Hitler's Panzers (6 page)

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 reserves. 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.

Such concepts were best nurtured in an environment where the kinds and levels of friction inevitable in maneuvers conducted on large scales with conscript forces did not exercise a sobering impact. In the fall of 1930, the Reichswehr maneuver amounted to a full- fledged mobilization exercise. All ten divisions were included in the scenario, though for the sake of economy most were represented by their staff and intelligence sections. The maneuver nevertheless featured full telephone and radio nets, a postal service, and all the rest of a modern administrative system. It also incorporated simulated tank forces. The maneuver’s purpose was to test commanders and senior staffs. The emphasis was on challenging “fog and friction” by speed, maneuverability, and flexibility. The fast pace and complex scenarios resulted in high levels of confusion, duly noted by foreign observers. But the resulting melees in a sense reflected the outcome sought by a developing German doctrine for combat against superior forces: jump down their throats and kick them to death from inside.

The Reichswehr’s developing skill in motorized operations at both theoretical and practical levels was further highlighted in the maneuvers of September 1932, held in the area of Frankfurt an der Oder. The respective commanders would be heard from again. Their names were Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock. Blue, the defending force under Rundstedt, had two cavalry divisions and only a single infantry division. Bock’s Red invaders, intended to represent Poles, included an entire cavalry corps, with cyclists and motorcyclists, motorized artillery, and motorized reconnaissance elements. The combat vehicles and the motorized formations were almost all simulated. Results were mixed, particularly when horses and motor vehicles attempted to cooperate directly. But the speed and scope of the exercises impressed all observers. Some motorized units advanced 300 kilometers in three days—a pace unmatched since the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages. It would have been difficult to transform the Reichswehr into a defen sively oriented force—even had a government with the will and power to do so existed.

The army’s prospective mechanization was hardly a closely guarded secret. In a public lecture to a patriotic organization, Defense Minister Wilhelm Groener described a future army with a fully motorized cavalry, a developed system of antitank weapons, and a force of light and medium tanks able to support infantry and operate independently. This was by now a standard boilerplate. But considered in a wider context, it might seem surreal—along with this entire chapter. A German army expressly forbidden the use of aircraft and armored vehicles nevertheless systematically investigates, analyzes, and begins to implement in exercises the techniques of modern war. Instead the present text repeatedly refers to foreign observers taking notes at Reichswehr maneuvers, but does not mention their filing any specific charges of violating the terms of Versailles. Just what was going on?

Weimar Germany was a sovereign state. Its soldiers could not reasonably be prevented from speculating on the nature of the wars they might have to fight. When the issue came up, German spokesmen made a convincing case that the very circumstances of German disarmament required the Reichswehr to be highly cognizant of possible threats it could not match directly. In practical contexts, moreover, the Germans kept well to the treaty’s terms. The few dozen imitations and improvisations that took the field for a few days each autumn were hardly fear-inspiring, and were quickly dismantled. The collaboration with the Soviet Union was likewise known to the Allied agencies responsible for enforcing the armistice terms. Their combined contributions to Germany’s military system were correctly judged as marginal.

From the perspectives of France and Britain and from the perspective of the League of Nations as well, standing on details was considered counterproductive when compared with the prospects of drawing Weimar Germany into a general program of European disarmament. In 1927 the Foreign Office successfully negotiated the withdrawal of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, which since 1919 had supervised the nuts and bolts of disarmament. The diplomats saw this as a step toward national security in an international context. The Reichswehr considered it an opportunity to pursue and expand its programs in preparation of a bigger future. In the years that Adolf Hitler was coming to power in Germany, the Reichswehr would establish the foundations for a Wehrmacht that developed into a uniquely formidable instrument of war.

CHAPTER TWO

G
ERMANY BECAME AN official member of the League of Nations’ Preparatory Commission on Disarmament in 1926. The adjective, not the noun, was the key word in that body’s title. Its history is a story of gridlock. German policy makers were by no means secretive or cynical. They insisted openly and emphatically that collective security depended on equality of armed forces at mutually acceptable levels. That meant revision of Europe’s status quo not necessarily on Germany’s terms, but in Germany’s favor. Reducing numbers and limiting weapons—particularly the “offensive” weapons like tanks and aircraft, so often excoriated by disarmament advocates—could only improve Germany’s relative position.

DISARMAMENT OFFERED OTHER prospects. By the mid-1920s the Reichswehr was internationally admired for the quality of its personnel, the level of its training, and not least its high morale. Its numerical weakness limited its operational worth against its neighbors’ exponentially stronger conscript forces. Reducing those armies’ numbers would highlight the advantages of a professional, long-service force. And it would be the Reichswehr that possessed the advantage of direct experience with such a system.

By the mid-1920s Germany’s military helplessness in practical contexts was beyond reasonable denial. In the east, man for man and company for company, the Reichswehr might be exponentially superior to Polish conscripts. But what if the Poles kept coming until the Germans ran out of ammunition? German plans involved creating local volunteer forces as a second line. But the probable survival time of an SA Standarte or a Stahlhelm detachment against a Polish battalion in the open field was measurable in hours—perhaps minutes. In the west, the Ruhr occupation of 1923 and the bloody record of contemporary French imperialism from Syria to Morocco indicated that anything like the civilian-based
Volkskrieg
(People’s War) advocated by some enthusiasts might salvage German national honor, but at a price neither politicians nor soldiers were willing to consider.