Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - BEGINNINGS

  CHAPTER TWO - MATRICES

  CHAPTER THREE - TRIUMPH

  CHAPTER FOUR - CLIMAX

  CHAPTER FIVE - DEATH RIDE

  CHAPTER SIX - ENDGAME

  CHAPTER SEVEN - FINALE

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX

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  Copyright © 2009 Dennis Showalter

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Showalter, Dennis E.

  Hitler’s Panzers : the lightning attacks that revolutionized warfare / Dennis Showalter.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15168-6

  1. Germany. Heer—Armored troops—History—20th century. 2. Tanks (Military science)—

  Germany-—History—20th century. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Tank warfare. 4. World War,

  1939-1945—Germany. 5. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945—Military leadership. 6. Lightning war—

  Germany—History—20th century. 7. Military art and science—Germany—History—20th century.

  I. Title.

  D757.54.S56 2009

  940.54’1343—dc22

  2009017551

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  GERMAN CAMPAIGN IN THE WEST, 1940

  GERMAN INVASION OF SOVIET UNION, 1941-1942

  CAMPAIGNS IN NORTH AFRICA

  EASTERN FRONT, 1943-1944

  THE EASTERN FRONT, 1944-1945

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GERMAN ARMY of World War II continues to attract reader attention. Academic studies and military analyses, general-reader narratives and coffee-table picture books, all jostle for places in book stores and on bookshelves. Central to history and myth alike are the armored forces: the tanks and assault guns, the motorized infantry, and the supporting arms of the panzer and panzer grenadier divisions of the army and the Waffen SS. They were the heart of the army’s fighting power and the core of its identity from the first days of victory in 1939 until the Third Reich’s downfall in 1945.

  The panzers have inspired a correspondingly rich literature. Works on doctrine, tactics, and equipment stand alongside studies of the panzers’ place in the German way of war and the history of war in the twentieth century. In darker contexts scholars present the panzers’ contributions to an ethic of fear and force that permeated Germany and its army before the rise of National Socialism transformed apocalyptic ideology into genocidal reality.

  General, comprehensive discussions of Hitler’s panzers have been understandably lacking. This book puts panzers at the center of three interfacing narratives. It presents the panzers’ contributions to the development of mechanized war and armor technology, their influence on the role of the army in German culture and society, and their role in the Third Reich’s conduct of World War II—militarily and morally.

  The massive body of printed and archival sources available on each of these subjects can provide a multiple-entry footnote for every paragraph and for many individual sentences. I have appealed to reader-friendliness, eschewing a reference apparatus in favor of occasionally naming someone whose contribution to a particular issue demands acknowledgment. For simplicity’s sake I have taken several other shortcuts as well. German ranks are given in American equivalents—including the mouth-filling titles of the Waffen SS. I reduce to a minimum the italicization of already complex German vehicle and weapons designations. All units of all armies follow the same terminology unless otherwise noted. Thus British or French armored units titled squadrons and regiments usually become companies and battalions.

  The consistent use of “approximately” and “about” when giving vehicle strengths in particular reflects the fact that those numbers often varied widely, literally from day to day, given the effectiveness of the workshops and recovery crews. Exact statistics are correspondingly likely to mislead—which was not infrequently the intention of compilers seeking to increase their inventory by exaggerating shortages.

  This is a story as much as a history. It is shaped by research and by four decades’ worth of memories and anecdotes acquired from listening to the men who were there on both sides. It addresses deeds and behaviors that defy conventional explanations, positive and negative. In the kaleidoscope that was the Third Reich, the same institutions, the same persons, the same man, could show a near-random set of faces. Which were masks and which realities? Throughout this project I have sought counsel from another soldier, who asks that when his story is told, “nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.” In telling the tale of Hitler’s panzers, there are worse mentors than Othello.

  Authors’ acknowledgments are tending to match those of the Academy Awards in length and fulsomeness. Without intending to slight anyone, I thank the students of Colorado College, who after over forty years keep me having too much fun to retire. And I thank especially the office staff of the history department: Sandy Papuga and Joanna Popiel. The book is dedicated to them, for more reasons than they know.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  SEPTEMBER 15, 1916, began as a routine day for the German infantrymen in the forward trenches around Flers on the Somme—as routine as any day was likely to be after two and a half months of vicious, close-gripped fighting that bled divisions white and reduced battalions to the strength of companies. True, an occasional rumble of engines had been audible across the line. But the British had more trucks than the Kaiser’s army, and were more willing to risk them to bring up ammunition and carry back wounded. True, there had been occasional gossip of something new up Tommy’s sleeve: of armored “land cruisers” impervious to anything less than a six-inch shell. But rumors—Scheisshausparolen in Landser speak—were endemic on the Western Front. Then “a forest of guns opened up in a ceaseless, rolling thunder, the few remaining survivors . . . fight on until the British flood overwhelms them, consumes them, and passes on. . . . An extraordinary number of men. And there, between them, spewing death, unear
thly monsters: the first British tanks.”

