Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  Hitler’s instructions of May 1938 for the Wehrmacht to prepare for an invasion of Czechoslovakia escalated the prospects of a general war Germany had little chance of winning. Ludwig Beck resigned as Chief of the General Staff in August. His successor, Franz Halder, inherited the outlines of a generals’ plot to seize Hitler’s person as soon as he issued orders for an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Some senior army officers, including Beck, had grown sufficiently dubious about the risks of Hitler’s freewheeling foreign policy in the context of Germany’s still-incom plete rearmament that they had developed plans for a “housecleaning.” These plans involved eliminating Nazi Party radicals, restoring traditional “Prussian” standards in justice and administration, and putting Hitler firmly under the thumb of the military leadership. Should that last prove impossible and the Führer suffer a fatal accident—well, no plan survives application, and the state funeral would be spectacular.

  Whether anything would have come of it remains a subject of speculation. The agreements secured from Britain and France at the Munich Conference of September 1938 left Czechoslovakia twisting in the wind, and hung any potential military conspirators out to dry. Czechoslovakia’s western provinces, the Sudetenland, were ceded to the Reich without a shot fired. Those who had urged caution on the Führer were correspondingly discredited.

  These events had less direct impact on the armored force than might have been expected. On an operational level, the main problem was seen as breaking through formidable Czech border defenses—a task for infantry, artillery, and aerial bombardment that brought more conventional generals to the fore of planning. Internal attention was further diverted by a major reorganization. In addition to forming the corps headquarters authorized for the light and motorized divisions, the former Mobile Combat Troops Command became XVI Corps, with the three panzer divisions under its direct command. Three new divisions were added to the order of battle. The 4th Panzer Division formed at Würzburg to replace the 2nd. The 4th Light Division was built around elements of the former Austrian army’s Mobile Division in Vienna. And in November, the 5th Panzer Division was organized at Oppeln, in Silesia, with many of its recruits coming from the newly annexed Sudetenland.

  A number of the tank battalions already existed as separate formations, part of Beck’s program for providing direct support to infantry divisions. The restructuring nevertheless meant more rounds of reas signments and promotions. The three mobile corps were assigned to a new army-level command created in 1937: Group 4, under Walther von Brauchitsch—the stepping-stone to his appointment as commander in chief of the army a few months later. Lutz briefly commanded XVI Corps, then was put on the retired list in 1938. This has been described as a forced retirement, a response at higher levels reflecting criticism of the way the armored force seemed to be developing as an army within the army.

  This argument is supported by Brauchitsch’s character and branch of service. He was an artilleryman, and while a solid professional, was neither a forceful personality like Guderian nor a smooth operator in the pattern of Lutz. Lutz’s removal from the scene, however, can also be interpreted in wider contexts, as part of a housecleaning of senior ranks reflecting both Hitler’s desire for more malleable generals and the High Command’s belief in the need for fresh blood.1 Lutz was one of those who had openly questioned the Führer’s policies as excessively risky. Lutz was also sixty-two, the same age as Gerd von Rundstedt, also retired in 1938—arguably a bit over the line for field command in the kind of war he had done so much to create. Lutz was unlikely to step down of his own accord, though allowing him to learn of his new status from a newspaper article was unmistakably déclassé.

  The appointment of Guderian as Lutz’s successor in command of XVI Corps also suggests that Lutz was not singled out for removal on either political or professional grounds. The German army, like its counterparts before and since, had an ample number of sidetracks for officers identified with mentors who made career-ending slips. But in 1938 the Inspectorate of Motorized Combat Troops and the Inspection for Army Motorization were combined into a single agency with the mouth-filling title of Inspection Department 6 for Armored Troops, Cavalry, and Army Motorization (In6). Its focus was to be on nuts and bolts: training, organization, technology. At the same time, an Inspectorate of Mobile Troops was established to develop doctrine and tactics, supervise the schools, and advise both the army high command and In6 on the operational aspects of mobile war. The post was offered to Heinz Guderian.

