CHAPTER ONE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1916, began as a routine day for the German infantrymen in the forward trenches around Flers on the Somme—as routine as any day was likely to be after two and a half months of vicious, close-gripped fighting that bled divisions white and reduced battalions to the strength of companies. True, an occasional rumble of engines had been audible across the line. But the British had more trucks than the Kaiser’s army, and were more willing to risk them to bring up ammunition and carry back wounded. True, there had been occasional gossip of something new up Tommy’s sleeve: of armored “land cruisers” impervious to anything less than a six-inch shell. But rumors—Scheisshausparolen in Landser speak—were endemic on the Western Front. Then “a forest of guns opened up in a ceaseless, rolling thunder, the few remaining survivors . . . fight on until the British flood overwhelms them, consumes them, and passes on. . . . An extraordinary number of men. And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters: the first British tanks.”
I
IMPROVISED AND POORLY coordinated, the British attack soon collapsed in the usual welter of blood and confusion. But for the first time on the Western Front, certainly the first time on the Somme, the heaviest losses were suffered by the defenders. Reactions varied widely. Some men panicked; others fought to a finish. But the 14th Bavarian Infantry, for example, tallied more than 1,600 casualties. Almost half were “missing,” and most of them were prisoners. That was an unheard-of ratio in an army that still prided itself on its fighting spirit. But the 14th was one of the regiments hit on the head by the tanks.
Shock rolled uphill. “The enemy,” one staff officer recorded, “employed new engines of war, as cruel as effective. . . . It is necessary to take whatever methods are possible to counteract them.” From the Allied perspective, the impact of tanks on the Great War is generally recognized. The cottage industry among scholars of the British learning curve, with descriptions of proto-mechanized war pitted against accounts of a semi-mobile final offensive based on combined arms and improved communications, recognizes the centrality of armor for both interpretations. French accounts are structured by Marshal Philippe Petain’s judgment that, in the wake of the frontline mutinies of 1917, it was necessary to wait for “the Americans and the tanks.” Certainly it was the tanks, the light Renault FT-17s, that carried the exhausted French infantry forward in the months before the armistice. Erich Ludendorff, a general in a position to know, declared after the war that Germany had been defeated not by Marshal Foch but by “General Tank.”
In those contexts it is easy to overlook the salient fact that the German army was quick and effective in developing antitank techniques. This was facilitated by the moonscape terrain of the Western Front, the mechanical unreliability of early armored vehicles, and such technical grotesqueries as the French seeking to increase the range of their early tanks by installing extra fuel tanks on their roofs, which virtually guaranteed the prompt incineration of the crew unless they were quick to abandon the vehicle. Even at Flers the Germans had taken on tanks like any other targets: aiming for openings in the armor, throwing grenades, using field guns over open sights. German intelligence thoroughly interrogated one captured tanker and translated a diary lost by another. Inside of a week, Berlin had a general description of the new weapons, accompanied by a rough but reasonably accurate sketch.
One of the most effective antitank measures was natural. Tanks drew fire from everywhere, fire sufficiently intense to strip away any infantry in their vicinity. A tank by itself was vulnerable. Therefore, the German tactic was to throw everything available at the tanks and keep calm if they kept coming. Proactive countermeasures began with inoculating the infantry against “tank fright” by using knocked-out vehicles to demonstrate their various vulnerabilities. An early frontline improvisation was the geballte Ladung: the heads of a half dozen stick grenades tied around a complete “potato-masher” and thrown into one of a tank’s many openings—or, more basic, the same half dozen grenades shoved into a sandbag and the fuse of one of them pulled. More effective and less immediately risky was the K-round. This was simply a bullet with a tungsten carbide core instead of the soft alloys commonly used in small arms rounds. Originally developed to punch holes in metal plates protecting enemy machine-gun and sniper positions, it was employed to even better effect by the ubiquitous German machine guns against the armor of the early tanks. K-rounds were less likely to disable the vehicle, mostly causing casualties and confusion among the crew, but the end effect was similar.
As improved armor limited the K-round’s effect, German designers came up with a 13mm version. Initially it was used in a specially designed single-shot rifle, the remote ancestor of today’s big-caliber sniper rifles but without any of their recoil-absorbing features. The weapon’s fierce recoil made it inaccurate and unpopular; even a strong user risked a broken collarbone or worse. More promising was the TuF (tank and antiaircraft) machine gun using the same round. None of the ten thousand TuFs originally projected were ready for service by November 11—but the concept and the bullet became the basis for John Browning’s .50-caliber machine gun, whose near-century of service makes it among the most long-lived modern weapons.
When something heavier was desirable, the German counterpart of the Stokes mortar was a much larger piece, mounted on wheels, capable of modification for direct fire and, with a ten-pound shell, lethal against any tank. The German army had also begun forming batteries of “infantry guns” even before the tanks appeared. These were usually mountain guns or modified field pieces of around three-inch caliber. Intended to support infantry attacks by direct fire, they could stop tank attacks just as well. From the beginning, ordinary field pieces with ordinary shells also proved able to knock out tanks at a range of two miles.
In an emergency the large number of 77mm field pieces mounted on trucks for antiaircraft work could become improvised antitank guns. These proved particularly useful at Cambrai in November 1917, when more than a hundred tanks were part of the spoils of the counterattack that wiped out most of the initial British gains. They did so well, indeed, that the crews had to be officially reminded that their primary duty was shooting down airplanes. As supplements, a number of ordinary field guns were mounted on trucks in the fashion of the portees used in a later war by the British in North Africa.
If survival was not sufficient incentive, rewards and honor were invoked. One Bavarian battery was awarded 500 marks for knocking out a tank near Flers. British reports and gossip praised an officer who, working a lone gun at Flesquieres during the Cambrai battle, either by himself or with a scratch crew, was supposed to have disabled anywhere from five to sixteen tanks before he was killed. The Nazis transformed the hero into a noncommissioned officer, and gave him a name and at least one statue. The legend’s less Homeric roots seem to have involved a half dozen tanks following each other over the crest of a small hill and being taken out one at a time by a German field battery. The story of “the gunner of Flesquieres” nevertheless indicates the enduring strength of the tank mystique in German military lore.
