At one time commanders such as Marlborough, Napoleon, and Wellington watched the progress of battle with their own eyes. They were able to modify and originate orders at a moment’s notice. At the battle of Sedan in 1870, Moltke saw the battle from a hill close to the fighting. At the assault on Schellenberg in 1704, during the Blenheim campaign, six lieutenant generals had been killed.
It was the First World War that saw the military commanders moving so far back from the battlefront that they were not even in range of artillery fire. As commanders became inured to the terrible meat grinder of battle, so the quality of generalship was reduced to a formula. Seldom was a general asked to think quickly. Many were never asked to think at all.
But in the final stages of the First World War, technology started a chain reaction that we now realize led up to the blitzkrieg. Yet blitzkrieg could not exist without very close cooperation from all arms. In this respect, radiotelephony—transmitting speech, rather than Morse code—was the most crucial element in the new style of war.
Using this radio transmitter, German commanders of divisions or even of corps were enabled to stay at the very front of any action. They could make minute-by-minute decisions and bring generalship to bear upon even the smallest tactical combat. After the Polish campaign Guderian urged his panzer unit commanders to restrict their HOs to a few armored vehicles and stay much closer to the front.
In 1940 the railway system still dominated military planning, as it had since the American Civil War. But, until now, the movement of an army from its railhead had been extremely limited, partly because of the increasing size of the supply dumps required by an attacking army. In the First World War, dumps as large as half a million tons had warned an enemy exactly where the next attack would come. This limitation was also true of the German build-up for the Polish campaign, though the dangers of air reconnaissance were avoided because the invasion came without declaration of war.
Motorization and the higher tank speeds did not do away with the army’s dependence upon railheads and supply dumps, but it did result in an attacking force being able to move from the railhead with greater speed and independence than had ever been known before.
In Poland these new freedoms were exploited only in a very limited way. Guderian’s armor had moved deep into the Polish back areas, but these thrusts were secondary to the Kesselschlacht battles that were fought near the frontiers by horse-drawn armies. In France the world was to see something quite different. Guderian’s armor, concentrated in a way it had not been before, was to shatter the French front and cause a collapse of the defenses.
The theory was well defined. Only against strong fortified positions would tank concentrations be used. They would advance in echelon—about 60 yards between each tank—and move in carefully timed waves, taking full advantage of any ground cover.
Each tank company consisted of three platoons of five tanks each, plus two tanks for the company commander (so that he had a spare tank). The company commander’s tanks were equipped with two-way radios so that he could receive orders and pass them on. Each platoon commander’s tank had only a one-way radio; he could hear his orders but not reply. The other tanks in the platoon had no radios and had to depend on visual signaling from their platoon commander.
Reports of enemy resistance came back to the divisional commander, who was in a tank or half-track according to the circumstances. For certain sorts of targets, he would request aid from the Luftwaffe, but otherwise he would manage to attack using his own forces. Infantry and engineers would be kept at the front of the advance, sometimes riding alongside the tanks. Armored half-tracks would carry heavy weapons and tow antitank guns. If the German tanks encountered enemy armor, they would retire through the antitank gun battery and then move round to outflank the enemy.
Once a breakthrough had been achieved, the speed of advance increased, but seldom to more than 3 mph. Air reconnaissance photographs would be dropped regularly to the mobile headquarters so that the division knew what resistance lay ahead and could change the spearhead accordingly.
Three armored cars often formed the point of the advance. One car would contain an artillery observer who could use radio to call for emergency covering fire. Motorcyclists of the reconnaissance battalion might be exploring side roads. According to their reports, other units would come forward—antitank guns to fight off enemy armor, flamethrowers to attack emplacements, or engineers to remove mines.
The Schwerpunkt—place of main effort—was not the place where major resistance was encountered. On the contrary, the advance elements by-passed and avoided opposition, wriggling and infiltrating wherever possible, fighting only where there was no alternative. The momentum of the attack was vital to success, and so no element would move off the roads to go cross-country without very good reason, for this would slow the advance.
Just as the tactics of the advance would keep the enemy guessing as to which way the German tanks would turn, so the German large-scale planning kept the Allied army commanders wondering. The invasion of France through the Ardennes might have turned to Paris instead of the coast and, in its later stages, there were still doubts about whether Guderian was making for Amiens or Lille.
