth, dust, smoke and so on and this will limit the vision of the tank crews; but such limitation is not intolerable; even in peacetime we have learned how to overcome that. In fact tanks can now advance through night and fog on compass bearings.
‘In an attack that is based on a successful tank action the “architect of victory” is not the infantry but the tanks themselves, for if the tank attack fails then the whole operation is a failure, whereas if the tanks succeed, then victory follows.
Fire
‘Armour and movement are only two of the combat characteristics of the tank weapon; the third and the most important is fire-power.
‘In any event, in land battles the tank possesses the unique quality of being able to bring its fire-power to bear while actually advancing against the enemy, and it can do this even though all the defence’s guns and machine-guns have not been silenced. We do not doubt that guns fired from stationary positions are more accurate than guns fired in motion; we are well able to judge this, since we are capable of both types of engagement. However: “Only movement brings victory.” Now should a tank attack be envisaged simply as a means of steam-rolling a path through thick and deep defensive positions held by infantry and artillery fully equipped with anti-tank weapons,6 as was done during the battles of matériel of the last war? Certainly not. A man who would attempt this would be thinking purely in terms of the infantry tank, a weapon whose sole function was the closest co-operation with the infantry, a weapon adjusted to the foot-soldier’s scale of time and space values. This was a concept which we hung on to for far too long. We neither can nor wish to devote weeks or even months to reconnaissance; we have no desire to rely on an enormous expenditure of ammunition; what we do want to do is, for a short period of time, to dominate the enemy’s defence in all its depth. We are well aware that with the limited fire-power of our tanks we cannot mount a “planned artillery preparation” or achieve a “concentrated artillery bombardment”; our intention is exactly the contrary, it is to knock out our targets with single, surely aimed shells. For we have not forgotten how during the war week-long barrages by the most powerful artillery on earth failed to enable the infantry to achieve victory. We have been taught by our enemies to believe that a successful, rapid tank attack, in sufficient width and depth to penetrate all the way through the opposing defence system, can achieve more towards ensuring victory than the system of limited advances as practised in the World War. Our shells, being aimed at specific targets, will not whistle over the enemy’s heads as they did during those costly though pointless creeping barrages: rather if the attack is carried out with sufficient concentration, width and depth we shall destroy recognisable targets as they present themselves and thus drive a hole in the enemy’s defences through which our reserves can follow more speedily than was possible in 1918. We want these reserves to be available in the form of Panzer Divisions, since we no longer believe that other formations have the fighting ability, the speed and the manæuvrability necessary for full exploitation of the attack and break-through. Therefore we do not regard the tank force as “an additional means for winning battles, which on many forseeable occasions could, in co-operation with other weapons, help the infantry to advance.”7 If that were all that tanks were for, the situation would be the same now as in 1916; and if that were true then one might as well be resigned to positional warfare from the very beginning and give up all hope of quick decisions in the future. But neither the alleged superiority in armaments of our enemy in any future war, nor the increased accuracy and range of guns of all calibres, nor the technical advances made in the employment of artillery suffice to shake our beliefs. On the contrary! In the tank we see the finest weapon for the attack now available: we will not change our minds until such time as the technicians can show us something better. We will in no circumstances agree to time-wasting artillery preparation and the consequent danger of losing the element of surprise, simply because the old maxim says that “only fire can open the way to movement.”8 We believe, on the contrary, that the combination of the internal combustion engine and armour plate enable us to take our fire to the enemy without any artillery preparation, provided always that the important conditions for such an operation are fulfilled: suitable terrain, surprise and mass commitment.