Hitler's Panzers

by Dennis Showalter

  The division had a predictable and cultivated reputation for “hardness.” In Italy and Warsaw, elements were involved in large-scale shootings of “partisans.” A table of standings for indictable war crimes by panzer divisions would probably put it roughly between the Waffen SS and the army. But Göring saw to it that the division was kept well up to strength and on the A list for equipment. Like the Hitler Jugend Division, it attracted a good number of teenage volunteers. Its training facilities—army-provided—kept Hermann Göring’s combat effectiveness at a level that made it a welcome presence in any sector—and also facilitated overlooking such regularly alleged peccadilloes as using civilians for human shields.

  II

  RUNDSTEDT’S REFUSAL TO decide between Rommel and Geyr led both to seek the Führer’s ear. As the jockeying intensified, the Field Marshal found himself in the position of a poker player who antes but refuses to bet: his stack of military/political chips was steadily diminishing. In February 1944, with more and more armored divisions arriving in France, Rommel’s Army Group B was given the right to command any formations of Panzer Group West in its operational area. Rommel also received the right to recommend sector assignments and command appointments for the mobile formations directly to Rundstedt, thus bypassing Geyr.

  In May Hitler created a new army group headquarters under Rundstedt to control southern France, and assigned it three panzer divisions: 9th, 11th, and 2nd SS. Rommel’s Army Group B also received three panzer divisions: the 2nd, 21st, and 116th. The cream of the panzers—1st and 12th SS Panzer, 17th SS Panzer Grenadier, and Panzer Lehr—remained under control of Panzer Group West, but not exactly under Rundstedt’s command. Instead the Panzer Group was now designated part of the Wehrmacht High Command reserve, which, in practice, placed it under Hitler’s direct authority.

  The reorganization invites dismissal as no more than another example of Hitler’s meddling in matters outside his competence. Rundstedt’s sarcastic comment that Hitler’s decision left him only the authority to move the sentries in his headquarters is nevertheless at best a half-truth. The field marshal had forgotten a fundamental military axiom: the first duty of a commander is to command; specifically, to decide the organization of his theater. War abhors vacuums. Adolf Hitler filled the one created by Gerd von Rundstedt.

  Assigning three mechanized divisions to southern France left seven available for the decisive sector. Either massed as a central reserve or posted within close range of the prospective beaches, they represented a force strong enough to shape, if not decide, the coming battle—not a chess queen, but properly used, perhaps a pair of knights. Their dispersion not only created the obvious possibility of being too weak everywhere. It generated a subtler risk of making everyone just strong enough to generate a false sense of security.

  On June 6, 1944, Normandy was a network of isolated, thinly garrisoned strong points. Its armored reserve, the 21st Panzer Division, was still partly equipped with French tanks captured in 1940. Even in those contexts the roots of German defeat ran deeper than a single day’s fighting. Hitler’s alleged late arising on that morning was less important than his continued uncertainty as to whether the Normandy landings were only a diversion. That uncertainty was shared throughout High Command West, however much it was denied later. Committing the armored reserves meant that the die was indisputably cast, and for all their alleged battlefield virtuosity, the generals were no less reluctant than their Führer to throw the final switch.

  Uncertainty rendered moot the question of whether Rommel or Geyr was right about the panzers. Might Rommel’s presence at his headquarters, instead of en route to Germany to plead for more tanks farther forward, have made a difference? Rommel could not repeal the laws of space and time. The 21st Panzer Division, which was closest to the invasion zone, played a critical role in frustrating the British attempt to capture the city of Caen but was unable to mount any counterattacks until afternoon. Panzer Lehr and Hitler Jugend were on their way to the invasion site by the evening of June 6. Rundstedt’s headquarters was planning a corps-strength panzer counterattack for as early as the seventh. They believed it might after all be possible to contain, perhaps even defeat, the long-feared invasion. One SS officer dismissed doubt by describing the enemy as “little fish. We’ll throw them into the sea in the morning.”