The blitzkrieg’s narrow front was always large enough to allow two or three attacking columns to advance side by side. These columns could then converge as pincers onto strong points—towns or large enemy units. Where this occurred, theory demanded that the columns diverge immediately afterward to avoid the risk of congestion on the road.
Fast armor—or at least armor faster than that of the enemy— was an essential component of the blitzkrieg. So was complete command of the air, for the attack, crammed on the road, was very vulnerable to low-flying aircraft. Air support for the blitzkrieg was needed to supplement artillery units which were often in the process of moving up—leapfrogging one over the other—when they were must urgently needed. Close air support did, in effect, protect the exposed flanks of the attacking columns.
Ideally, then, the blitzkrieg in the West needed countryside with enough roads for attackers to converge on objectives and diverge on the far side of them. The advance required at least two parallel roads stretching ahead, with some minor roads linking them. High ground commanding the advance route had to be captured. Ideally, the road system of the surrounding region had to be such as to provide difficulties for an enemy attempting to concentrate his reserves into the threatened area. The line of thrust needed to be developed so that the enemy had difficulty in deciding what each objective was.
Moving forward, even before contacting an enemy, called for planning of great skill. A panzer division used about 1,000 gallons of fuel per mile (twice this, if moving across country). And, of course, the trucks that delivered fuel would also need fuel. Drivers also needed food and a place to park where they would not block the road. It was the usual practice to designate one supply road for each division, and this Rollbahn was usually the main route of that division’s advance.
As needed, engineer units, with the skills and cumbersome equipment necessary to build bridges or mend roads, had to pass up the highways filled with advancing columns, so as to get to the front not a minute sooner and not a minute later than they were needed. At reasonable intervals, all of these men would go to sleep, whether given permission to do so or not. By that time, they had to occupy a section of road that was not needed by the units advancing behind them. Food and fuel had to be distributed as well as ammunition and a multitude of other supplies. The empty supply columns then needed room to pass back down the roads for more. In combat, casualty evacuation and medical units added more complexities.
Archibald Wavell, considered one of the finest of Britain’s generals, stressed the importance of such planning in a lecture on generalship in T939. He said that strategy and tactics could be apprehended in a very short time by any reasonable human intelligence. But it was the principles and practice of military movement and administration— the “logistics” of war—that was of prime importance. He went on: “I should like you always to bear in mind when you study military history or military events the importance of this administrative factor, because it is where most critics and many generals go wrong.”34
Heinz Guderian was well aware of the importance of logistics. In May 1918 he had been the quartermaster of XXXVIII Reserve Corps at a time when it made an unprecedented advance of 14 miles during an offensive on the river Aisne.
But, of course, the logistics of war, like the methods of war, are subject to constant change. The broad scale of the 28-mile-wide infantry attack at Marne-Aisne in July 1918 had, by May 1940, become about a 4-mile front for the blitzkrieg at Sedan. Such changes demanded a miniaturization of planning to get enough attacking force into a narrow section of roadways. Until 1940 no one could be sure such logistics were possible.
The forward movement for such attacks is sometimes planned by means of large graphs. One axis represents distance along the road and the other axis is time, hour by hour. Such graphs end up as a maze of diagonal colored lines. Other graphs are prepared for such contingencies as air attack, counterattack, breakdowns, and the switching of the Schwerpunkt. The planners have to remain in constant contact with the advance forces. Sometimes the terrain demands that this be done by observers in light planes as well as by traffic police on the ground.
The nature of the ground over which the armored forces fought was critical. In Poland the tanks suffered heavy casualties when committed to street fighting. Hitler wrote a secret memorandum dated 9 October 1939 in which he took up this point. In a paper that the historian William Shirer described as one of the most impressive Hitler ever wrote, he orders that the armored divisions “are not to be lost among the maze of endless rows of houses in Belgian towns. It is not necessary for them to attack towns at all.”35 He stresses the importance of keeping up the momentum of the attack. He reminds the army of the need to improvise, according to circumstance, and encourages them to concentrate weapons—for example, tanks or antitank guns— in great quantities, even if this means depriving other parts of the front. In this and in many other ways Hitler’s memorandum describes the blitzkrieg.
Hitler read this memo aloud to the military leaders on 10 October 1939. Up till then. Hitler seems to have regarded the armored divisions more as a propaganda device than as a decisive weapon. Now his opinion had changed.
World History