Other purpose-designed antitank weapons were ready to come on line when the war ended: short-barreled, low-velocity 37mm guns, an automatic 20mm cannon that the Swiss developed into the World War II Oerlikon. The effect of this new hardware on the projected large-scale use of a new generation of tanks in the various Allied plans for 1919 must remain speculative. What it highlights is the continued German commitment to tank defense even in the war’s final months.
That commitment is highlighted from a different perspective when considering the first German tank. It was not until October 1916 that the Prussian War Ministry summoned the first meeting of the A7V Committee. The group took its name from the sponsoring agency, the Seventh Section of the General War Department, and eventually bestowed it on the resulting vehicle. The members were mostly from the motor transport service rather than the combat arms, and their mission was technical: develop a tracked armored fighting vehicle in the shortest possible time. They depended heavily on designers and engineers loaned to the project by Germany’s major auto companies. Not surprisingly, when the first contracts for components were placed in November, no fewer than seven firms shared the pie.
A prototype was built in January; a working model was demonstrated to the General Staff in May. It is a clear front-runner for the title of “ugliest tank ever built” and a strong contender in the “most dysfunctional” category. The A7V was essentially a rectangular armored box roughly superimposed on a tractor chassis. It mounted a 57mm cannon in its front face and a half dozen machine guns around the hull. It weighed 33 tons, and required a crew of no fewer than eighteen men. Its under-slung tracks and low ground clearance left it almost no capacity to negotiate obstacles or cross broken terrain: the normal environment of the Western Front. An improved A7V and a lighter tank, resembling the British Whippet and based on the chassis of the Daimler automobile, were still in prototype states when the war ended. A projected 150-ton monster remained—fortunately—on the drawing boards.
Shortages of raw material and an increasingly dysfunctional war production organization restricted A7V production to fewer than three dozen. When finally constituted, the embryonic German armored force deployed no more than forty tanks at full strength, and more than half of those were British models salvaged and repaired. Material shortcomings were, however, the least of the problems facing Germany’s first tankers. By most accounts the Germans had the best of the first tank-versus-tank encounter at Villiers Bretonneaux on April 24, 1918. British tankers, at least, were impressed, with their commanding general describing the threat as “formidable” and warning that there was no guarantee the Germans would continue to use their tanks in small numbers.
In fact, the German army made no serious use of armor in either the spring offensive or the fighting retreat that began in August and continued until the armistice. In the ten or twelve times tanks appeared under German colors their numbers were too small—usually around five vehicles—to attract more than local attention. The crews, it is worth mentioning, were not the thrown-together body of men often described in British-oriented accounts. They did come from a number of arms and services, but all were volunteers—high-morale soldiers for a high- risk mission: a legacy that would endure. Europe’s most highly industrialized nation nevertheless fought for its survival with the least effective mechanized war instruments of the major combatants.
In public Erich Ludendorff loftily declared that the German high command had decided not to fight a “war of material.” His memoirs are more self-critical: “Perhaps I should have put on more pressure: perhaps then we would have had a few more tanks for the decisive battles of 1918. But I don’t know what other necessary war material we should have had to cut short.” For any weapon, however, a doctrine is at least as important as numbers. In contrast to both the British and the French, the German army demonstrated neither institutional nor individual capacity for thinking about mechanized war beyond the most immediate, elementary contexts.
II
THE SAME POINT can be made about the Second Reich’s general approach to mobile warfare. The existence of a specific “German way of war” remains a subject for debate. Robert M. Citino, the concept’s foremost advocate, describes its genesis in a Prussian state located in the center of Europe, ringed by potential enemies, lacking both natural boundaries and natural resources. Unable to fight and win a long war, Prussia had to develop a way to fight front-loaded conflicts: short, intense, and ending with a battlefield victory leaving the enemy sufficiently weakened and intimidated to forgo a second round.
The Western world has developed three intellectual approaches to war. The first is the scientific approach. The scientists interpret war as subject to abstract laws and principles. Systematically studied and properly applied, these principles enable anticipating the consequences of decisions, behaviors, even attitudes. The Soviet Union offers the best example of a military system built around the scientific approach. Marxism-Leninism, the USSR’s legitimating ideology, was a science. The Soviet state and Soviet society was organized on scientific principles. War making was also a science. The application of its objective principles by trained and skilled engineers was the best predictor of victory.
The second approach to war is the managerial approach. Managers understand war in terms of organization and administration. Military effectiveness depends on the rational mobilization and application of human and material resources. Battle does not exactly take care of itself, but its uncertainties are best addressed in managerial contexts. The United States has been the most distinguished and successful exemplar of managerial war. In part, this reflects the country’s underlying pragmatism: an ethic of getting on with the job. It also reflects a historical geography that, since the Revolution, has impelled America to export its conflicts—in turn making administration a sine qua non. As demonstrated by the disasters suffered by Harmar and St. Clair in the 1790s to the catastrophe of Task Force Smith in 1950 Korea, without effective management, successful fighting has been impossible.
The Germans developed a third approach: understanding war as an art form. Though requiring basic craft skills, war defied reduction to rules and principles. Its mastery demanded study and reflection, but depended ultimately on two virtually untranslatable concepts: Fingerspitzengefühl and Tuchfühling. The closest English equivalent is the more sterile phrase: “Situational awareness.” The German concept incorporates as well the sense of panache: the difference, in horsemen’s language, between a hunter and a hack, or in contemporary terms, the difference between a family sedan and a muscle car.
Prussia’s situation did not merely generate but required the tactical orientation of its mentality. This is in direct contrast to the United States, whose fundamental military problems since at least the Mexican War have been on the level of strategy and grand strategy: where to go and how to sustain the effort. The actual fighting has been a secondary concern, which is why so many of America’s first battles have been disasters. Prussia, on the other hand, was unlikely to recover from an initial defeat. This was the lesson and the legacy of Frederick the Great. Its reverse side was the sterility of victories won in vacuums: by the end of the Seven Years’ War, Prussia was on the point of conquering itself to death.