  The appointment had a back story. The new Inspectorate seems to have been Brauchitsch’s idea. Hitler approved. Guderian initially turned down the post on the grounds that it lacked any real authority; he could only make recommendations. When Hitler informed him that his advisory responsibility meant that, if necessary, he could report directly to the Führer in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, Guderian changed his mind. A promotion to General der Panzertruppen (Lieutenant-General) further sweetened the deal.

  This account has been challenged by Guderian’s friend, General Hermann Balck. Balck describes a cabal involving Brauchitsch and the General Staff to kick Guderian upstairs, or at least sideways, in order to minimize the effect of what was considered his “tunnel vision” on the subject of army motorization. Some support for that unverifiable hypothesis is offered by Guderian’s initial assignment in the new mobilization scheme: command of a second-line infantry corps in the western theater. In 1940, Erich von Manstein would receive a similar assignment for the same reasons: as an obvious slap on the wrist, and as a warning against excessively close contact with the Führer. In Guderian’s case, however, that contact was a bit too valuable to waste, given the growing indications that one of the Third Reich’s alleged “two pillars” was significantly overtopping the other.

  At least that seems to have been the opinion of Brauchitsch’s successor as commander of Group 4. Walther von Reichenau stood out among the army’s generals as an admirer of Hitler, and assiduously cultivated his own back channels to the Führer. He was unlikely to seek to choke off Guderian, especially since the two men were much alike in aggressive temperament and blinkered vision.

  Guderian’s driving energy was immediately put to use. Lutz was no weakling, but his chief talents had been as a negotiator and a facilitator. The panzer divisions suffered from constant teething troubles, expected and unexpected. The senior formations were still very much works in progress. In a 1938 exercise, the staff of the 1st Panzer Division created a foul-up beyond the generous tolerance for maneuver mistakes. Perhaps energized by Hitler’s presence, Guderian not only blasted the regiment’s officers but ordered some punitive transfers “to encourage the rest.” Guderian also struggled mightily with the cavalry in an effort to wean them away from a historic commitment to screening and reconnaissance. On the technical side, Guderian iterated and reiterated the importance of radio communication—increasingly with aircraft as well as vehicles. Though initially unable to provide every tank with a transmitter, he did make sure each had a receiver.

  With the occupation of the rump Czech state in March 1939, Guderian and the armored force simultaneously acquired a windfall and a problem. The windfall reflected Bohemia’s history as a center of arms design and manufacture under Habsburg rule. The Czechoslovak government cultivated that heritage, and in the 1930s produced two state-of-the-art designs. The TNHP 35 weighed a little more than 10 tons with 35mm of armor on the front and 16mm on the sides. It could do 25 miles per hour on roads, was high-maintenance but easy to operate, and, best of all, carried a high-velocity 37mm gun. The TNHP 38 was even better. At 10 tons with 25mm of frontal armor, it was more maneuverable than the 35, carried the same 37mm gun, and on the whole was roughly equal to the Panzer III, which was still backed up on German production lines.

  The Germans’ initial problem was adapting their new tanks to Wehrmacht requirements. The armored force took over about 200 of what were rechristened the 35(t), for Tsechoslowakei, and began the extensive modificati
ons necessary, particularly in radio equipment, to make them suitable for German service. The 38(t) was just coming into production when the Germans marched in and began testing the design. In May 1939 the Weapons Office contracted with the Czech factory to manufacture 150 of them. They were the first of a long line of 38(t)s that would serve throughout the war in a variety of roles. None, however, would be ready for service by September 1, 1939.

  On the organizational side, on November 24, 1938, von Brauchitsch issued a sweeping directive for the development of the army’s motorized forces. It projected a final goal of nine panzer divisions, to be met by converting the four light divisions in the fall of 1939. Each army corps would have a motorcycle battalion; each field army would receive a number of motorized reconnaissance battalions. Independent armored brigades were projected as well, to support conventional infantry divisions or cooperate with motorized ones—the latter a possible foreshadowing of the panzer grenadier divisions. Finally, a number of independent companies equipped with “the heaviest kind of tanks” would support infantry attacks against fortifications.