  I

  IMPROVISED AND POORLY coordinated, the British attack soon collapsed in the usual welter of blood and confusion. But for the first time on the Western Front, certainly the first time on the Somme, the heaviest losses were suffered by the defenders. Reactions varied widely. Some men panicked; others fought to a finish. But the 14th Bavarian Infantry, for example, tallied more than 1,600 casualties. Almost half were “missing,” and most of them were prisoners. That was an unheard-of ratio in an army that still prided itself on its fighting spirit. But the 14th was one of the regiments hit on the head by the tanks.

  Shock rolled uphill. “The enemy,” one staff officer recorded, “employed new engines of war, as cruel as effective. . . . It is necessary to take whatever methods are possible to counteract them.” From the Allied perspective, the impact of tanks on the Great War is generally recognized. The cottage industry among scholars of the British learning curve, with descriptions of proto-mechanized war pitted against accounts of a semi-mobile final offensive based on combined arms and improved communications, recognizes the centrality of armor for both interpretations. French accounts are structured by Marshal Philippe Petain’s judgment that, in the wake of the frontline mutinies of 1917, it was necessary to wait for “the Americans and the tanks.” Certainly it was the tanks, the light Renault FT-17s, that carried the exhausted French infantry forward in the months before the armistice. Erich Ludendorff, a general in a position to know, declared after the war that Germany had been defeated not by Marshal Foch but by “General Tank.”

  In those contexts it is easy to overlook the salient fact that the German army was quick and effective in developing antitank techniques. This was facilitated by the moonscape terrain of the Western Front, the mechanical unreliability of early armored vehicles, and such technical grotesqueries as the French seeking to increase the range of their early tanks by installing extra fuel tanks on their roofs, which virtually guaranteed the prompt incineration of the crew unless they were quick to abandon the vehicle. Even at Flers the Germans had taken on tanks like any other targets: aiming for openings in the armor, throwing grenades, using field guns over open sights. German intelligence thoroughly interrogated one captured tanker and translated a diary lost by another. Inside of a week, Berlin had a general description of the new weapons, accompanied by a rough but reasonably accurate sketch.

  One of the most effective antitank measures was natural. Tanks drew fire from everywhere, fire sufficiently intense to strip away any infantry in their vicinity. A tank by itself was vulnerable. Therefore, the German tactic was to throw everything available at the tanks and keep calm if they kept coming. Proactive countermeasures began with inoculating the infantry against “tank fright” by using knocked-out vehicles to demonstrate their various vulnerabilities. An early frontline improvisation was the geballte Ladung: the heads of a half dozen stick grenades tied around a complete “potato-masher” and thrown into one of a tank’s many openings—or, more basic, the same half dozen grenades shoved into a sandbag and the fuse of one of them pulled. More effective and less immediately risky was the K-round. This was simply a bullet with a tungsten carbide core instead of the soft alloys commonly used in small arms rounds. Originally developed to punch holes in metal plates protecting enemy machine-gun and sniper positions, it was employed to even better effect by the ubiquitous German machine guns against the armor of the early tanks. K-rounds were less likely to disable the vehicle, mostly causing casualties and confusion among the crew, but the end effect was similar.

  As improved armor limited the K-round’s effect, German designers came up with a 13mm version. Initially it was used in a specially designed single-shot rifle, the remote ancestor of today’s big-caliber sniper rifles but without any of their recoil-absorbing features. The weapon’s fierce recoil made it inaccurate and unpopular; even a strong user risked a broken collarbone or worse. More promising was the TuF (tank and antiaircraft) machine gun using the same round. None of the ten thousand TuFs originally projected were ready for service by November 11—but the concept and the bullet became the basis for John Browning’s .50-caliber machine gun, whose near-century of service makes it among the most long-lived modern weapons.

  When something heavier was desirable, the German counterpart of the Stokes mortar was a much larger piece, mounted on wheels, capable of modification for direct fire and, with a ten-pound shell, lethal against any tank. The German army had also begun forming batteries of “infantry guns” even before the tanks appeared. These were usually mountain guns or modified field pieces of around three-inch caliber. Intended to support infantry attacks by direct fire, they could stop tank attacks just as well. From the beginning, ordinary field pieces with ordinary shells also proved able to knock out tanks at a range of two miles.