  The Allied beachheads held, though the British and Canadians were hard pressed at some points, especially by Hitler Jugend. Initial defeat left the panzers the fulcrum of later hopes and plans. The Germans’ intention was to withdraw mechanized units presently committed, to bring in others from quiet sectors and the Reich (in particular 9th and 10th SS Panzer, currently deployed in Hungary), and to hit the Allies before they could convert a buildup to a breakthrough. That was frustrated in good part by a massive campaign against roads and railroads by Allied aircraft and the French Resistance. The 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions took longer to cross France than to move from Hungary. Tigers, which were difficult to transport safely by rail, used up engine life and track mileage in extended road marches. Second SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, responded to Resistance harassment during its move toward the beachhead with an escalating series of atrocities, culminating in the massacre of over 600 civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10.

  Oradour, a crossroads town, was doomed for no better reason than convenience. There was some talk of excess and of courts-martial, but the death in combat of the senior officer who was directly responsible put an end to such sentimentality. Nor was Oradour an isolated incident. On June 22, 11th Panzer Division, responding to the Franco-American invasion of southern France, recorded killing 125 “resistance fighters” at a cost of 4 wounded. Following the custom of the Eastern Front no prisoners were reported.

  Air power was proving even more decisive than expected. Allied tactical air forces were close to their peak strength on D-Day, and the force-ratios they could apply to the still- constricted beachhead were exponentially higher than during the rest of the campaign. In the British sector especially, fighter-bombers cruised the battlefield looking for targets of opportunity: “cab ranks,” the tankers and infantrymen called them.

  The direct effectiveness of air attacks against the German tanks has been accurately called into question. The impact of constant bombing and strafing on crew morale and crew effectiveness was beyond doubt even in the best divisions. The Soviet Sturmoviks’ normal attack formation was a circle, rotating over a target until ammunition was exhausted. Units of antiaircraft like the Flakpanzer coming into service had some chance to disrupt the strike, maybe bring down a few of their tormentors. The fighter-bombers struck by twos and fours, seemingly out of nowhere, then were gone before even a good gun crew could find their range.

  Staff cars, traveling alone or with small escorts, made even more tempting targets. Casualties mounted among senior officers trying, in the German tradition, to keep touch with their forward units. Rommel was only the most prominent victim. On June 10 the headquarters of Panzer Group West was crippled by a hundred-plane strike that wiped out most of the the senior staff. Geyr was “only” wounded, but his was the kind of narrow escape that left brave men shaken, their judgments clouded and their perspectives skewed. Fritz Bayerlein, hardly the exemplar of a timid man, assigned “broom commandos” to sweep away tire tracks left in roads and fields by the vehicles of his Panzer Lehr Division.

  From the Germans’ perspective the Schwerpunkt of the Allied offensive was in the British/Canadian sector where Montgomery, initially in overall command of ground operations, mounted a series of attacks, the major ones named after famous British races. Their purpose, whether to open the way into France or to engage and wear down the German armor reserves, has been intensively debated. Their image is of a series of ham-handed, head-down disappointments that generated casualty rates comparing with the worst weeks of the Somme and enhanced an already-pervasive caution at all levels of command.

  Photos of burned-out British tanks littering such battlefields as Epsom
and Goodwood are matched by the stories of their burned-out crews. SS First Lieutenant Michael Wittmann’s single-panzer destruction of two dozen armored vehicles in 15 minutes at Villers-Bocage has earned him his own website, the designation “badass of the week” on another, and a commemorative T-shirt available through the Internet. Less well known but no less worthy of recognition is the ramming of a King Tiger by Lieutenant John Gorman’s Sherman. Though Gorman belonged to the Irish Guards, his action reflected less Emerald Isle panache than desperation caused by a jammed gun. Both crews abandoned their disabled tanks, briefly confronted each other, and then ran for their own sides with the war story of a lifetime.