  On April 1, 1939, the General Staff ordered the creation of four new panzer divisions—effective, ironically, on September 19. In practice, that meant raising and training the tank units and supporting formations necessary to upgrade the light divisions. At the same time, the armored force was allocating the revamped Czech tanks and the Panzer IIIs and IVs also beginning to enter service. As if that was not enough, the panzers were increasingly drafted for display purposes; parades in Berlin and other German cities were designed to impress not only foreign observers but a German population that cheered Hitler’s bloodless victories and yet retained a vivid collective memory of World War I.

  Whatever the tanks may have provided in terms of intimidation and reassurance, Guderian and his generals were less than pleased at the waste of time and energy. The fall maneuvers, however, were expected to compensate. For the first time the armored force was to take the field in strength: XVI Corps would control three panzer divisions, the 4th Light Division, and a motorized division. Deploying that force would require implementing the first stages of mobilization for the units involved. To test the concept of the air-ground combat team on a similar scale, the Luftwaffe would provide its new tactical support force. The exercises were never held. Instead, on September 1, 1939, the panzers went to war for real.

  VII

  THE CRITIQUE OF mass war developed in German military thought after 1918 had never excluded numbers, per se. Its goal had been the eventual creation of a force able to achieve decisive tactical and operational results initially, thus avoiding the spiral of escalation forcing Germany into a war of attrition—exactly the kind of war the professional soldiers had warned for years and decades that Germany had no chance of winning. The army that took the field, however, was the product of improvisation. The steady pace originally projected by the General Staff and the High Command was submerged by a rearmament that rapidly became its own justification and increasingly outran available human and material resources. Even after the Blood Purge of 1934 eliminated the possibility of using the SA as the basis for an alternative military system, the army continued to fear dual loyalty in an increasingly Nazified society. Total war of the kind Hitler seemed willing not merely to risk but to affirm remained, in strategic terms, the wrong kind of war for Germany. And in social and political contexts, a mass war involving the German Volk was likely to benefit the Nazis far more than the soldiers.

  Since the Napoleonic Wars the Prussian/German army had stressed the desirability of a high average quality. The General Staff developed as a leaven to the officer corps as a whole, rather than a self-absorbed elite. In operational terms, one regiment, division, or corps had been considered as capable as any other. When reserve divisions were organized on a large scale as part of the run-up to World War I, they were structured as far as possible to the active army’s norms, and from the beginning were used in the same way as active formations. In 1939, however, most of the divisions were formed by Wellen (waves), each with differing scales of equipment, levels of training, and operational effectiveness. Now in planning for war, the army was constrained to develop a hierarchy of dependability, with the peacetime divisions of the “first wave” at its apex—and the mobile divisions at the apex of the first wave.

  That situation offered the army a political and military window of opportunity. The tactical, doctrinal, and institutional concepts developed by the Reichswehr and refined after 1933 provided the prospect of decisive offensive operations executed not by a small professional army but by specialized technocratic formations within a mass. High-tech force multipliers favored developing an elite group; not in the racial/ ideological sense of the emerging Waffen SS, not even an elite element depending on personnel selection like the paratroopers of the British and US armies, but a functional elite, based on learned skills. Its professionalism would enable the employment of ways of war, inapplicable by homogenized mass armies in the pattern of 1914-18, that would bring victories despite the institutional weaknesses of the new Wehrmacht—and despite any signs of clay feet or cardboard spine Germany’s Führer might show along the way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TRIUMPH

  FOR YEARS THE Polish campaign of 1939 was widely described as the first test of blitzkrieg, “lightning war.” Then soldiers and academ ics began to question both the nature of the campaign and the existence of the concept. German scholars in particular have been at pains to discredit and deconstruct the concept of blitzkrieg—to a point at times suggesting Kafka’s hunger artist, who rejects admiration for his self-destructive behavior. Reduced to its essentials, the critique of blitzkrieg is that the German victories of 1939-40 were not consequences of doctrine or planning. They developed from a series of accidents and coincidences reflecting operational improvisations born of the necessity to avoid a drawn-out war of attrition, and responding to strategic imperatives generated by the essentially random nature of the National Socialist regime. Far from being a German concept, blitzkrieg was in fact a term coined in the West, first used in Time magazine and introduced to the German army secondhand. Hitler himself as late as 1942 dismissed it as “Italian phraseology.”