  In an emergency the large number of 77mm field pieces mounted on trucks for antiaircraft work could become improvised antitank guns. These proved particularly useful at Cambrai in November 1917, when more than a hundred tanks were part of the spoils of the counterattack that wiped out most of the initial British gains. They did so well, indeed, that the crews had to be officially reminded that their primary duty was shooting down airplanes. As supplements, a number of ordinary field guns were mounted on trucks in the fashion of the portees used in a later war by the British in North Africa.

  If survival was not sufficient incentive, rewards and honor were invoked. One Bavarian battery was awarded 500 marks for knocking out a tank near Flers. British reports and gossip praised an officer who, working a lone gun at Flesquieres during the Cambrai battle, either by himself or with a scratch crew, was supposed to have disabled anywhere from five to sixteen tanks before he was killed. The Nazis transformed the hero into a noncommissioned officer, and gave him a name and at least one statue. The legend’s less Homeric roots seem to have involved a half dozen tanks following each other over the crest of a small hill and being taken out one at a time by a German field battery. The story of “the gunner of Flesquieres” nevertheless indicates the enduring strength of the tank mystique in German military lore.

  Other purpose-designed antitank weapons were ready to come on line when the war ended: short-barreled, low-velocity 37mm guns, an automatic 20mm cannon that the Swiss developed into the World War II Oerlikon. The effect of this new hardware on the projected large-scale use of a new generation of tanks in the various Allied plans for 1919 must remain speculative. What it highlights is the continued German commitment to tank defense even in the war’s final months.

  That commitment is highlighted from a different perspective when considering the first German tank. It was not until October 1916 that the Prussian War Ministry summoned the first meeting of the A7V Committee. The group took its name from the sponsoring agency, the Seventh Section of the General War Department, and eventually bestowed it on the resulting vehicle. The members were mostly from the motor transport service rather than the combat arms, and their mission was technical: develop a tracked armored fighting vehicle in the shortest possible time. They depended heavily on designers and engineers loaned to the project by Germany’s major auto companies. Not surprisingly, when the first contracts for components were placed in November, no fewer than seven firms shared the pie.

  A prototype was built in January; a working model was demonstrated to the General Staff in May. It is a clear front-runner for the title of “ugliest tank ever built” and a strong contender in the “most dysfunctional” category. The A7V was essentially a rectangular armored box roughly superimposed on a tractor chassis. It mounted a 57mm cannon in its front face and a half dozen machine guns around the hull. It weighed 33 tons, and required a crew of no fewer than eighteen men. Its under-slung tracks and low ground clearance left it almost no capacity to negotiate obstacles or cross broken terrain: the normal environment of the Western Front. An improved A7V and a lighter tank, resembling the British Whippet and based on the chassis of the Daimler automobile, were still i
n prototype states when the war ended. A projected 150-ton monster remained—fortunately—on the drawing boards.

  Shortages of raw material and an increasingly dysfunctional war production organization restricted A7V production to fewer than three dozen. When finally constituted, the embryonic German armored force deployed no more than forty tanks at full strength, and more than half of those were British models salvaged and repaired. Material shortcomings were, however, the least of the problems facing Germany’s first tankers. By most accounts the Germans had the best of the first tank-versus-tank encounter at Villiers Bretonneaux on April 24, 1918. British tankers, at least, were impressed, with their commanding general describing the threat as “formidable” and warning that there was no guarantee the Germans would continue to use their tanks in small numbers.

  In fact, the German army made no serious use of armor in either the spring offensive or the fighting retreat that began in August and continued until the armistice. In the ten or twelve times tanks appeared under German colors their numbers were too small—usually around five vehicles—to attract more than local attention. The crews, it is worth mentioning, were not the thrown-together body of men often described in British-oriented accounts. They did come from a number of arms and services, but all were volunteers—high-morale soldiers for a high- risk mission: a legacy that would endure. Europe’s most highly industrialized nation nevertheless fought for its survival with the least effective mechanized war instruments of the major combatants.

  In public Erich Ludendorff loftily declared that the German high command had decided not to fight a “war of material.” His memoirs are more self-critical: “Perhaps I should have put on more pressure: perhaps then we would have had a few more tanks for the decisive battles of 1918. But I don’t know what other necessary war material we should have had to cut short.” For any weapon, however, a doctrine is at least as important as numbers. In contrast to both the British and the French, the German army demonstrated neither institutional nor individual capacity for thinking about mechanized war beyond the most immediate, elementary contexts.