Hitler's Panzers (20 page)

Wars may not be won by evacuations. It is nevertheless incontestable that the way Dunkirk was evacuated contributed vitally to Britain’s continuing the fight. Not only did the country’s only significant force of trained soldiers survive to fight again; they returned in archetypi cally British fashion: brought home by the Royal Navy and the British people, in organized formations, ready at least in public “to have another go.” Dunkirk lent moral and material substance to the famous image of a defiant Tommy proclaiming, “Very well, then! Alone!” What might have been the reaction had Britain confronted a demoralized rabble of stragglers and survivors?

The BEF of 1940 did not lack courage. But initiative, flexibility, and tactical skill were not among its strong points. Hew Strachan accurately describes it as “outthought and outmaneuvered.” The rains that softened the ground around Dunkirk did not begin to fall until after May 24. Had the panzers caught up with the British retreat, it is not too difficult to imagine replications of the situations created after the breakthrough at Sedan, of men giving up the fight from simple confusion. The risks were clear, but Hitler’s Reich and German blitzkrieg had in common a bottom line of opportunism. Eventually both would decay into choosing what seemed to be the easy way as a preferred option. And in that context it is worth remembering the words of another soldier, this one from the seventeenth century, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose: “He either fears his fate too much/Or his deserts are small/That puts it not unto the touch/To win or lose it all.”

Such apocalyptically gloomy thoughts were far from the minds of most of the tankers, privates to generals, taking position for Case Red, the conquest of France. The high command’s assumption that the French no longer possessed any significant reserves produced a decision to distribute the panzers across the sectors of Army Groups B and A, using infantry and artillery to secure multiple simultaneous breakthroughs, then directing and combining mobile forces as opportunities for exploitation developed.

Despite the short time available, the French had established a solid defense in depth along the Somme and Aisne, integrated by checker-boarded strong points based on farms and villages. Many units had been ordered to hold
sans esprit de recul
—to the finish. They fought with grim determination and improved finesse. Crossing the rivers cost the Germans time and lives. Stuka strikes had limited success neutralizing mutually supporting networks, as opposed to knocking out individual positions. But once the zone of resistance was penetrated, there was nothing much behind it—certainly nothing that could stop panzers on the loose.

The French were still in the process of reconstructing their shattered mobile divisions when the Germans struck. Army commanders continued to distribute their remaining tanks by battalions, so closely behind forward positions they were easily bypassed. Britain provided its only armored division: around 300 rivet-shedding deathtraps that broke down about as quickly as German gunners could disable them. German armored columns fanned out across central France, overcoming dozens and hundreds of small-scale stands by improvised task forces, brushing aside counterattacks by “provisional companies” of surviving tanks from broken units and “independent companies” equipped with tanks fresh off production lines. Their monuments were a few helmet-topped crosses alongside country roads.

Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had been dubbed the “ghost division” for its speed and flexibility: “Now you see it, now you don’t.” The Ghosts went cross-country to capture Le Havre, set an army record by advancing more than 160 miles in a single day to seize the city and fortress of Cherbourg in an urban blitz, and finished the war on its way to the Spanish frontier. Third Panzer Division reached Grenoble. Second Motorized finished the campaign in the Loire Valley. The chief laurels of Case Red, however, fell to Guderian. Given his own panzer group of four armored and two motorized divisions, he shouldered his way across the Aisne, then swung southwest in the rear of the Maginot Line, isolating the area as Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s infantry-based Army Group C attacked the fortifications from the front. In the autumn of 1939, Manstein had discussed forcing the French to fight on the wrong side of their vaunted fortifications. On June 16, Guderian—who, parenthetically, was officially under the command of 12th Army—made the concept work. He swung his tanks and riflemen 90 degrees east for a broad-front thrust into Alsace. Executed so smoothly that its difficulty has gone unnoticed, the movement completed the encirclement of almost a half million French soldiers in the historic battleground and killing ground from Nancy to Belfort. That other elements of the panzer group reached the Swiss border the next day was a bonus for the journalists—and for Hitler, who at first refused to believe the dispatch. And all of this was achieved, moreover, without the massive air support Guderian enjoyed in the breakout from Sedan.