As a consequence, Prussian theorists, commanders, and policy makers were constrained to develop a second, higher level of warmaking: the operational level. “Operational art” is usually defined in general terms as the handling of large forces in the context of a theater of war. The Germans incorporated a specific mentality emphasizing speed and daring: a war of movement. This involved maneuvering to strike as hard a blow as possible, from a direction as unexpected as possible. It depended on, and in turn fostered, particular institutional characteristics: a flexible command system, high levels of aggressiveness, an officer corps with a common perspective on war making. “We must strive,” wrote military theorist Friedrich von Bernhardi in 1912, “to gain a victory as rapidly as possible at the decisive spot by concentration . . . and then take advantage of it with the utmost energy . . .”
As Citino emphasizes, the German way of war had nothing to do with miles per hour—in principle. Practice was another story, especially over the course of the nineteenth century. As industrialization and bureaucratization enabled increasing armies’ size, as technology facilitated their concentration in the theater of war, the new German Empire kept pace. In 1914 its armies took the field without a hitch. At the other end of the military spectrum, Germany boasted Europe’s best-trained infantry and its most effective artillery. What it lacked was the mobility necessary to complete strategic movements like the great sweep through Belgium, and to develop the tactical victories won on the battlefield.
That limitation was more than a consequence of the dominance of firepower and the undeveloped use of internal- combustion engines. It involved a gap in the German way of war: neglect of operational mobility. Like its counterparts, nineteenth-century Prussian cavalry had been essentially a tactical instrument. In the Wars of Liberation, it had been deployed by regiments and brigades. In the Wars of Unification, 1866 and 1870, larger formations had been only organized on mobilization. Despite demonstrating all the disadvantages of improvisation, this remained unchanged in 1914.
The German cavalry division of 1914 was a potentially effective combined-arms team. Its six regiments, 4,500 troopers, had twelve field pieces and a half dozen mobile machine guns as organic fire support. They depended on horses but were by no means helpless on foot. Regiments were extensively trained in marksmanship and skirmishing. Officers did not ignore the potential of dismounted fire action. The division had its own bridging train, and even a radio detachment. Most divisions either had attached or could call on a battalion or two of Jäger. These elite light infantry formations included a cyclist company, a machine-gun company, and a small motor transport column whose ten trucks could be used to shuttle infantry forward, much like the truck companies attached to US infantry divisions in World War II.
Could firepower and mobility compensate for a lack of endurance? The question was never addressed. Alfred von Schlieffen, author of the great offensive plan implemented in 1914, had insisted on strong cavalry forces on the flanks. Instead, half the cavalry of Germany’s active army was directly assigned to infantry divisions. Of the ten cavalry divisions deployed on the Western Front in 1914, five were deployed to cover the advance in such unlikely cavalry country as the Vosges and the Ardennes. One need not assume that German cavalry that was utilized as an early version of the Soviet operational maneuver group would have somehow averted stagnation. The high force-to-space ratios of the Western Front, combined with the overwhelming superiority of firepower over mobility, and protection, would, in all probability, have ended in something approximating the race to the sea and the development of trench warfare no matter what the Kaiser’s horsemen did or did not do. What is significant is the cavalry’s acceptance of its limitations. Comprehensively rethinking the use of existing organizations to improve flexibility and maximize striking power proved to be beyond the collective imagination of the cavalry as well as the high command.
The German cavalry went to war in 1914 all too conscious of its fragility. Apart from the effects of long-range, rapid- fire weapons, devastatingly demonstrated in the Wars of Unification, the cavalry’s self-image was of a specialized arm, demanding a spectrum of skills that required an extra, third year of service from peacetime conscripts. It was an equal shibboleth in the mounted arm that effective cavalry could not be improvised, and therefore the existing force must be carefully husbanded—not kept in the “bandbox” Lord Raglan proposed for British cavalry during the Crimean War, but in no way expendable like common infantrymen. Between 1871 and 1914, cavalry doctrine focused on reconnaissance and screening. These missions offered a chance to salvage the mythology of the arme blanche, albeit on a reduced scale. Charges en masse might be obsolete. German horsemen focused instead on the charge en petite: riding at the enemy in traditional style but at troop and squadron strength.
As early as 1905, automobile engineer Paul Daimler demonstrated a surprisingly advanced prototype armored car at the autumn maneuvers. It was dismissed as lacking practical utility. A couple of improvised armored trucks were attached to each cavalry division and used for fire support. Equally improvised detachments of machine-gun crews and riflemen in commandeered civilian cars did useful service occupying bridges and road junctions in advance of the horsemen. In 1915 the General Staff developed specifications for a purpose-built armored car. The resulting models carried two or three machine guns and were well armored for the time. One later model even had a radio. The cars also possessed rear steering positions, enabling them to reverse out of tight spots. That last was a useful quality, given the bulky shapes and high weights that rendered them visible on roads and limited their cross-country mobility to a point near zero.
In the war’s first year, both fronts saw their share of what an earlier generation of horse soldiers called “hussar tricks” of low-level derring do. In Poland, cavalry played an important role in the breakout from Lodz in November 1914 and division-strength raids periodically disrupted Russian communications and Russian equilibrium. The limited Russian road network, however, inhibited the use of the cavalry beyond the hit-and-run level. German generals also increasingly used their mounted troops to plug gaps in what was never a continuous front. Men and mounts alike were worn down for marginal advantages. In the West, beginning in 1915, the Germans cold-bloodedly reorganized their cavalry divisions as semi-mobile infantry or dismounted them altogether.
The fledgling air arm benefited disproportionately from these policies. The future Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, was not the only disgruntled troop officer who grumbled that he “had not gone to war to collect cheese and eggs,” and took to the skies instead. But when the German army mounted its final great offensive in March-April 1918, the limits of its infantry-artillery base grew increasingly obvious. The Germans could not develop their initial advantage in the war’s decisive theater. They could break into Allied defenses, and they could break through them. They could not break out.
