Hitler's Panzers (21 page)

Prognostication was eclipsed by reconfiguration. The expansion of Germany’s mobile forces initiated in the autumn of 1940 is generally and legitimately connected with Hitler’s parallel decision to invade the Soviet Union. The reorganization, however, had an army taproot as well. The 1940 campaign left no serious doubt that large-scale mobile operations were the wave of the future, and that foot-marching infantry and horse-drawn artillery belonged to a rapidly vanishing past. Manstein, who did not entirely waste his time as commander of an infantry corps, voiced a consensus in reporting that existing infantry divisions lacked the firepower to break through defenses and the mobility to exploit success. That rendered them dependent on the panzers, and created the risk of a two-tier army. Certainly as well any prospective adversary would imitate the Germans by massing tanks, motorizing infantry, and using air power in ground combat. A smaller army would be able to upgrade its standard divisions by increasing their motorization and adding assault guns, self-propelled antitank guns, and antiaircraft guns to the orders of battle.

That perspective shaped the army’s initial reaction to Hitler’s decision, announced as early as May 15, to shift military production to the Luftwaffe and the navy while reducing the army to 120 divisions. Twenty of these, the Führer declared, would be armored, and ten more motorized. On June 18 the General Staff agreed to create ten new panzer divisions despite the continued shortage of armored and unarmored vehicles of all kinds. Six weeks later, on July 31, Hitler held a conference on strategic priorities. There he announced his intention to invade Russia early in 1941—before then, if possible. The result was another shift in the army’s institutional emphasis: creating as many as possible combat-ready formations of any kind, in order to meet the mission’s geographic demands as well as its operational ones.

The configuration of the army being created for the invasion of Russia exacerbated the difference between the panzers and the rest. Most of the new panzer and motorized divisions were created by converting and expanding 14 of the 36 active infantry divisions created after 1933. That meant well over half the original peacetime army, the hard core of Germany’s ground forces, was now part of a technology-based elite that, for practical purposes after the invasion of Russia, would be increased only by the incorporation of the Waffen SS. The remaining active divisions that still marched to fight lost effectiveness by being heavily milked to stiffen the no fewer than sixteen “waves” of infantry divisions organized by summer 1941. Those toward the bottom of the list were scraping the barrel for cadres, weapons, and equipment, with much of the latter two coming from conquered and occupied countries. It was correspondingly obvious that the panzer and motorized divisions would have to do the serious work.

That would require a capacity for both assault and exploitation, and an improved level of sustainability. The most significant feature of the panzer arm’s reorganization was the shift in the balance of tanks and infantry in a panzer division. The panzer brigade was reduced to a single regiment, usually of two battalions and around 150 tanks. The motorized brigade, however, was increased to two two-battalion regiments and a motorcycle battalion, with one of the rifle battalions riding half tracks. This 50 percent reduction in armored strength was subsequently excoriated by theorists like B. H. Liddell-Hart and field soldiers like Guderian for increasing rear echelons at the expense of fighting power, and privileging wheels over treads. It is frequently attributed to Hitler’s fetishistic emphasis on numbers at the expense of everything else. In fact, the rebalancing had been considered after the Polish campaign, and confirmed in 1940. The motorcyclists had been effective as a swing force, able both to fight afoot and add punch to the reconnaissance battalion. There never seemed to be enough infantry, however, to cope with the near-simultaneous demands of breaking through defense lines, mopping up bypassed positions, securing exposed flanks, and consolidating captured ground in the face of counterattacks accompanying the armor.

It was certainly possible to increase the panzer division’s infantry and keep its tanks at the same number: fewer divisions but more powerful ones. Massed tanks, however, had been shown to pose problems of control that limited their effectiveness against reasonably well-defended positions, Gembloux being the prime example. The large numbers of rear-echelon vehicles required by a two-tank-regiment division had regularly led to traffic problems significantly hampering operations. Radios had their limits. So did the talents of commanders. The German way of war depended on a high average rather than erratic genius. The commander of a panzer division had to be more than “a good ordinary general,” but it flew in the face of experience to expect too many of them to be gifted battle captains in the mode of a Rommel. For the same reason of effective control, motorized divisions were kept at their existing strength: two three-battalion regiments with neither tanks nor half-tracks.