In those contexts it made little difference that Italy entered the war on June 10, or that Paris, declared an open city by a fugitive government, was occupied—by a straight- leg infantry division—on June 13. Marshal Philippe Petain, aged hero of the Great War and newly appointed prime minister, requested an armistice on June 17, while something remained to be salvaged. On June 22 the agreement was signed, in the same railroad car that had been used for the armistice of 1918. Adolf Hitler lacked an ironist’s subtlety, but he had a keen sense of history.

CHAPTER FOUR

F
OR HITLER’S PANZERS the summer of 1940 was a time of high celebration. The sun had never shone so brightly—literally, in the near-perfect weather, and metaphorically in the favors showering from an ostensibly grateful Führer. The tankers were not yet sufficiently well positioned to share in the cornucopia of gifts, decorations, and promotions at the very top that produced so many new field marshals that Rundstedt grumbled his new rank had been cheapened. They nevertheless finished well up in the victory sweepstakes. Kleist, Guderian, Hoth, and Hoepner were all promoted
Generaloberst
(General) with the same date of rank: July 19.

With a major expansion of mobile forces in the works, opportunities were opening at every level of command from division to platoon. The two Armored Troop Schools at Münster and Wuensdorf were well into their wartime stride as officer training establishments. Cadets were assigned after basic training with their unit—if they had no combat experience—followed by eight weeks of officer training. The branch school provided sixteen weeks of specialized technical and tactical instruction. Cadets then returned, usually to their original units, for a probationary period prior to being commissioned. In contrast to the Americans and to some degree the British, the German army believed that anyone unable to command and lead those he had served among as an enlisted man was unlikely to make a good officer. At higher levels there were training courses for new battalion commanders, second chances for salvageable officers with blotted copybooks, and useful training and staff appointments for those a bit long in the tooth or slow in reaction to be useful for field operations

Napoleon once said soldiers are led with baubles. For officers with “sore throats,” army slang for anyone seeming interested in the higher decorations worn around the neck, Rommel and most of his senior counterparts were as generous with recommendations as the High Command was in accepting them. And many an enlisted
Panzermann
could return home on a hero’s furlough with an Iron Cross on his chest.

The price of all this? Around 700 tanks permanently lost—most of them obsolescent, eminently expendable Panzer Is and IIs. Fewer than 50,000 killed in the entire Wehrmacht during the whole campaign. In most of the mobile units, losses had been low enough to foster nostalgia for absent friends rather than mutual speculation on who would be next.

The tankers stood down. Fifth and 7th Panzer Divisions prepared desultorily for an invasion of England that the High Command projected as a large-scale river crossing. The project was treated with appropriate seriousness at regiment and company levels—which is to say the Landser generally enjoyed themselves splashing in the water and messing around with boats. Other divisions, like 4th and 10th Panzer, drew duty in occupied France: deferential men, accommodating women, and ample sightseeing. Still more fortunate outfits went home promptly: 3rd Panzer to Berlin and 9th to Vienna, where their receptions were a good deal more enthusiastic than they had been when marching out in 1939.

IN THE FALL of 1940 Adolf Hitler had the opportunity to consolidate rule over a European empire unmatched since the days of Napoleon. Norway, the Low Countries, and northern France lay under German occupation. The government of Vichy France was eager to assume the role of a client state. Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain were vulnerable to German pressure. Nazi influence in the Balkans grew by the week. Josef Stalin still “trusted” his treaty partner to continue acting like a capitalist. Rational calculation, which excluded the Winston Churchills and Charles de Gaulles, allowed only one conclusion: the Third Reich was here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. That conclusion had been shaped by the Wehrmacht—specifically its panzer divisions.

