Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  In 1924 Seeckt ordered each unit and garrison to designate an officer responsible for acting as an advisor on tank matters, conducting classes and courses on armored warfare, and distributing instructional materials. These included copies of Volckheim’s articles, Heigl’s data on foreign tanks, and similar material issued by the Inspectorate of Motor Troops. The armor officer had another duty as well: to serve as commander of dummy tank units in the field. Seeckt ordered that representations of state-of-the-art weapons, especially tanks and aircraft, be integrated into training and maneuvers. Tanks in particular must be represented as often as possible in exercises and maneuvers, to enable practicing both antitank defense and tank-infantry cooperation in attacks. Troops were to practice both tactical motor movement and firing from the treaty-sanctioned troop transports. Reports from the annual maneuvers were to include “lessons learned” from operating with mock armored vehicles.

  By the mid 1920s the Truppenamt was moving doctrinally beyond the concept of tanks as primarily infantry-support weapons and organi zationally by considering their use in regimental strength. In November 1926, Wilhelm Heye, who the previous month had succeeded Seeckt as Chief of the Army Command, issued a memo on modern tanks. Heye wore an upturned mustache in the style of Wilhelm II, but that was his principal concession to Germany’s military past. Like Seeckt, he had spent a large part of the Great War as a staff officer on the Eastern Front. In 1919 he had been in charge of frontier security in East Prussia, and from 1923 to 1926 commanded the 1st Division in that now-isolated province. Heye argued that technical developments improving tanks’ speed and range had repeatedly shown in foreign maneuvers, especially the British, the developing potential of mechanization. Operating alone or in combined-arms formations, tanks were not only becoming capable of extended operations against flanks and rear, but of bringing decisive weight to the decisive point of battle, the Schwerpunkt.

  During the same year, Major Friedrich Rabenau prepared a detailed internal memorandum for the Operations Section. Rabenau was an established critic of the heroic vitalist approach to modern war and its emphasis on moral factors such as “character.” He went so far as to argue that future armies would depend heavily on a technically educated middle class and technically skilled workers. Now he synthesized developments in mobility with the concepts of the Schlieffen Plan. Schlieffen’s grand design, Rabenau argued, had failed less because of staff and command lapses than because its execution was beyond the physical capacities of men and animals. Comprehensive motorization would enable initial surprise, continuing envelopment, and a finishing blow on the enemy’s flanks and rear. Rabenau’s ideas, widely shared in the Operations Section, percolated upwards. A directive in late 1926 asserted that not only could tanks be separated from foot-marching infantry, they could best be used in combination with other mobile troops—or independently. In 1927, section chief General Werner von Fritsch went on record to declare that tanks, in units as large as the British brigades, would exercise a significant influence at operational as well as tactical levels.

  V

  HEINZ GUDERIAN EVENTUALLY did such a good job overstating his role in the development of Reichswehr thinking on armor that those who correct his exaggerations run a certain risk of going too far in the opposite direction. Guderian’s fondness for the first person singular should not obscure his early investigations of armored vehicles’ possibilities—or his early addressing of those possibilities in the context of Germany’s defeat in the Great War. He developed—or perhaps more accurately enhanced—a reputation for clarity and forcefulness, recommending for example that instead of the currently popular hybrids, cavalry divisions should be entirely mechanized. In 1924 his exile ended when he was transferred to the staff of an infantry division as an instructor in military history and tactics.

  Guderian’s approach was unusual even in a German army more open than most to learning from negative experiences. His classes focused on defeat—specifically, defeat caused by failure to innovate. Guderian ascribed that as much to intellectual rigidity as to technical indifference. He argued, for example, that “shock power” was considered prior to 1914 to depend on infantry attacks with cold steel. During the Great War it came to depend on artillery fire. That was still the case in France. But the guns moved too slowly and took too long. Shock was force multiplied by impulsion; both elements were important. Victory required bringing fire against the enemy quickly, through maneuver. And that, Guderian increasingly asserted, meant mechanization—specifically, fast-moving, gun-armed tanks.