  I

  THE INTERACTING DECONSTRUCTIONS have in turn generated opportunities for reconstruction. Blitzkrieg was certainly not a comprehensive principle for mobilizing Germany’s resources for a total war waged incrementally. Nor was it a structure of concepts like Air Land Battle or counterinsurgency, expressed in manuals, taught in schools, and practiced in maneuvers. The word itself had appeared now and then in German military writing since the mid-1930s, not in a specific sense but to refer to the kind of quick, complete victory that was at the heart of the army’s operational planning, and a central feature of its doctrine and training. Nor was the context always positive. Just before the outbreak of war, one critic affirmed that the chances of a blitzkrieg victory against an evenly matched enemy were zero.

  To say that blitzkrieg was an ex post facto construction nevertheless makes as much sense as to assemble the components of a watch, shake the pieces in a sack, and expect to pull out a functioning timepiece. The most reasonable approach involves splitting the difference. On one hand, blitzkrieg is a manifestation of Bewegungskrieg, the war of movement, the historic focus of Prussian/German strategic and operational planning that Seeckt and his contemporaries sought to restore after the Great War. On the other hand, blitzkrieg gave a technologically based literalness to an abstract concept. Bewegungskrieg had always been more of an intellectual construction than a physical reality. It involved forcing an enemy off balance through sophisticated planning creatively implemented in a context of forces moving essentially at the same pace. In blitzkrieg the combination of radios and engines made it possible for an army literally to run rings around its enemy—if, and it was a big if, its moral and intellectual qualities were on par with its material.

  The Polish campaign helped shape that concept
. Considered in hindsight, Case White, the cover name for the invasion of Poland, seems a classic example of what the Germans call “a made bed.” Much of the terrain was ideal for mobile operations: large stretches of open country with neither formidable natural obstacles nor man-made ones like the hedgerows of Normandy. The weather cooperated. September was unusually dry—a boon in a country where paved roads were few to an invader whose off-road capacities were limited. The Polish army depended on the muscles of men and horses for mobility. It had around 600 tanks, but most of them were counterparts of the Panzer I, and most of those were attached by companies to the cavalry brigades. Strategically, German occupation of the rump state of Slovakia left Poland enveloped on three sides—yet the Polish army was deployed along its frontiers in a pattern similar to the one Napoleon sarcastically suggested was best suited to stop smuggling.

  That positioning reflected domestic factors. Poland, much like West Germany during the Cold War, could not afford to abandon large parts of its territory without devastating consequences for the national morale on which its conscript army’s effectiveness depended. It reflected as well the defensible—and accurate—conclusion that even without the non-aggression pact with Germany, whose negotiation had hardly been a secret, the Soviet Union could be expected to seek direct profit from a German- Polish war.

  In sum, Poland had no prospects of waging anything like a long war successfully. Its only prospects lay with its French and British allies. That, in turn, ironically placed Poland in a position similar to that of Prussia in the autumn of 1806, when it did not have to defeat Napoleon, just bloody his nose and set him back on his heels until the British guin eas and Russian bayonets that were the Fourth Coalition’s real strengths could be brought into play. German planners, with vivid memories of the World War I blockade and well aware of France’s “Anaconda plan” of total mobilization for total war, were correspondingly committed to a war from a standing start. Overwhelming Poland as quickly as possible would change the military dynamic—and might just change the international dynamic as well, if Hitler could pull off another of his high-wire stunts.