  British armor in Normandy had significant shortcomings. Divisions trained as instruments of exploitation made heavy weather of assignment as breakthrough forces. Interarm cooperation was poor, within the armored divisions and between the infantry divisions and the independent tank formations supporting them. The heterogeneous origins of the armored forces, ranging from war-raised infantry battalions converted to tanks, through cavalry regiments that were still riding horses in 1941, to the Foot Guards themselves, facilitated operational entropy that could not be entirely overcome by transfers and replacements.

  Orthodox criticisms of the tankers have nevertheless been recently and successfully challenged by a common-sense observation: British concepts of armor employment did not replicate German ones. Twenty-first Army Group intended to make the Germans fight its kind of battle. That involved making carefully prepared set-piece attacks supported by heavy firepower in narrow sectors. It involved exploiting success without taking excessive risks. It was a concept based on technology and material, setting steel to do the work of flesh: in June and July alone, British tank losses totaled around 1,300.

  The British way in Normandy combined the “colossal cracks” that were Montgomery’s specialty with the “bite and hold” approach developed in World War I and identified with trench- warfare generals like Plumer and Rawlinson. Normandy added something new to the mix. By 1944 the German practice of responding to enemy tactical success by an immediate, often improvised, armor-tipped counterattack, was common knowledge. The obvious response was to defeat the counterattack. That involved consolidating ground gained, bringing up towed and self-propelled antitank guns, and “seeing off ” the panzers. An outstanding example was offered by 1st Tyneside Scottish on July 1 at Rauray. This typical infantry battalion, supported by a company of Shermans, stopped five separate attacks by battle groups of Hohenstaufen and Das Reich in a 14-hour fight that accounted for the destruction of around 35 tanks and assault guns. Ten of those were claimed by the Tynesiders’ antitank platoon, whose six-pounders had little chance against a Panther except in close-quarters fighting.

  Like Frederick the Great’s oblique attack order two centuries earlier, the panzer counterattack lost mystique and effectiveness as its predictability increased. The Allies of 1944 were not the French of 1940 or the Russians of 1941-42. Getting inside their decision cycles might still be possible. Throwing them significantly off balance was likely to be a serious and expensive proposition. In Rommel’s words, “a soldier . . . must have sufficient intelligence to get the most out of his fighting machine. And that these people can do. . . .”

  The Germans’ tactical problem was exacerbated by Hitler’s insistence on holding forward positions as opposed to sanctioning the flexible defense sought by the panzer commanders. This policy offered some advantage, as it kept the fighting in the Normandy bocage, among the best defensive terrain in northwest Europe. But it also exposed an infantry whose declining quality often led to heavy, morale-sapping losses. By mid-July German casualties approached 100,000. Fewer than 6,000 replacements had arrived.

  The panzer divisions High Command West and Army Group B originally intended for a major counterattack were being drawn one by one into frontline killing grounds. They not only had to replace now-lacking infantrymen, but provide fire support to compensate for a nonexistent Luftwaffe and artillery whose strength rapidly declined under Allied bombs and shells. One panzer grenadier battalion came off a bitterly contested hill with fewer than 50 men still standing. The Hitler Jugend division was eviscerated in a month, losing 17,000 men and its commander—but not before murdering enough Canadian prisoners to initiate a mercifully brief episode of mutual reprisals.

  Generals were easier to find than soldiers. The commander of 7th Army, facing the Americans, committed suicide on June 27, and was replaced by Paul Hausser—the first time an SS general was assigned an army command. Geyer drew up a searing critique of the first month’s fighting that attracted Hitler’s attention. On July 6 he was also relieved, his command renamed 5th Panzer Army and assigned to Heinrich Eberbach, whose solid Eastern Front credentials and reputation as an enthusiastic Nazi was in Hitler’s eyes a winning combination.