  As a teacher Guderian was an acquired taste whose allusive approach and sardonic sense of humor alienated as well as inspired. But he was a dynamic lecturer who took advantage of the opportunity to read widely in German and foreign literature on armor’s current developments and future prospects. The division commander, himself interested in motorization’s prospects, had worked with Guderian in the past and was willing to give him his head. In 1927, freshly promoted to major, he was assigned to the Truppenamt’s Operations Section, in principle to study the development of motor transportation for infantry. That same year, Fritsch was replaced as section head by General Werner von Blomberg, whose interest in motorization ranged from replacing the infantry’s bicycles with motorcycles to preparing training schedules for theoretical tank regiments.

  It was scarcely surprising that the Operations Section focused obsessively on the British maneuvers held that summer. These exercises centered on an Experimental Mechanized Force built around armored cars and medium and light tanks, and including a temporarily motorized machine-gun battalion, a field artillery battalion, a battery of light infantry guns, and an engineer company, all truck-transported. The section reported extensively on the maneuvers themselves and provided translations and summaries of the major journalistic commentaries, especially those by Fuller and Liddell- Hart. The statement of British Chief of Imperial General Staff Sir George Milne that future armored forces would be able to strike up to three hundred miles into an enemy’s territory struck particular chords. Guderian credits the post-maneuver Provisional Instructions for Tank and Armored Car Training with providing the theoretical basis for a developing German armor doctrine. The work was summarized, and then translated—no great feat of intelligence, since it was available on the open market.

  Even—or better said, especially—in the Reichswehr, theory required testing. Banning weapons and limiting numbers enhanced the risks of abstraction, postulating developments and concepts beyond the attainable and the sustainable. New models of dummy tanks appeared on the maneuver grounds. The originals had usually been wooden frames mounted on bicycles or pushed around by a couple of soldiers. By 1928 the firm of Hanomag was delivering motorized mock-ups that could cross terrain at fair speeds. That summer, Vollard- Bockelberg used them in a small-scale exercise reflecting British tactics by deploying the model tanks in three waves: two to break through to the enemy artillery zone and into his rear; the third to support the infantry directly.

  By 1930 all the motor battalions conducted similar exercises built around dummy tanks and wooden antitank guns.

  In April 1931, Oswald Lutz was appointed Inspector of Motor Troops. He requested as his chief of staff Heinz Guderian, freshly promoted to lieutenant colonel. In 1931-32, the team planned and conducted a series of upscale exercises involving entire battalions of dummy tanks with supporting infantry and artillery. For Lutz the “supporting” adjective was central. Tanks were now the key weapon on the modern battlefield. Infantry, artillery, engineers and aircraft played essentially supporting roles. Tanks therefore should carry out independent missions, as opposed to being tied down to the infantry. Independence in turn required mass; using tanks in anything less than battalion strength diluted their shock effect and rendered them disproportionately vulnerable to antitank defenses. Finally, Lutz insisted on surprise as a critical force multiplier. Surprise involved more than the timing if an initial attack. Tanks should advance in echelons and on a broad front,
constantly shifting the focus of their movements in order to confuse the defender. But Lutz was no advocate of the all-armor approach; instead, he stressed the importance of cooperation. In particular the infantry must closely follow the tanks to exploit the initial shock of armor, and trust to the tanks for fire support instead of looking to the rear for artillery or waiting for their own heavy weapons.

  On the technical side the development of armored vehicles had continued after the armistice. Initially this focused on wheeled vehicles for internal security purposes. The design capacity to do more remained. The question from the military perspective was how best to work with industry to enhance that capacity and develop state-of-the-art designs without flagrantly violating the terms of Versailles. By the mid-1920s the solution had been worked out, less on paper than by winks, nudges, and gentlemen’s agreements. The Truppenamt would prepare specifications. Interested companies would produce designs and prototypes for study and testing. That process would continue until it somehow became feasible to begin production openly.