Blitzkrieg essentially meant convincing participants and observers—one’s own side and the home front included—that enemies faced inevitable and humiliating defeat. In a technological age, that no longer meant man-to-man physical superiority as it had in the Middle Ages, or even at times in the trenches of the Western Front. It spoke rather to the ability to use the means at one’s disposal so effectively that resistance seemed not merely futile but pathetic, without even the heroic element that traditionally informs last stands and forlorn hopes in Western military mythology. Prisoners usually look frightened and shabby compared to their captors—one reason why the current laws of war forbid showing their pictures. Even over a half-century’s distance, prisoners of blitzkrieg appear shocked out of their higher cognitive abilities. Their conquerors seem from another dimension, unmarked physically and psychologically—“overmen” in the original sense of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The disaster that overtook the western allies in May and June of 1940 has been ascribed to the erosion of national will and morale during the interwar years. It has been presented as the fruit of strategic and tactical doctrines inadequate to meet the German challenge. It has been described as reflecting shortcomings of organization, training, and intelligence. In the same context the German victory is presented as a faute de mieux improvisation: a combination of unpredictable chance, Allied mistakes, and the behavior of a few hard-driving panzer generals who presented their own high command with a series of faits accomplis. Far from prefiguring a new way of war, the successes of 1940 arguably led Germany down a dead-end road of operative hubris, emphasizing combat at the expense of strategy. In an age of industrialized mass war, lightning victories would prove a temporary and fatal anachronism.

Blitzkrieg’s real victor in 1940 was National Socialism. Hitler celebrated the successes of May and June in Nazi terms: as a triumph of will, informed by a consciousness of martial superiority that in turn depended on the racial superiority evoked and refined by the Third Reich. In that context, blitzkrieg played a central, arguably essential role in the “exterminatory warfare” that was Nazi Germany’s true contribution to modern war making. Some forewarning was given by the treatment of the West African troops the French deployed in large numbers during the campaign’s second half. The atrocities had historical roots: fear and resentment generated by French use of African “savages” in 1870 and 1914-18. The kind of close-quarters fighting in streets and woods characterizing many initial breakthroughs is not usually conducive to taking prisoners, and German soldiers were conditioned to be ruthless in combat. They arguably entertained as well a generalized sense that the war was, for practical purposes over, and regarded continued resistance as immoral because it was futile.

Neither direct orders nor wink-and-a nudge tolerance at higher levels sanctioned abuses that, rather than being systematic, tended to be situational by perpetrators, places, and times. After all allowances are made there is nevertheless no question that German soldiers, including men from the mobile divisions, disproportionately refused quarter to black combatants, disproportionately singled out black prisoners for brutal treatment including large-scale executions in non-combat situations, and justified themselves on racial grounds. Only the degenerate French would put subhumans into uniform, call them soldiers, and give them license to mutilate German wounded. It was an evil portent.

Another portent existed for those with wit or will to see. It is a familiar paradox that history’s greatest war was directed and controlled by civilians: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin—and Adolf Hitler. Their styles ranged from Roosevelt’s Olympian position as ultimate decision maker and arbiter to Churchill’s hands-on interventionist approach. None eventually exercised more comprehensive control of their nation’s war effort than did Hitler. It is a downplayed irony that he achieved that position in the face of a military establishment that, since the eighteenth century, had been widely considered the driving wheel of a Prussia/Germany that was “an army with its own country.”

Whatever his motives, in front of Dunkirk, Adolf Hitler faced down the High Command on a military issue that was clearly in the operational sphere with no real elements of policy or politics. That had made him the first ever ruler of Prussia/Germany, king or kaiser, chancellor or president, to exercise direct control of the generals on their own ground. Hitler, convinced of his own military genius, determined to assert his authority at any price, saw the halt order as the capstone of a campaign he had shaped, in a war he had sought and initiated. It was the first step in what became a pattern of exercising direct command based on remarkable memory for details, adamant refusal to accept inconsistencies or discrepancies, and unshakable belief that decisions were best made spontaneously, with instinct processing data and will inspiring results. Well before the Reich’s downfall, micromanagement would become an analgesic—not only for Hitler, but for his generals as well.