Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  The defense of Western Europe had, by late 1943, become an army responsibility. The Kriegsmarine, defeated in the U-boat campaign, its remaining surface vessels penned in harbor, could do little more than conduct coast-defense operations with a mixed bag of small craft. The Luftwaffe’s attention had shifted to the Eastern Front and to the Reich itself. Staff and operational assignments to Air Fleet 3, responsible for Western Europe, were viewed as either dead ends or rest cures.

  On October 25, 1943, Rundstedt submitted a comprehensive memorandum describing the challenges and requirements of a sector that in the next year could expect to become a major theater of operations. He sarcastically noted that he would be very glad if Hitler read this report despite his busy schedule. Otherwise the Führer might accuse his generals of failing to keep him informed should things go wrong, as he had done in December 1941. And there was a great deal to go wrong in the sectors allotted to High Command West.

  Rundstedt argued from a paradox. The Atlantic Wall, conceived and ordered by Hitler as the main battle line, lacked the depth to hold by itself. On the other hand, abandoning the coast without a fight would sacrifice the advantage of the Channel as a moat. It would mean the loss of a heavy investment in fortifications. Above all, it would require staking the campaign on a mobile battle in northeastern France against an enemy whose strong point was a capacity for mobile warfare. Therefore, Rundstedt argued, the coastline must be defended to the last.

  Rundstedt expected an invasion not much later than spring, 1944. He believed the Allies would land first in the Pas de Calais, then in Normandy and Brittany: sites offering the easiest passages, the shortest supply lines, and the closest locations to Germany’s frontiers. The Allies enjoyed air and naval supremacy. They already had as many divisions available for such an operation as Rundstedt could muster in his entire expanded theater. Most were first-class assault troops, young, sound of wind and limb, and equipped with the best American and British industry could provide.

  Experience in both world wars showed that landings made in sufficient force would succeed. But a combination of local counterattacks to disrupt initial successes, supplemented once the Allied Schwerpunkt became apparent by the concentrated blows of a massed reserve, provided the window of an opportunity for defeating the invasion, or at least so bloodying the Anglo-Americans’ noses that they might reconsider their military and political options.

  Success once more depended on the panzers. A Führer Directive of November 3 accepted most of Rundstedt’s basic propositions. For two and a half years, Hitler declared, the Reich’s energies had been directed against Asiatic Bolshevism. Now an even greater danger had emerged: the Anglo-Saxon invasion. In the east, space could be traded for time. Not so in the west. An Allied breakout from a successful landing would have prompt and incalculable consequences for the Reich. No longer could the west be stripped for the sake of other theaters. Instead its defenses must be strengthened by every means possible—above all its mobile defenses.

  In October 1943, the Western theater had only around 250 armored vehicles—no more than a token against the thousands available to the Western Allies. Its half dozen mobile divisions were skeletons or embryos. The General Staff and the armored force were instructed to provide Panzer IV tanks and assault guns for the reestablished, replenished, and newly created armored formations ultimately responsible for defending northeast Europe.

  Was Rundstedt, a man of advanced years and fixed opinions, the general to throw the Allies into the sea? In November 1943 the Führer sent Rommel, restored to health and underemployed commanding a shadow Army Group B, to prepare plans and suggestions for the best ways of meeting an Allied invasion. The appointment arguably reflected Hitler’s long-standing practice of establishing parallel systems for solving difficult problems. Rundstedt was familiar with that process, and pleased enough with the Führer’s newfound interest in the west, that he offered the newcomer full cooperation. Rommel recognized the awkwardness of his position and took pains to avoid stepping on his senior’s toes. But the army’s senior and junior field marshals were like oil and water. Rundstedt tended to let situations develop before he acted, all the while commenting on those developments with an irony that could alternately inspire admiration or fury in his associates. Rommel was a driver, accustomed to seeing every situation as an emergency, making snap decisions, and making those decisions work.