  Meanwhile, the Americans, under Omar Bradley, chewed through the bocage with more determination than finesse. Moving into the Cotentin peninsula, 1st US Army captured a devastated Cherbourg on June 26, but made slow progress toward St. Lo and the open country beyond it. The Germans in this sector multiplied its natural defensive potential by the flexible tactical system dating from World War I and modified in Russia: holding front lines thinly, determining the American tactical Schwerpunkt, then counterattacking. But Normandy was kept short of troops in favor of the northern sector. On July 24, 14 divisions, half of them mechanized, were concentrated around Caen. The Americans faced nine, only three mechanized and one of them just rotated south for a rest cure after being badly mauled by the British while supporting the worn- out infantry. Panzer Lehr Division, for example, was virtually semi-mobile, using its tanks to patrol gaps between strong points manned by panzer grenadiers whose half-tracks had been left behind as useless in the bocage.

  On July 25 Allied bombers and American artillery blew open the German front and blew up most of Panzer Lehr. As a combination of shock and exploitation, Operation Cobra succeeded brilliantly. German reserves were exhausted. German commanders who had spent six weeks responding to local, specific threats were unable to readjust their thinking to the changed scale of events. German resistance eroded, then crumbled, then collapsed. A single Panther of Das Reich held up an armored column for most of a morning. But on July 31, 4th Armored Division captured the key road junction of Avranches. On August 1 George Patton’s 3rd Army became operational and began transforming the breakthrough to a breakout.

  Von Kluge, recovered from his accident, had replaced Rundstedt on July 7. Ten days later, he assumed command of Army Group B as well when Rommel was wounded in an air attack. He described the situation in blunt terms as a Riesensauerei (ratfuck), with the Americans on the verge of being able to do what they wanted, where they wanted.

  Matters grew worse after Montgomery launched his own offensive on July 30. Operation Bluecoat was no blitzkrieg, but it made steady progress against a series of armored counterattacks characterized by tactical skill at the expense of coordination and shock power. Tigers, King Tigers, and Jagdpanthers appeared here and there, by twos and threes, to create temporary shock, awe, and havoc before breaking down or being disabled. Hohenstaufen was down to 34 AFVs on August 4, after only two days’ serious fighting.

  Kluge recommended retreat across the Seine. Hitler ordered instead a counterattack toward Avranches and eventually the coast, to be mounted by no fewer than eight of the mechanized divisions currently deployed in France. Kluge, who was significantly involved in the July 20 plot against Hitler, was in no position to temporize, much less protest. Nor was the counterattack’s concept exactly an example of an amateur making war with maps. Indeed, had Kluge consulted a map he might have concluded that the serpentine, narrow Seine was unlikely to be more than an inconvenience to the motorized Allies. Once Normandy was lost the next viable long-term defensive position was the Westwall, on the borders of the Reich itself. Throwing the Allies into the sea might by now be a chimera. But using what remained of the panzers to throw the Amer
icans back into the bocage was a reasonable alternative to seeing the armor ground down day by day or enveloped by an Allied breakout.

  Hitler’s admonition to attack at full strength was also theoretically sensible. Kluge, however, was in no position to concentrate the divisions that were holding together his rapidly collapsing front. He managed to assemble 2nd and 116th Panzer, Das Reich, and elements of the Leibstandarte in XLVII Panzer Corps under Hans von Funck—about 300 tanks and assault guns. Funck was a first-rate tank man who had commanded 7th Panzer Division from 1941 to 1943 and XLVII Panzer Corps since March. Speed was his best force multiplier, and the panzers had not forgotten how to hit fast and hard. Going in on the night of August 6, Das Reich captured Mortain and opened the road to Avranches. On its right, the army’s 2nd Panzer drove through one American regiment and almost encircled another.

  “Almost,” however, was the operative word. Funck and Kluge lacked the reserves to exploit initial successes. The Americans rallied instead of breaking. Artillery fire called in by a battalion surrounded on high ground outside Mortain took toll of Das Reich’s columns; antitank guns blocked the division’s armor. The 30th Infantry Division and elements of 3rd Armored halted and then counterattacked 2nd Panzer and Leibstandarte. Omnipresent fighter-bombers—American Thunderbolts and British Typhoons—savaged the unarmored vehicles backed up on every road in the sector. Orders to shift to the defensive were garbled or misunderstood, risking both the operation and the troops involved.