In one sense Ludendorff ’s often-derided concept of “punch a hole and see what develops” resembles Erich von Falkenhayn’s concept for the 1916 attack on Verdun. Both were ultimately focused on the level of policy: Do so much damage that France in one case, and the Allies in the other, would be impelled to negotiate. When the coalition withstood the shock at policy levels, translating tactical victory to the operational level became decisive. It was not only that Germany lacked the force structure to make even a token effort. From Ludendorff down, no one with serious authority had a paradigm, a template, for making that transition. The oft-cited absence of a decisive operational/strategic focus for the offensive reflected two years of learning how to wipe out Allied gains by devastatingly successful local counterattacks whose decisive points were usually obvious. The vaunted storm troopers eventually first exhausted their bag of tactical tricks, and then exhausted themselves. The specially prepared “attack divisions” were bled white as Allied railroads and trucks reinforced critical sectors before the Germans could advance through them on foot. The result was stalemate, leading to exactly the kind of drawn-out fighting retreat that German planners and thinkers had predicted meant catastrophe, and then to final visions of an apocalyptic last stand in the Reich itself.
There were exceptions. Small detachments of armored cars served in Russia and Romania. One AFV (amored fighting vehicle, the general name and abbreviation for any form of battlefield armor) even found its way to Palestine, where it engaged in a brief firefight with two of its British counterparts before being abandoned by its crew. An improvised “assault group” formed around an infantry battalion that was riding requisitioned supply trucks bounced Romania’s Iron Gates in 1916 and held off a division until relieved. A cyclist brigade played a key part in the rapid overrunning of Russia’s Baltic Islands in 1917. The postwar Freikorps that fought in the Baltic used armored cars as assault vehicles against the Bolsheviks and, on one occasion, combined them with a truck-mounted rifle battalion in a counterattack. It was, however, General Hans von Seeckt who moved the German army from Sitz to Blitz.
III
AN ARISTOCRAT AND a Prussian Guardsman, General Hans von Seeckt fit none of the stereotypes associated with either. Educated at a civilian Gymnasium rather than a cadet school, he had traveled widely in Europe, visited India and Egypt, and was well read in contemporary English literature. During the war he had established a reputation as one of the army’s most brilliant staff officers. Having made most of that reputation on the Eastern Front, he was untarnished by the collapse of the Western Front, and a logical successor to national hero Paul von Hindenburg as Chief of the General Staff in the summer of 1918. In March 1920 he became head of the army high command in the newly established Weimar Republic.
Seeckt disliked slogans; he disliked nostalgia; he rejected the argument, widespread among veterans, that the “front experience,” with its emphasis on egalitarian comradeship and heroic vitalism that was celebrated by author-veterans like Ernst Jünger and Kurt Hesse, should shape the emerging Reichswehr. Instead he called for a return to the principle of pursuing quick, decisive victories. That in turn meant challenging the concept of mass that had permeated military thinking since the Napoleonic Wars. Mass, Seeckt argued, “becomes immobile. It cannot win victories. It can only crush by sheer weight.”
Seeckt’s critique in part involved making the best of necessity. The Treaty of Versailles had specified the structure of the Reichswehr in detail: a force of 100,000, with enlisted men committed to twelve years of service and officers to twenty-five. It was forbidden tanks, aircraft, and any artillery above three inches in caliber. As a final presumed nail in the coffin of German aggression, the Reichswehr’s organization was fixed at seven infantry and three cavalry divisions: a throwback to the days of Frederick the Great. Whatever might have been the theoretical hopes that the newly configured Reichswehr would be the first step in general European disarmament—when, presumably, the extra cavalry would give tone to holiday parades—Germany’s actual military position in the west was hopeless in any conventional context. In the East, against Poland and Czechoslovakia, some prospects existed of at least buying time for the diplomats to seek a miracle. Seeckt’s Reichswehr, however, faced at least a double, arguably a triple, bind. It could not afford to challenge the Versailles Treaty openly. It badly needed force multipliers. But to seek those multipliers by supporting clandestine paramilitary organizations depending on politicized zeal was to risk destabilizing a state that, though unsatisfactory in principle, was Germany’s best chance to avoid collapsing into permanent civil war.
Seeckt’s response was to develop an army capable of “fighting outnumbered and winning.” Among the most common misinterpretations of his work is that it was intended to provide cadres for a future national mobilization. Almost from the beginning the Reichswehr developed plans for eventual expansion. These plans, however, were based on enlarging and enhancing the existing force, not submerging it in an army prepared to fight the Great War over again. The manuals issued in the early 1920s, in particular the 1921 field service regulations titled Fuehrung und Gefecht der Verbundeten Waffen (Leadership and Employment of Combined Arms) emphasized the importance of the offensive. The Reichswehr, Seeckt insisted, must dictate the conditions of battle by taking the initiative. It was on the offensive that the superiority of troops and commanders achieved the greatest relative effect. The leader’s responsibility was above all to maintain pace and tempo. He must make decisions with minimal information. Boldness was his first rule; flexibility his second. Doctrine and training alike emphasized encounter battles: two forces meeting unexpectedly and engaging in what amounted to a melee—a melee in which training and flexibility had a chance to compensate for numerical and material inferiority. Even large-scale attacks were envisaged as a series of local combats involving companies, squads and platoons finding weak spots, creating opportunities, cooperating ad hoc to exploit success.
General-audience writings like Friedrich von Taysen’s 1921 essay on mobile war also stressed what was rapidly becoming a new—or rediscovered—orthodoxy. Machines, Taysen declared, were useless unless animated by human energy and will, when they could contribute to the rapid flanking and enveloping maneuvers that alone promised decision in war. Two years later he restated the importance of fighting spirit and warned against allowing infantry to become addicted to armor support.
Taysen’s soaring perorations on “Germanic limitlessness” and “living will” were a far cry from Seeckt’s practical approach. They nevertheless shared a common subtext: the centrality of mobility in both the figurative and the literal senses. The Reichswehr had to be able to think faster and move faster than its enemies at every stage and in every phase. Paradoxically, the banning of cutting-edge technology facilitated cultivating those qualities by removing the temptations of materially focused faddism. Elsewhere in Europe, J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell-Hart depicted fully mechanized armies with no more regard for terrain than warships had for the oceans they traversed. Giulio Douhet and Hugh Trenchard predicted future wars decided by fleets of bombers. French generals prepared for the “managed battle” structured by firepower and controlled by radio. The Red Army shifted from an initial emphasis on proletarian morale to a focus on synergy between mechanization and mass as ideologically appropriate for a revolutionary state.
