Perhaps it is unique in military history for one man to influence the design of a weapon, see to training the men who use it, help plan an offensive, and then lead his force in battle. Heinz Guderian did just that.
Guderian was born in 1888 at Kulm, a Prussian town on the river Vistula (now Chelmno, a Polish town on the river Wista). Bom in a Germany that is now Poland, he went to live in a Germany that is now France—Colmar in Alsace. This region was annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and returned to France at the end of the First World War.
Guderian attended military schools in Germany before being sent as a Fdhnrich—an NCO aspiring to become an officer—to the battalion his father commanded at Bitche in Lorraine.
As a young officer, encouraged by his father, he elected to serve with a telegraph battalion. It was an unusual choice for an ambitious young infantry officer to make, but Guderian found the technical work interesting. When war began in 1914 he took charge of a heavy wireless station working in conjunction with cavalry.
With every week that went by, wireless was improved. Its application to warfare was changing the whole system of command. Since Napoleon’s time, commanders had been moving farther back in order to control the battle, but wireless enabled a commander to be anywhere he wished, even in an airplane or a tank. From this time onward, radio communication was a top priority in all Guderian’s theories.
In the latter part of the First World War Guderian had served as a staff officer, progressing from divisional staff appointments to the staff of a corps and attending a General Staff officer’s course in Sedan. Again he found himself in that region of France where he had lived as a child and young man. During the 1914-1918 war, Luxembourg and the Ardennes were well behind the German front line. He knew the terrain well.
After 1918 Guderian remained in the postwar army. He served on the eastern frontier, working as a senior staff officer with the Iron Division, and also as a lowly company commander with his own regiment, before being selected for a staff job with the Inspectorate of Transport Troops. This office was responsible for studying the possible tactical uses of motorized infantry in combat, as well as the more mundane use of motor transport. The inspector intended to use Guderian in connection with motorized infantry studies, but the Chief of Staff changed this assignment and sent him to a technical job concerning construction work, workshops, and fuel supply. Guderian was “astonished” at being assigned to such humdrum tasks and even asked to return to his company command, but there was no escape.
Later, Guderian realized that this enforced experience was valuable to him, but at the time it was a great disappointment, assuaged to some extent by a self-imposed course of study. He read the works of the armored warfare theorists, in particular J. F. C. Fuller. This was the first time that Guderian had encountered the theory of mechanized forces striking deep to hit the enemy’s “brain” and communications, rather than clashing with front-line enemy troops.
Guderian’s experience of the infiltration tactics of the First World War fitted well with his new interest in tanks, in just the same way as these two factors had come together in the mind of J. F. C. Fuller in 1918. And to this was added a vital third element—Guderian’s war experience with military radio. Here were the vital ingredients of blitzkrieg.
In 1927 the British Army was leading the world in tank-warfare techniques. The French and American armies had not permitted their tanks to form a separate corps as the British had done. Under the terms of the 1919 peace treaty, the Germans were not permitted to have tanks. The British Army had an “experimental mechanized force.” It combined some little “tankettes,” armored cars, Vickers medium tanks, a motorized infantry battalion (using half-tracks and six-wheel trucks), engineers, and an artillery regiment, with some self-propelled 18-pounder guns. It was a brilliant innovation. Even in 1940 this would have sounded formidable, but the army disbanded it after a couple of years and in Britain the promising experiments were forgotten.
They were not forgotten in Germany, however. By 1928 the Germans had found a way of having some tank experiments of their own and made a secret agreement with Soviet Russia to share the facilities of a testing ground at Kazan, on the Volga. The Germans brought expertise and the Russians provided some tanks, including the little British Vickers-Loyd type, some ideas from which were seen in the early German tanks.
Guderian remained in Germany and became well known in the army for his lectures on military history and his ideas about the future role of tanks, aircraft, and motorized infantry. By this time he was in the Troop Office (or Truppenamt, the name used to disguise the existence of the forbidden General Staff).
In the summer exercises of 1929 he used some small cars rigged up to represent tanks. Little was accomplished beyond establishing a desire for real tanks. When Guderian was given command of a motorized battalion, the need for make-believe continued; his men used motorcycles to supplement the antique armored cars and wooden sticks to represent antitank weapons. But there was no substitute for real radio, and in 1931 the British Army again led the world by installing newly developed crystal-controlled radios to exercise 180 tanks under one command.
It all worked perfectly—so perfectly that some observers suspected it was a hoax brought off by means of previously rehearsed drivers. Guderian knew better. He saw that radio command was now a primary requirement for the sort of warfare he envisaged.
World History