  Rundstedt broke the fast-developing ice. On December 30 he made a formal proposal to make Army Group B responsible for the region most exposed to invasion: the Netherlands, Pas de Calais, and Normandy. Rommel applied his famous energy to the Atlantic Wall with good effect. The heart of his thinking, however, involved deploying the panzer formations so close to the coast that they could engage as the enemy crossed the beaches. Without the immediate help of mechanized reserves, the Field Marshal insisted, their air and naval supremacy meant the Allies were certain to get ashore somewhere. Undisturbed for any length of time, they would flank the defenders out of their fixed defenses and roll up the Atlantic Wall like a rug.

  Rommel’s approach offered the advantage of employing the panzer divisions in ways grown familiar to their officers in Russia: counterpunch ing a tactically vulnerable enemy, with dash and tactical skill compensating for inferior numbers. It offered as well a closer link between the mechanized formations and the semi-mobile infantry divisions manning the Wall. As was the case with Model and Raus, Rommel’s plan made it less likely that the former would regard themselves as pawns for sacrifice. One of the reasons for the German infantry’s Homeric combat record on the Eastern Front was the widespread knowledge that surrendering to Ivan involved high levels of immediate risk and complete certainty of subsequent discomfort. Conditions of British or American captivity were so favorably mythologized that not a few prisoners taken during the D-Day campaign seemed surprised when their first meal did not include steak.

  Rommel thought in wider terms as well. Repulsing the landings at the shoreline would buy military time that might be exploited politically. A decisive victory presented to the Führer by his favorite marshal might well prove an entering wedge for a negotiated peace. If not, there was always the German Resistance, whose plans and hopes for direct action against “history’s greatest warlord” were increasingly open secrets among those in the know at High Command West. Best evidence indicates Rommel was not directly involved in any conspiracies. He was, however, tactician enough to profit from any opportunities created by Hitler’s removal.

  Rommel’s principal critic was Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg. His prewar career combined wide experience as a staff officer and attaché with early involvement in developing the armored force. He took 3rd Panzer Division through Poland and led panzer corps in Russia under Guderian in 1941 and Kleist during Operation Blue before his appointment as commander of Panzer Troops West in July 1943. Geyr was no admirer of the battle group tactics that had emerged in Russia as a response to a chronic shortage of tanks. These small formations, he argued, would be disproportionately vulnerable to Allied firepower. What was needed were large-scale counterattacks against the invasion beaches: counterattacks in divisional strength or more. Geyr’s response to the threats from sea and air was to keep German armor well clear of the coast, in camouflaged positions out of range of naval guns. Admittedly, to reach the operational zones the mechanized forces would have to move by night. Properly trained troops under competent officers could nevertheless expect to arrive in good time to throw the invaders back into the Channel.

  Rommel expected the invasion to have higher levels of air support than anything previously seen in history. The northern French roads suitable for major troop movements led across rivers and through cities: inviting targets for Allied bombers. It was unreasonable, Rommel argued, to expect divisions positioned according to Geyr’s proposals to reach the battle zone, reorganize, and refit, in less than ten days or two weeks. That was all the time and more the invaders would need to establish a bridgehead impregnable to anything
High Command West was likely to bring against it.

  The debate played out against a background of evidence that the British and Americans from Africa to Anzio had not demonstrated any particular skill in armored war. The end game in Tunisia had been a triumph of mass against overextension. In Sicily the Italians had collapsed; the Luftwaffe was conspicuous in its absence. But the hastily rebuilt Hermann Göring and 15th Panzer Grenadier Divisions, fighting in dispersed battle groups, kept the Allies off balance and bought time for a reverse Dunkirk across the Straits of Messina. Nor were German panzer specialists impressed by what they considered George Patton’s military excursion to Palermo and along the north coast.

  The Italian campaign only highlighted the Allies’ limitations not merely in using armor, but in thinking about its use. In some of Europe’s most broken terrain the Americans committed a full armored division and the British no fewer than five (though only three at any one time), plus a large number of smaller independent units. Periodically, so many tanks were deployed for a particular operation that they got in their own and everyone else’s way—the Liri Valley comes to mind operationally, and tactically the New Zealand armored brigade at Cassino.

  On the other hand, the 16th Panzer Division came close to defeating the Salerno landing single-handedly. At Anzio the panzers played a central role in transforming Winston Churchill’s hoped-for wildcat into a “stranded whale.” Those achievements, and a score of lesser ones, had depended on a substantial armored presence, usually from three to five panzer and panzer grenadier divisions. The defense of northwest Europe would require proportionally stronger mobile forces. Where were they to come from in the existing context of compound overstretch?