  The first concept of the Weapons Office in 1925 was cutting-edge: a 16-ton vehicle with a top speed of 25 miles per hour, 14mm of armor overall, and a turret-mounted short 75mm gun. Three firms—Krupp, Rheinmetall, and Daimler-Benz—responded, two with a long history of arms production, the third specializing in motor vehicles. None gave the project high priority; all found it more difficult than expected to transform sketches and figures into a functioning weapons system. The half dozen prototypes available by 1929 were most useful as showcases for developments in automotive technology, engines, and suspension systems, than as practical field designs. Though it took only half the time to develop and present their prototypes, the same could be said for the Truppenamt’s second proposal, submitted in 1928. This was a light tank, seven and a half tons, carrying a turret-mounted 37mm high-velocity gun, slightly faster and carrying a bit less armor than its larger stablemate. As a fig-leaf concession to Versailles, the designs were given the subtle cover names of “large tractors” and “small tractors.”

  If the Reichswehr’s theories of armored war owed heavy debt to Britain, its tank designs channeled France in their armament and in the concept behind the paired designs. The heavier vehicles would directly support and cooperate with infantry. The lighter ones would lead attacks and act as tank destroyers. The French reversed the order, but the thinking was similar.

  The Reichswehr pursued other avenues as well. With great reluctance, Lutz abandoned his hopes for a Christie-type wheel/track tank as attention shifted to developing armored cars. During and after the war, German designs were characterized by heavy armor and armament but correspondingly poor off-road capacity. In 1927, the Inspectorate of Motor Troops submitted contracts for prototypes—this time to three firms with histories of successful heavy-truck design: Daimler, Buessing, and Magirus. Since the beginnings of industrialized war in the nineteenth century, the Prussian/German army had been reluctant to rely on single suppliers. The results here justified the multiple tenders, providing the technical basis for the eight-wheeled armored cars that would guide and lead the panzers across most of Europe a decade later.

  Taking the test models to the field posed a different set of problems. After the war, Germany sold the design of its projected light tank to Sweden, and one of its designers also relocated. The vehicle went into service in a modified form in 1921, and gave enough satisfaction that the Swedish army and government remained open to further cooperation. Economics reinforced technology. In 1920, the major heavy-machinery firm of Landsverk was on the edge of bankruptcy. Working through a Netherlands company, the German company Gutehoffnungshütte Aktenverein purchased half the stock, and by 1925 owned more than 60 percent of it. Landsverk continued to turn out trucks and tractors, and railroad and harbor equipment. It also developed a sideline: producing armored vehicles. German engineers, technicians, and designs played significant roles in the process, and some of the resulting vehicles were eventually exported as far afield as Ireland. Despite regular low-level exchanges of personnel and concepts, however, as far as the Reichswehr was concerned, Sweden’s society was too open for much more than the military tourism that in 1929 allowed Guderian, as the guest of a Swedish armor battalion, to actually drive a tank for the first time.

  Looking eastward suggested better prospects since, due to the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia had frequently made common cause, brought together by their shared status as outlaw states. For German soldiers the vast, impenetrable Soviet Union offered opportunities to circumvent Versailles in relative obscurity. Their Russian counterparts saw Germany as a source of technical modernization. Preliminary planning for military cooperation began in 1920, expanded after a secret clause of Rapallo allowed Germans to train in Russia, and culminated in 1939 with an agreement to establish schools for chemical, aircraft, and armor development.

  The tank school at Kazan, on the lower Volga, was considered sufficiently important by the German government to pay its expenses, with the Soviets responsible for on-site maintenance. From its beginnings in 1927, however, the school suffered from conflicting expectations. Stalin hoped to use German expertise to develop the USSR’s tank and tractor industries. The Germans were at best conflicted about facilitating the creation of a high-tech army in a Bolshevik state. The tank models the Reichswehr had promised remained stuck on the drawing boards. Germany’s political opposition, especially the Social Democrats, consistently probed and challenged the Soviet connection. The Soviets, suspicious in principle of any capitalist state, found it difficult to believe the technical and political difficulties could not be resolved by making a few judicious examples. When they showed how that could be done in the Shakhty Trials of engineers accused of “wrecking” the Soviet economy, the German government temporarily drew back in the face of what it regarded as a provocation.