In sober reality, not until the end of the 1920s would the technology of the internal combustion engine develop the qualities of speed and reliability beyond the embryonic stages that restricted armored vehicles to a supporting role. Aircraft as well were limited in their direct, sustained contributions to a ground offensive. Wire-and-strut, fabric-covered planes with fragile engines, even the specialized ground-attack versions developed by the Germans, were terribly vulnerable to even random ground fire. Artillery, despite the sophisticated fire-control methods of 1918, was a weapon of mass destruction. In that context the Reichswehr cultivated its garden, emphasizing human skills—a pattern facilitated because much of the process of maintaining effectiveness involved preventing long-service personnel from stagnating as a consequence of too many years spent doing the same things in the same places with the same people.
The cavalry in particular emerged from its wartime shell. The treaty-prescribed order of battle gave it an enhanced role faute de mieux. The mounted arm was forced to take itself seriously in the tasks of securing German frontiers and preserving German sovereignty. Further incentive was provided by tables of organization, internal organizations that authorized one cavalry officer for two of his infantry counterparts. There were fewer opportunities to withdraw into nostalgic isolation—everyone had to pull his professional weight. As early as spring 1919, a series of articles in Militär-Wochenblatt, the army’s leading professional journal, dealt with the army’s projected reconstruction and included two articles on cavalry. Maximilian von Poseck, the arm’s Inspector-General, argued that in the east, large mounted units had been effective for both reconnaissance and combat, and mobile war was likely to be more typical of future conflict than the high-tech stalemate of the Western Front.
The Reichswehr’s cavalry cannot be described as taking an enthusiastic lead in Germany’s military mechanization. Its regimental officers initially included a high percentage of men who had spent their active service in staffs or on dismounted service, and who were now anxious to get back to “real cavalry soldiering.” In the early 1920s Seeckt consistently and scathingly criticized the mounted arm’s tactical sluggishness, its poor horsemanship, and its inaccurate shooting, both dismounted and on horseback. Too much training was devoted to riding in formation—a skill worse than useless in the field, where dispersion was required. Horses did not immediately become “battle taxis.” Lances were not abolished until 1927—a year earlier, let it be noted, than in Britain. Neither, however, did the cavalry drag its collective feet, or pursue horse-powered dead ends with the energy of their European and American counterparts. After 1928, through judicious juggling of internal resources, each Reichswehr cavalry regiment included a “Special Equipment Squadron” with eight heavy machine guns and, eventually, two light mortars and two light cannon—a significant buildup of firepower, achieved without doing more than slightly bending treaty requirements.
The cavalry also benefited from the absence of institutional rivals. There was no air force to attract forward thinkers and free spirits. Germany had no tank corps, no embryonic armored force, to challenge the horse soldiers’ position and encourage the narrow branch-of-service loyalties that absorbed so much energy on the mechanization question in France, Britain, and the United States. Instead, German cavalrymen were likely to find motor vehicles appealing precisely because they were deprived of them.
German and German-language military literature of the 1920s projected the development of a genuine combined arms formation. While details varied, the core would be three horse-mounted brigades—a total of six regiments, each with a machine-gun squadron. These would cooperate with an infantry battalion carried in trucks, a cyclist battalion, and an independent machine-gun battalion, also motorized. Fire support would be provided by a battalion each of horse-drawn and motorized artillery. With a detachment of around a dozen armored cars, a twelve-plane observation squadron, an antiaircraft battalion, an engineer battalion, and signal, medical, and supply services, this theoretical formation combined mobility, firepower, and sustainability to a greater degree than any of its forerunners or counterparts anywhere in Europe.
In the delaying missions that were generally recognized as probable in a future war’s initial stages, the division could keep an enemy off balance by its flexibility, with its brigades controlling combinations of other units in the pattern of the combat commands of a US armored division in World War II. Offensively the division could operate independently on an enemy’s flank, and behind the kind of rigid front line projected throughout Europe by French- influenced doctrines, disrupting movement by hit-and-run strikes or, in more favorable circumstances, developing and exploiting opportunities for deeper penetration.
Though their concepts could be tested temporarily in maneuvers, these divisions were impossible to create under the original provisions of Versailles. The initial direct impulses for motorization and mechanization instead came from a source no one would have been likely to predict. The Versailles Treaty allocated each infantry division a Kraftfahrabteilung, or motor battalion. As this organization developed it was not the orthodox supply formation most probably envisaged by the Allied officials who structured the Reichswehr, but rather a general pool of motor transport. The hundred-odd men of a motor company had access to two dozen heavy trucks and eleven smaller ones, six passenger cars, four buses, seventeen motorcycles, and two tractors. Treaty interpretation even allowed each battalion a complement of five wheeled armored personnel carriers. These Gepanzerter Mannschaftstransportwagen resembled those used by the civil police, without the twin machine-gun turrets, and could carry a rifle squad apiece. With that kind of vehicle pool on call, it was a small wonder that as early as 1924, units conducted on their own small-scale experiments with organizing motorcycle formations, and provided dummy tanks for maneuvers. The motor battalions were also responsible for the Reichswehr’s antitank training—a logical assignment since they controlled the only vehicles able to provide hands-on instruction.
The motor transport battalions’ practical support for operational motorization was not necessarily a straw in the Reichswehr’s institutional wind. A front-loaded, offensively minded Prussian/German army had traditionally regarded logistics as unworthy of a real soldier’s attention. Under the Kaiser, train battalions had been a dumping ground and a dead end for the dipsomaniac, the scandal-ridden, the lazy, and the plain stupid—the last stage before court-martial or dismissal.
That heritage probably had something to do with the assignment in 1922 of one Lieutenant Heinz Guderian to a staff post in the 7th Kraftfahrabteilung in Munich. Guderian had a good enough war record as a signals and intelligence officer to be assigned as the army’s official representative to the Iron Division in the Baltic. But instead of strengthening General Staff control of that unruly formation, he supported its de facto mutiny in the fall of 1919. Initially transferred to command an infantry company, a punitive measure common for General Staff officers with blotted copybooks, Guderian’s superiors described his new assignment as a positive career move that would improve his professional breadth. Guderian saw it as a further demotion. But given the highly limited opportunities for ex-lieutenants in the civilian economy of 1919 Germany, Guderian finally decided to report to the 7th after all.
His commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel Oswald Lutz. Lutz had begun his career in the railway troops, then, during the war, shifted to motor transport, eventually becoming its chief for the 6th Army. An enthusiastic supporter of tank development, Lutz had also considered wider aspects of motorization. Serving in the postwar Truppenamt—successor to the forbidden General Staff—in the Weapons Office and then the Inspectorate of Motor Troops, he spearheaded a reconceptu alization of the Reichswehr’s approach to the use of motor vehicles in general and tanks in particular. He insisted on expanding the initial emphasis on technology to include the study of tactics. Lutz also pestered civilian designers to develop prototype specialized vehicles, the artillery tractors and the half-tracks, with front wheels for steering and caterpillar tracks in the rear for cross-country mobility, that some of his officers were considering as complements to specialized fighting vehicles.
Again, this process was facilitated by circumstances. Guderian’s story of the senior officer who told him trucks were there to haul flour (“Mehl sollt ihr fahren!”) is almost certainly apocryphal. As the Reichswehr settled into its peacetime stations its vehicles were, however, likely to be underemployed. During the war, shortages of gasoline and rubber had increasingly restricted the use of trucks even for basic supply purposes. A century earlier, advocates of railroads had depicted a Germany made invulnerable by troops shuttled behind steam engines. Now a new potential form of strategic/operational mobility was attracting notice. The Reich’s steadily improving road system had even the state railway service investing in buses to supplement its locomotives. Even conservative officers saw the prospects—and career advantages—of eventually establishing a transport force that could quickly shift regiments, perhaps even divisions, to threatened sectors and regions.
In the winter of 1923-24, Reichswehr maneuvers incorporated cooperation between motorized ground troops and simulated air forces. In 1925, the 1st Division in East Prussia included armored cars, motorized artillery, and dummy tanks in its maneuver orders of battle. Such exercises highlighted the Reichswehr’s limited achievements in motorization. They also offered opportunities to consider problems as they arose—and foreign observers noted the Germans seemed well able to correct mistakes involving motor vehicles. In 1924, the motor troops were made responsible for monitoring developments in tank war and preparing appropriate training manuals.
Motorization received a further institutional boost when, in 1926, Colonel Alfred von Vollard- Bockelberg took over as branch Inspector General. He expanded and transformed the branch officers’ course from a focus on technical details of maintenance to a program incorporating, and then emphasizing, tactical studies. It would eventually become the Armored Forces School. In 1929, an improvised motorized “reconnaissance and security battalion,” drawn primarily from the 6th Motor Battalion, took the field for maneuvers. In 1930, the 3rd Motor Battalion was completely reorganized as a fighting formation, including mock-up tanks and antitank guns as well as the more orthodox mix of trucks, cars, and motorcycles. By then a new armored personnel carrier was coming on line, based on a four-wheel civilian truck, with a cupola-mounted machine gun enabling it to double as an armored car. And Bockelberg gave the branch a new name. Henceforth it was titled Motorized Combat Troops.
IV
IN JANUARY 1918, as part of the preparation for the great offensive, Ludendorff ’s headquarters issued the Guide for the Employment of Armored Vehicle Assault Units. It described their main mission as supporting the infantry by destroying obstacles, neutralizing fire bases and machine-gun positions, and defeating counterattacks. Because tanks by themselves could not hold ground, the document emphasized the closest possible cooperation with infantry. Tank crews were expected to participate directly in the fighting, either by dismounting and acting as assault troops, or by setting up machine-gun positions to help consolidate gains. In fact the tanks and infantry had, for practical purposes, no opportunity to train together—a problem exacerbated by the continued assignment of tank units to the motor transport service. In action, the tanks’ tendency to seek open ground and easy going clashed fundamentally with the infantry’s doctrine of seeking vulnerable spots. Nothing happened to change the infantry’s collective mind that tanks were most effective against inexperienced or demoralized opponents.
The widespread and successful Allied use of tanks in the war’s final months made a few believers. In the first months after the armistice, before the Republic’s military structure was finally determined, critics suggested the German army had seriously underestimated the tanks’ value. After Versailles made the question moot in practical terms, theoretical interest continued.
Much of this was conventional, repeating wartime arguments that tanks were most effective in creating confusion and panic, in the pattern of antiquity’s war elephants. Positive theory on the use of tanks closely followed contemporary French concepts in projecting a first wave of heavy tanks acting more or less independently, followed by a second wave of lighter vehicles maintaining close contact with the infantry. But in contrast to the French, who saw tanks as the backbone of an attack, the Reichswehr’s infantry training manual of 1921 warned against the infantry laming its offensive spirit by becoming too dependent on armor.
These positions were in good part shaped by the tanks’ existing technical limitations. In particular they were considered too slow and too unreliable to play a central role in the fast-paced offensive operations central to Reichswehr tactics. At the same time, German military thinkers and writers, Seeckt included, recognized that even with their current shortcomings, tanks had a future. The trailblazer here was Ernst Volckheim. He had been a tank officer during the war, and afterward returned to his parent branch. In 1923 he was assigned to the Reichswehr’s Inspectorate for Motor Troops. That same year he published an operational history of German tanks, affirming armor’s continuing technological development and its corresponding importance in any future war. “If tanks were not such a promising weapon,” Volckheim dryly asserted, “then certainly the Allies would not have banned them from the Reichswehr!”
Above all, Volckheim argued, tanks were general-service systems, able to engage any objective and move in many different formations. In that way, they resembled the infantry more than any other branch of service. The tanks’ future correspondingly seemed to lie with emphasizing their basic characteristics: speed, reliability, and range. In contrast to a general European predilection for light tanks that focused on improving their mobility, Volckheim saw the future as belonging to a medium-weight vehicle built around its gun rather than its engine. In a future war where both sides had tanks, speed might provide some initial tactical opportunities. The tank with the heaviest gun would nevertheless have the ultimate advantage.