  Adolf Hitler was no Cadmus. Nevertheless the Third Reich had sown at least some of the dragon’s teeth that provided the legendary founder of Thebes with his army—with almost as much internal conflict as that among Cadmus’s dragon-blooded warriors. On December 31, 1942, Hitler authorized the formation of two new Waffen SS divisions, the 9th Hohenstaufen and the 10th Frundsberg. The 9th took its name from the rulers of the medieval Holy Roman Empire, the 10th from a famous commander of mercenary Landsknechts. For most of their careers they served in tandem beginning with their training in France and their brief introduction to combat on the Eastern Front in early 1944.

  Beginning in 1942 the Waffen SS found its sources of volunteers, German, ethnic German, and foreign, falling far short of replacement requirements. Increasing numbers of Germanics were being assigned to the ethnic SS divisions springing up throughout occupied Eastern Europe. Hohenstaufen initially received a number of Hungarian Germans. From 1943, however, the ranks of the Waffen SS panzers were in general filled by men from the draft pool, supplemented by periodic infusions of compulsory transfers from the Luftwaffe and the navy.

  Standards were upheld by the instructors. More than an army already stretched to its limits, the Waffen SS provided strong, experienced, and motivated cadres to its new armored formations. “Meine Ehre heist Treue,” “loyalty is my honor,” was the SS motto. For the Waffen SS it meant above all fidelity to the principles of National Socialism and the Führer who embodied them. It also meant unconditional trust among comrades. Discipline remained rigid, but “character development” emphasized initiative, aggression, and self-reliance in a context of teamwork. By 1943 parade-ground drill had been abandoned in favor of weapons proficiency, terrain orientation, and camouflage instruction.

  Contradictions among these concepts were downplayed as training periods grew shorter. Compliance was an increasingly acceptable substitute for belief. And should compliance fail, sterner methods might be applied. An SS prisoner, himself an Alsatian, described a Waffen SS officer in Normandy ordering an Alsatian deserter beaten to death by his own company.

  A third Waffen SS armored division authorized in 1943 is perhaps the most familiar. The 12th SS Panzer’s antecedents went back to May 1942. In that month, three weeks of pre-military training was ordered for all boys between sixteen and eighteen, under the auspices of the Hitler Youth. The army and the SS competed vigorously to provide cadres, many from the panzers. Old-style drill sergeants had little place in a system staffed by combat veterans often only a few years older than their charges. The military emphasis was on skill, will, and initiative in an environment of comradeship. The ideological elements, as a rule directly provided by Hitler Youth officials, synergized with the war stories to foster an ethos of struggle and sacrifice for Volk and Reich.

  The next step, at seventeen, was eligibility for at least three months of compulsory labor service. Now under Wehrmacht control, like its peacetime predecessor the Arbeitsdienst emphasized hard work under hard conditions as opposed to focused military or ideological instruction. After 1942 every German drafted into the Wehrmacht at eighteen had passed through these programs, at least in principle. Back to back, they were a natural pipeline to military service and a natural recruiting agent for Hitler’s panzers, army or SS.

  When the 12th SS Panzer Division opened its ranks to volunteers under the official draft age, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds lined up in a fashion reminiscent—albeit on a smaller scale—of the “war volunteers” of August 1914. With a cadre drawn primarily from the Leibstandarte and supplemented by army officers with Hitler Youth experience, with chocolate replacing cigarettes in the rations—smoking was officially bad for one’s health in the Reich—the division began training in the summer of 1943.

  The instructors took their military responsibilities seriously and found willing students in the teenagers who filled the ranks and set the tone in the combat units even as older men were assigned to the support and technical services. As for ideological conditioning, the volunteers had by then largely indoctrinated themselves. German adolescents were less creatures of propaganda and illusion than many postwar accounts depict. Certainly after 1942 they had a reasonable idea of what was waiting for them “out there,” and reasonable grounds for believing that the skills and attitudes acquired in a Waffen SS uniform were eminently transferable to the Russian Front as survival instruments and coping mechanisms. If one had to board the train, why not travel first class? Or in the cruder language of young men among themselves, if you were in the bucket at least it should be full of—euphemistically—fertilizer.