  At the Reichswehr’s urging, the project was resumed. Things went slightly better on the ground, even though the Russian share of the enterprise was under not the Ministry of Defense, as might be expected, but the NKVD, the police force of the Soviet Union. Actual training did not begin until 1929. Soviet ideologues and Russian patriots argued that a revolutionary republic had little to learn from foreign aristocrats. German professionals tended to dismiss the Russians as retrograde. Most of the training was done on the models and variants of “tractors” shipped by twos and threes into the USSR. The Russians did provide thirty of their own tanks, and when the British allowed arms sales to the USSR, some of their improved mediums were added to a mix large enough for battalion-scale exercises. The Russians, in the process of developing their own armored doctrines, were more concerned with the technical side, pressing for a level of cooperation that would include manufacturing German tanks under German supervision in Soviet factories. That prospect was too ambitious for a Reichswehr reasonably content with a status quo that enabled selected officers to observe Russian maneuvers and inspect Russian tank units, allowed others to take and teach the courses, and not least gave firms actually or potentially involved in armored vehicles design and manufacture to expose engineers and administrators to the Kazan experience. Eventually, fifty-odd officers participated as students and instructors in the Kazan programs. They gave the Reichswehr a core of men with hands-on experience that proved disproportionately valuable in the 1930s.

  Kazan’s actual curriculum does not seem particularly innovative compared with the soaring visions of the Truppenamt that reflected a continued—arguably a developing—debate over just what came next. As interest in mechanization developed, officers from other branches, or with broader perspectives, diluted the initial intensity. A 1929 article in MW, for example, used the 1917 Battle of Cambrai as a springboard to describe modern tanks as having three missions: cooperating with infantry in the initial breakthrough, overrunning enemy artillery before it could react, and then completing an operational breakthrough. The author recommended using as many as five waves of armor, including reserv
es. A Guide to Leadership and Battle, published by a Reichswehr major in 1929, spoke of tanks and other forbidden fruits, aircraft and heavy artillery, as army- level tools to tip the balance at the decisive point. Cavalry divisions were described as combinations of horse, cyclist, and motorized elements supported by armored cars and, when necessary, by tanks as well.

  A rapidly increasing body of similar literature took a similar position: somewhere in the middle, accepting as a given that tanks would play a major role in future wars but uncertain of exactly how that scenario would develop. The 1929 edition of a standard handbook for officers of all arms, issued by the Training Section, described tanks as having two missions: cooperating with the infantry and operating independently—with the caveat that they should not get too far ahead of the main force. How far was too far? In the final analysis, the Reichswehr simply lacked the practical experience with real tanks to make any reasonable choices. That was about to change—and change massively.

  Another kind of change was underway as well. Particularly during the tenure of Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord as chief of the Truppenamt and then of the Army High Command from 1930 to 1934, war games became increasingly theoretical, dispensing with realistic troop levels and postulating artificial political conditions in order to expand the learning experience of the game situation. This abstraction encouraged wider acceptance of the concept that quality, particularly when enhanced by technology, could overcome numbers. The issues of mobility, surprise, and concentration of force that had initially been key to tactical survival became the basis of power projection at the operational level. The Reichswehr in the early 1930s did not withdraw to the airy empire of operational dreams. Hammerstein-Equord insisted on the distinction between “studies” that had to be grounded in reality and war games designed to enhance the vision and capacity of future field commanders. Staff training stressed that victory depended on the offensive, and that the offensive was the product of a mind-set emphasizing surprise, deception, and, above all, courage to take risks against odds.