The next year Volckheim published two more books on tank war. One repeated his insistence that tanks would develop to the point where infantry would be assigned to support them—a hint of the rise of the panzer grenadier that was near-heresy in an army focused on infantry as the dominant combat arm. Volckheim’s second book went even further, projecting the future main battle tank by asserting that technology would eventually produce a family of armored vehicles specially designed for particular purposes. Equipped with radios, exponentially faster, better armed, and with more cross-country ability than anything even on today’s drawing boards, they would in fact be able to operate independently of the traditional arms—an echo of the theories of Volckheim’s British contemporary, J. F. C. Fuller. He admired as well the designs of American J. Walter Christie, which could be switched from wheels to tracks as needed.
Volckheim was also an officer for the working day. First detached to the Weapons Testing School at Doeberitz, in 1925 he was promoted to First Lieutenant and assigned to teach tank and motorized tactics at the infantry school at Dresden. From 1923 to 1927 he also published two dozen signed articles in the Militär-Wochenblatt, the army’s long-standing semiofficial professional journal. Most of them dealt with tactics of direct infantry support by setting problems and presenting solutions. An interesting subtext of these pieces is the scale of armor Volckheim’s scenarios usually presented: an armor regiment to a division, a battalion supporting a regiment.
Volckheim also addresses the subject of antitank defense—a logical response to the Reichswehr’s force structure—and some of the best were published in pamphlet form. Volckheim recommended camouflage, concealment, and aggressive action on the part of the infantry, combined with the forward positioning of field guns and light mortars to cover the most likely routes of advance. Unusual for the time, Volckheim also recommended keeping tanks in reserve, not merely to spearhead counterattacks but to directly engage enemy armor as a primary mission.
Volckheim, with the cooperation of Militär-Wochenblatt’s progressive editor, retired general Konstantin von Altrock, made armored warfare an acceptable, almost fashionable, subject of study in the mid-1920s Reichswehr. Initially most of the material published in MW translated or summarized foreign work. By 1926 most of the articles were by German officers, both from the combat arms and—prophetically—from the horse transport service as well. Fritz Heigl’s survey of world developments, Taschenbuch der Tanks (Tank Pocketbook), whose first edition appeared in 1926, was widely circulated. Its successors remain staples of chain bookstore and internet marketing.
The Reichswehr’s Truppenamt, often described simply as the successor to the treaty-banned General Staff, was actually formed from its predecessor’s Operations Section. Reorganized into four bureaus—operations, organization, intelligence, and training—and more streamlined than its predecessor, the Truppenamt shed responsibility for the kind of detailed administrative planning that had increasingly dominated the prewar General Staff. That was just as well, for while the methods might be transferable, the fundamental reconfiguration of Germany’s security profile demanded fresh approaches.
On the specific subject of armored warfare, the intelligence section monitored foreign developments in tactics and technology systematically enough to issue regular compilations of that material beginning in 1925. German observers took careful notes on postwar French experiences with combining horses and motor vehicles, new material such as half-tracks, and patterns of armor- infantry cooperation. They noted as well the British maneuvers of 1923 and 1924, observing in particular the appearance of the new Vickers Medium, whose turret-mounted 47mm gun, good cross-country mobility, and sustainable speed of around 20 miles per hour made it the prototypical modern tank. English was the fashionable foreign language in the Reichswehr, and Britain was an easier objective for short-term visits. And German officers regularly visited a United States whose army was more willing than any European power to show what they had. In objective terms that was not very much, and most of it existed as prototypes and test models. But the German army offered three months of subsidized leave as an incentive to improve language proficiency, and America offered attractive possibilities for travel and culture shock.
In 1924 Seeckt ordered each unit and garrison to designate an officer responsible for acting as an advisor on tank matters, conducting classes and courses on armored warfare, and distributing instructional materials. These included copies of Volckheim’s articles, Heigl’s data on foreign tanks, and similar material issued by the Inspectorate of Motor Troops. The armor officer had another duty as well: to serve as commander of dummy tank units in the field. Seeckt ordered that representations of state-of-the-art weapons, especially tanks and aircraft, be integrated into training and maneuvers. Tanks in particular must be represented as often as possible in exercises and maneuvers, to enable practicing both antitank defense and tank-infantry cooperation in attacks. Troops were to practice both tactical motor movement and firing from the treaty-sanctioned troop transports. Reports from the annual maneuvers were to include “lessons learned” from operating with mock armored vehicles.
By the mid 1920s the Truppenamt was moving doctrinally beyond the concept of tanks as primarily infantry-support weapons and organi zationally by considering their use in regimental strength. In November 1926, Wilhelm Heye, who the previous month had succeeded Seeckt as Chief of the Army Command, issued a memo on modern tanks. Heye wore an upturned mustache in the style of Wilhelm II, but that was his principal concession to Germany’s military past. Like Seeckt, he had spent a large part of the Great War as a staff officer on the Eastern Front. In 1919 he had been in charge of frontier security in East Prussia, and from 1923 to 1926 commanded the 1st Division in that now-isolated province. Heye argued that technical developments improving tanks’ speed and range had repeatedly shown in foreign maneuvers, especially the British, the developing potential of mechanization. Operating alone or in combined-arms formations, tanks were not only becoming capable of extended operations against flanks and rear, but of bringing decisive weight to the decisive point of battle, the Schwerpunkt.
During the same year, Major Friedrich Rabenau prepared a detailed internal memorandum for the Operations Section. Rabenau was an established critic of the heroic vitalist approach to modern war and its emphasis on moral factors such as “character.” He went so far as to argue that future armies would depend heavily on a technically educated middle class and technically skilled workers. Now he synthesized developments in mobility with the concepts of the Schlieffen Plan. Schlieffen’s grand design, Rabenau argued, had failed less because of staff and command lapses than because its execution was beyond the physical capacities of men and animals. Comprehensive motorization would enable initial surprise, continuing envelopment, and a finishing blow on the enemy’s flanks and rear. Rabenau’s ideas, widely shared in the Operations Section, percolated upwards. A directive in late 1926 asserted that not only could tanks be separated from foot-marching infantry, they could best be used in combination with other mobile troops—or independently. In 1927, section chief General Werner von Fritsch went on record to declare that tanks, in units as large as the British brigades, would exercise a significant influence at operational as well as tactical levels.