  The Waffen SS also formed three new panzer grenadier divisions: the 16th and 17th in October 1943, the 18th in January 1944. The 16th drew its cadres largely from the Skulls. The 18th was built around an SS brigade initially formed from Totenkopf formations, with a three-year record of stomach-churning atrocities in Russia—mostly behind the lines. Both were predictably most dangerous to civilians, the 16th in Italy and the 18th in Russia. The 17th was forced to show its mettle in northwest Europe, against an enemy that fought back.

  The Waffen SS also formed another corps. After the recapture of Kharkov in 1943 Leibstandarte’s commander Sepp Dietrich was recalled to Germany to command I SS Panzer Corps, intended to include his old division and the Hitler Jugend once it was ready for operations. Dietrich, who had fought in the embryonic tank force during World War I and remained a noncommissioned officer in spirit and perspective, was respected for his courage and for caring about his men. Though it took a while, Dietrich also developed a sense of his limitations. He commanded and allowed—better said, encouraged—his staff officers to do the thinking. Many of these were army transfers, and Dietrich as a corps commander was consistently willing to cooperate with army generals after D-Day.

  The army’s principal contribution to preparing for the invasion involved reconstructing and reequipping divisions battered to pieces in Russia. In addition, the 16th Panzer Grenadier Division was upgraded to the 116th Panzer Division in spring 1944. A number of panzer grenadier formations emerged: a Führer Escort Brigade and a Führer Grenadier Brigade, both expanded to divisions in early 1945; a Feldherrnhalle Division based on the old 60th Motorized and drawing some manpower from the original storm troops of the SA; and a Brandenburg Divis
ion built around the army’s special operations units.

  In December 1943 the instruction and demonstration units of the panzer schools were stripped to form the Panzer Lehr Division. An elite force with an initial strength of almost 200 Panzer IVs, Panthers, and Tigers, its creation nevertheless indicated the panzers’ desperate straits. Their principal advantage had always been quality. Quality depended on training—more so as the casualty lists increased. Now, like a peasant family in a hard winter, the army was eating its seed grain.

  During the war’s final months a number of ephemeral panzer formations appeared and disappeared. Some had high numbers: 232nd and 233rd. Others had inspiring titles: Clausewitz, Holstein, Müncheberg. What they had in common were cadres provided by training schools and replacement depots; equipment provided ad hoc; and ranks filled by stragglers from broken units, completed from hospitals and convalescent homes and by locally raised recruits, often obtained practically at gunpoint. Few of them lasted long enough to do more than swell Allied tallies of prisoners.

  From Hitler who authorized them to the senior officers who created and committed them, these cobbled-together armored formations challenge any notion of a professionally informed “genius for war.” They highlight as well an operational situation, desperate through 1943, that erupted into full-blown crisis in 1944. The panzers, the core of Germany’s war effort, had been ruthlessly expended and marginally nurtured. As the army’s combined-arms capacities diminished, the panzers had evolved—or derogated—from a spearhead to a fire brigade to a firewall, expected not merely to restore emergencies but to avert them. As for personnel, “by 1944,” recalled one army tank driver whose war began at Sedan and ended in the Bulge, “we were like bad soup: old bones and green vegetables.”

  The Third Reich’s ultimate vanity formation, however, owed its existence to Hermann Göring. The Luftwaffe chief controlled the Reich’s antiaircraft and airborne forces, but wanted his own ground combat unit as well. The Hermann Göring Division began in 1933 as a 400-man police unit. It grew to be a regiment, then a brigade. In late 1942 it became a division, then a panzer division brought to strength by transfers from the Luftwaffe and the paratroops, and brought to effectiveness by combat-experienced army tankers. Lost in Tunisia, it reformed in Sicily, fought there, in Italy, and then—as noted in Chapter 6—was transferred to Russia in September 1944. Administrated by the Luftwaffe, it was operationally subordinated to the army, which facilitated its acceptance by the soldiers almost as much as did its acknowledged fighting power.