McCarthy Peter - Panzerkrieg : a history of the German tank division in World War II

MIKE SYRON, an archaeologist, and PETER MCCARTHY, a journalist, met while attending University College Dublin in the mid-nineties and soon discovered that they shared a fascination with the history of the Second World War, in particular that of the German armoured forces.

A History of the German Tank Division in World War II

Peter McCarthy & Mike Syron

ROBINSON
London

Constable & Robinson Ltd

5556 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2002

This edition published by Robinson,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2003

Copyright Peter McCarthy and Mike Syron 2002

The right of Peter McCarthy and Mike Syron to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

Publication data is available from the British Library

ISBN1-84119-800-5 (pbk)

ISBN 1-84119-392-5 (hbk)

eISBN 978-1-47210-780-0

Printed and bound in the EU

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Avril, Scott and the memory of A.J.
Mike

To my family
Peter

Also to all the tankers of World War Two.

Panzerlied

(Tank Song)

I

Whether in storm or in snow

Whether the sun smiles on us

The day blazing hot

Or the night ice cold

Our faces are dusty

But our spirits are cheerful

Yes, our spirits are cheerful

Our tank roars

Into the windstorm.

II

With thundering engines

As fast as lightning

We engage the enemy

Safe in our tanks

Far ahead of our comrades

In battle we stand alone

Yes, stand alone

We strike deep

Into enemy territory.

III

If an enemy tank

Appears in our sight

We ram throttles full

And close with the foe!

We give our lives freely

For the army of our realm

Yes, the army of our realm

To die for Germany

Is our highest honour.

IV

With barriers and tanks

Our opponent tries to stop us

We laugh at his efforts

And travel around them.

And when guns threatingly

Hide in the yellow sand

Yes, in the yellow sand

We search for paths

No-one else has found.

V

And if some day

Faithless luck abandons us

And we cant return home

The deadly bullet strikes

And fate calls us,

Yes, fate calls us

Then our tank is

An honourable grave.

Written by Oberleutnant Wiehle in June 1933.

Contents

Illustrations

Between

Between

All photographs listed are used with the kind permission of The Trustees of The Imperial War Museum, London, unless otherwise stated.

Maps

Introduction

T HIS is the story of the Panzerwaffe, the German armoured divisions in the Second World War, the elite tank forces of the Wehrmacht. It is a dramatic story as befits a dramatic war, recounting great victories and crushing defeats, in battlefields ranging from the bocage country of France and the endless steppes of Russia to the deserts of North Africa.

At almost every decisive moment of the war, the panzers can be found. They were the instrument used to achieve the Anschluss in 1938 and to occupy Czechoslovakia a year later. When the Wehrmacht rumbled across the Polish frontier in September 1939, igniting the Second World War, it was the mobility and speed of the panzers that so captured the imagination of the world and created the myth of whole armies of tanks.

William L. Shirer, that self-appointed expert on all aspects of the Third Reich vividly, if somewhat inaccurately, described this new method of waging war:

the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planes and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitring, attacking, spreading flame and terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them, breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; self-propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the rutted Polish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army of a million and a half men on motorised wheels, directed and co-ordinated through a maze of electronic communications

Had his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, only been as well researched as it was widely read, then perhaps the above popular misconception about the German war machine might never have got such firm hold. It is ironic that a man who took great pride in sorting the Nazi propaganda ministrys wheat from the chaff should succumb so readily to the carefully crafted newsreels supplied by Goebbels. Of the fifty or so German divisions which invaded Poland, only six were panzer divisions and the vast majority of the 1.5 million-strong army travelled on foot, with no better mobility than Napoleons armies.

In fact at that time, the Panzerwaffe, the newest German arm, was still little more than an exercise unit for flag-trooping, sabre-rattling and parade ground displays. Their tanks were small, cheap and, in keeping with Hitlers megalomania, numerous, but of little practical value on the battlefield. Within a year however the Panzerwaffe would truly come of age, evolving into something greater than even its progenitors dared hope for, even if it never quite became the monstrous, mechanised juggernaut its opponents claimed it was.

In May 1940 came the panzers greatest victory. Seven panzer divisions slashed their way through the Ardennes (terrain the Allies declared impassable for tanks) and raced for the English Channel. By so doing they trapped a million Allied soldiers, forcing the British to evacuate at Dunkirk and the French to surrender. It remains one of the most startling victories in modern warfare; the largest army in Europe, with tanks superior to the Germans both in number and quality, was defeated in weeks by a new method of war: Blitzkrieg.

The unstoppable panzers became a convenient alibi for the Allies in defeat, yet what the Germans had done with their tanks was in fact not so radical or unexpected; it had been theorised about for the past twenty years, mainly by Englishmen. All they had done in reality was to take a twenty-year-old weapon, largely unproven in battle and downgraded between the wars to a mere infantry support weapon, and used it to its full potential. While other nations theorised and debated about the merits of the tank, the Germans acted, successfully turning the weapon against its own inventors.

A year later the panzers were taking on Russia, pitting themselves against the 20,000 tanks of the Red Army they came within a hairs breadth of victory, halted at the gates of Moscow by winter and Siberian reinforcements. In 1942, they were again close to success when the Stalingrad disaster changed everything. In that same year in North Africa, the panzers were just miles from Alexandria when defeated at El Alamein by vastly superior forces.

From 1943 on, the Panzerwaffe was largely on the backfoot, fighting defensively to slow down the inexorable Allied advance and make them pay a high price for every yard gained. In this enforced role they pioneered new ways of fighting and new weapons which proved highly effective. In 1944, the Battle of the Bulge became their offensive swansong in the West, just as Kursk had the previous year in the East, yet they were still able to seize local victories from the jaws of defeat. Small numbers of German tanks often inflicted heavy losses when the Allies got careless, such as at Villers Bocage in June 1944.