V
HEINZ GUDERIAN EVENTUALLY did such a good job overstating his role in the development of Reichswehr thinking on armor that those who correct his exaggerations run a certain risk of going too far in the opposite direction. Guderian’s fondness for the first person singular should not obscure his early investigations of armored vehicles’ possibilities—or his early addressing of those possibilities in the context of Germany’s defeat in the Great War. He developed—or perhaps more accurately enhanced—a reputation for clarity and forcefulness, recommending for example that instead of the currently popular hybrids, cavalry divisions should be entirely mechanized. In 1924 his exile ended when he was transferred to the staff of an infantry division as an instructor in military history and tactics.
Guderian’s approach was unusual even in a German army more open than most to learning from negative experiences. His classes focused on defeat—specifically, defeat caused by failure to innovate. Guderian ascribed that as much to intellectual rigidity as to technical indifference. He argued, for example, that “shock power” was considered prior to 1914 to depend on infantry attacks with cold steel. During the Great War it came to depend on artillery fire. That was still the case in France. But the guns moved too slowly and took too long. Shock was force multiplied by impulsion; both elements were important. Victory required bringing fire against the enemy quickly, through maneuver. And that, Guderian increasingly asserted, meant mechanization—specifically, fast-moving, gun-armed tanks.
As a teacher Guderian was an acquired taste whose allusive approach and sardonic sense of humor alienated as well as inspired. But he was a dynamic lecturer who took advantage of the opportunity to read widely in German and foreign literature on armor’s current developments and future prospects. The division commander, himself interested in motorization’s prospects, had worked with Guderian in the past and was willing to give him his head. In 1927, freshly promoted to major, he was assigned to the Truppenamt’s Operations Section, in principle to study the development of motor transportation for infantry. That same year, Fritsch was replaced as section head by General Werner von Blomberg, whose interest in motorization ranged from replacing the infantry’s bicycles with motorcycles to preparing training schedules for theoretical tank regiments.
It was scarcely surprising that the Operations Section focused obsessively on the British maneuvers held that summer. These exercises centered on an Experimental Mechanized Force built around armored cars and medium and light tanks, and including a temporarily motorized machine-gun battalion, a field artillery battalion, a battery of light infantry guns, and an engineer company, all truck-transported. The section reported extensively on the maneuvers themselves and provided translations and summaries of the major journalistic commentaries, especially those by Fuller and Liddell- Hart. The statement of British Chief of Imperial General Staff Sir George Milne that future armored forces would be able to strike up to three hundred miles into an enemy’s territory struck particular chords. Guderian credits the post-maneuver Provisional Instructions for Tank and Armored Car Training with providing the theoretical basis for a developing German armor doctrine. The work was summarized, and then translated—no great feat of intelligence, since it was available on the open market.
Even—or better said, especially—in the Reichswehr, theory required testing. Banning weapons and limiting numbers enhanced the risks of abstraction, postulating developments and concepts beyond the attainable and the sustainable. New models of dummy tanks appeared on the maneuver grounds. The originals had usually been wooden frames mounted on bicycles or pushed around by a couple of soldiers. By 1928 the firm of Hanomag was delivering motorized mock-ups that could cross terrain at fair speeds. That summer, Vollard- Bockelberg used them in a small-scale exercise reflecting British tactics by deploying the model tanks in three waves: two to break through to the enemy artillery zone and into his rear; the third to support the infantry directly.
By 1930 all the motor battalions conducted similar exercises built around dummy tanks and wooden antitank guns.
In April 1931, Oswald Lutz was appointed Inspector of Motor Troops. He requested as his chief of staff Heinz Guderian, freshly promoted to lieutenant colonel. In 1931-32, the team planned and conducted a series of upscale exercises involving entire battalions of dummy tanks with supporting infantry and artillery. For Lutz the “supporting” adjective was central. Tanks were now the key weapon on the modern battlefield. Infantry, artillery, engineers and aircraft played essentially supporting roles. Tanks therefore should carry out independent missions, as opposed to being tied down to the infantry. Independence in turn required mass; using tanks in anything less than battalion strength diluted their shock effect and rendered them disproportionately vulnerable to antitank defenses. Finally, Lutz insisted on surprise as a critical force multiplier. Surprise involved more than the timing if an initial attack. Tanks should advance in echelons and on a broad front, constantly shifting the focus of their movements in order to confuse the defender. But Lutz was no advocate of the all-armor approach; instead, he stressed the importance of cooperation. In particular the infantry must closely follow the tanks to exploit the initial shock of armor, and trust to the tanks for fire support instead of looking to the rear for artillery or waiting for their own heavy weapons.
On the technical side the development of armored vehicles had continued after the armistice. Initially this focused on wheeled vehicles for internal security purposes. The design capacity to do more remained. The question from the military perspective was how best to work with industry to enhance that capacity and develop state-of-the-art designs without flagrantly violating the terms of Versailles. By the mid-1920s the solution had been worked out, less on paper than by winks, nudges, and gentlemen’s agreements. The Truppenamt would prepare specifications. Interested companies would produce designs and prototypes for study and testing. That process would continue until it somehow became feasible to begin production openly.
The first concept of the Weapons Office in 1925 was cutting-edge: a 16-ton vehicle with a top speed of 25 miles per hour, 14mm of armor overall, and a turret-mounted short 75mm gun. Three firms—Krupp, Rheinmetall, and Daimler-Benz—responded, two with a long history of arms production, the third specializing in motor vehicles. None gave the project high priority; all found it more difficult than expected to transform sketches and figures into a functioning weapons system. The half dozen prototypes available by 1929 were most useful as showcases for developments in automotive technology, engines, and suspension systems, than as practical field designs. Though it took only half the time to develop and present their prototypes, the same could be said for the Truppenamt’s second proposal, submitted in 1928. This was a light tank, seven and a half tons, carrying a turret-mounted 37mm high-velocity gun, slightly faster and carrying a bit less armor than its larger stablemate. As a fig-leaf concession to Versailles, the designs were given the subtle cover names of “large tractors” and “small tractors.”
If the Reichswehr’s theories of armored war owed heavy debt to Britain, its tank designs channeled France in their armament and in the concept behind the paired designs. The heavier vehicles would directly support and cooperate with infantry. The lighter ones would lead attacks and act as tank destroyers. The French reversed the order, but the thinking was similar.
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.