Fighting the French had also indicated that in armored war, quality was at least as important a force multiplier as numbers. Survivability was important both to sustainability and morale. The vulnerable Panzer Is and IIs were being replaced with the more formidable Panzer III coming off the Reich’s production lines. The repeatedly demonstrated shortcomings of the 37mm gun as a main armament led to its replacement in the G version by a 50mm gun whose 42-caliber barrel made it a rough counterpart of the 75mm gun mounted on the early versions of the US Sherman—that is to say, a general-purpose weapon useful in supporting infantry, effective against tanks, but not a real tank-killer. About 450 of this version were produced by February 1941, alongside 300 of an up-armored Model H. A number of older Panzer IIIs were also rearmed with the 50mm gun—a tribute to the generous design of the turret ring. The Panzer IV had been satisfactory overall; its E and F versions were distinguished primarily by increased side and frontal armor.

While scales of equipment varied a good deal in practice, a well-outfitted tank battalion of 1941 with German material had two or three light companies of 17 Panzer IIIs and 5 Panzer IIs, and one medium company of 10 Panzer IVs and 5 Panzer IIs. The Panzer IIs were filler, to be used and used up for reconnaissance and other secondary missions until enough IIIs and IVs became available. The tables reflected production figures that trailed far behind unit requirements. Hitler initially asked for as many as a thousand tanks a month. Minister for Armament and War Production Fritz Todt responded that it would cost two billion marks, require a hundred thousand skilled workers, and disrupt submarine and aircraft deliveries originally secured by cutting back the construction of new munitions plants.

The High Command received a similarly discouraging answer when it pressed for an increase in tank production from the 200 or so a month that remained standard. Goals of delivering 2,800 Panzer IIIs and IVs by April 1941 remained chimerical. In May 1941, plans were developed for a major production program: more than 34,000 vehicles to complete equipping the mobile divisions. The target date was 1944. Meanwhile, actual tank production reached a low of 120 in September 1940. One new panzer regiment was built around Panzer IIs originally adapted for underwater movement as part of the aborted preparations for invading Britain. As a point of comparison, as late as April 1941, material shortages and production problems meant that seven million rounds for the standard 105mm howitzer existed only as empty shell casings—no propellant, no explosive. By comparison the panzers were well off.

The numbers gap was filled in part by the factories of Bohemia. They continued the steady manufacture of enough 38(t)s to equip five divisions with three battalions, more than a hundred each, and keep 6th Panzer Division’s 35(t)s up to strength as well. But that 30 percent of its ground-force cutting edge went into battle in obsolescent tanks looted from a second-rate power is a clear sign that Wehrmacht planning agencies put more energy into preparing for the exploitation of Soviet resources than into providing the tools for their conquest.

One consequence was the inability to provide three battalions of up-to-date tanks for more than three of the reconfigured divisions that went to war against the USSR. Three battalions provided organizational flexibility. Three battalions might sustain effectiveness by consolidating. Two were far more likely to reach a tipping point, especially in fast-paced offensive action without regular pauses for maintenance and regular replacement of losses. A second loser in the armaments sweepstakes was the assault gun force. Four of the first six batteries served in France. Their low silhouettes and high firepower proved their worth from the beginning of the campaign. Regiment Grossdeutschland had nothing but praise for its six organic
Sturmgeschütz
(StuGs) at Stonne for working hand in hand with the riflemen in street fighting, demolishing barricades, and carrying heavy weapons and ammunition. The gun’s limited traverse was not a problem in a direct-support role, while the vehicle’s presence alone gave a valuable boost to the foot soldiers’ morale.

The artillery, whose role in the West had been significantly limited compared to the Great War, was fully convinced and began training the first battalions (three six-gun batteries) in the summer of 1940. Service with the StuGs has been described as popular because it was the quickest way to decoration and promotion. The assault artillery did win more than 150 Knight’s Crosses, with lesser medals in proportion. But they were won the hard way, and throughout the war the guns were manned by volunteers.

Men were easier to find than equipment. Despite the support of two powerful branches of service, assault gun production remained limited—around 30 per month and not exceeding 50 until June 1941. As a result only two battalions every three months, later three every two months, joined the pre-Barbarossa order of battle. Instead of being assigned to divisions, as originally intended, they were held as army troops, sent where need was greatest—another reinforcement of armor’s elite, almost separate, status even when its crews wore artillery colors.

The emerging differentiation between the armored force and the rest of the army was further exacerbated by the absence of progress developing self-propelled antitank guns. The concept was simple enough: attach a gun to the chassis of an obsolescent tank, of which the army had an ample supply. Nevertheless by June 1941 the inventory of such vehicles amounted to about 150 of the 47mm Czech guns on Panzer I bodies mentioned in Chapter 3. Doing the same thing with captured French equipment does not seem to have even been considered at higher levels, though two tank regiments were eventually organized with French vehicles.

Antitank defense in general had a low practical priority in the run-up to Barbarossa. The near-useless 37mm towed gun was in the process of being more or less replaced by an excellent 50mm/62-caliber piece. Its early production runs were so small that they were issued to the infantry by two-gun sections. Infantry companies were issued small-bore antitank rifles: more sophisticated and less dangerous to their users than their World War I forebears, but effective only against the kind of light tanks that everywhere were being phased out of service. And doctrine expressly forbade using already scarce assault guns in an antitank role. The Landser in Russia would spend too long depending on well-placed hand grenades and overloads of nerve—or desperation.

In near-absolute contrast to its behavior after the Polish campaign, the German army in 1940-41 not merely accepted but enabled two massive disconnects: between a motorized/mechanized elite and everything else, and within that elite, between structure and equipment. Both cognitive dissonances were subsumed beneath a euphoria that exceeded even the “victory disease” that infected the Imperial Japanese Navy in the months between Pearl Harbor and Midway. Robert M. Citino describes a “literature of exaltation” that reflected the National Socialist intellectual structure of heroism and sacrifice. The Nazis’ crude racism was also not without its appeal; soldiers in all places at all times seek as many credible grounds as possible to assert superiority over their enemies. To interpret the army’s mentality to a double penetration by National Socialist culture and Nazified personnel is nevertheless to overlook its roots in professional pride. The high-tech, low-cost victories of 1939-40 lifted the German generals’ morale in ways incomprehensible to those who had not experienced the Western Front a quarter-century earlier. Places whose names had symbolized a generation’s sacrifice and a generation’s failure—Verdun, Ypres, Amiens—had fallen like beads pulled from a string, rating scarcely a line in official reports. The invasion of Britain had been a nonstarter, but that was easily rationalized by claiming special circumstances.

Citino accurately presents this pride in terms of satisfaction at what seemed the definitive culmination of decades and centuries of thought and effort: not merely a German way of war but a new paradigm of war itself. There was, however, another factor. The combination of mobility, firepower, and electronic communications developed and applied by the panzers was seen as merely the matrix, epitomizing and amplifying the warrior spirit of the new German soldier. Boldness, decisiveness, “necessary hardness”—these were the mainsprings of an unmatched triumph, facilitated perhaps by National Socialism but structured and inspired by the traditional bearer of German values: the army.

The exact balance of the developing synergy between Nazis and soldiers, the exact balance between values recently acquired and values long entertained, may legitimately be debated. The result, however, is clear: a level of hubris defying and denying the more balanced legacies of Frederick the Great, Moltke the Elder, and Hans von Seeckt. These men understood that Destiny is no man’s drudge and Bellona no man’s trull. It was a lesson their successors had yet to learn. The means of their instruction would be an army fundamentally flawed relative to its missions and flawed by design.