Germany. Heer - Panzer general: Heinz Guderian and the Blitzkrieg victories of WWII

First Skyhorse edition 2018

Copyright 1975, 1992, 2003 by Kenneth Macksey

Foreword Copyright 2018 by Dennis Showalter

This book was originally published as Guderian: Panzer General by Macdonald and Janes London. It was reprinted with new material by Greenhill Books and Stackpole Books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover photo credit: AP Images

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-2729-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2732-8

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS

Between pages 116 and 117

MAPS

Foreword

For more than fifty years, Heinz Guderian has held a central place in the modern military history as creator of the Wehrmachts armored force and master of maneuver warfare. But there are fashions in generalship. More recent scholarship presents Guderian in other matrices. He is depicted as part of an officer corps not merely accepting of but complicit in the crimes of Adolf Hitlers genocidal Third Reich. He is presented not as a dissenting voice in Nazi Germanys increasingly disastrous military policies, but as someone kept on Hitlers payroll through bonuses and bribes. As for his image as Father of the Blitzkrieg, it is increasingly fashionable to argue that Blitzkrieg never existed except as a series of accidents and coincidences reflecting operational improvisations created by the essentially random nature of the National Socialist regime. Finally, Guderians status as a battle captain has been called into question by critics describing him as only being in the right place at the right time in 1940, and significantly overmatched in the larger scale and greater challenges of Operation Barbarossa.

In this context of comprehensive revisionism, a new edition of Mackseys biography offers a welcome counterbalance. First published in 1975 and since updated, Panzer General depicts a creative thinker, an innovative administrator, and a charismatic commander able to transform inspiration into reality and transmit enthusiasm to his subordinates to a degree seldom matched in the modern history of warfare. While more conscious of Guderians positives than his shortcomings, Macksey acknowledges his subject as headstrong, tactless, disruptive, and self-centeredqualities, it should be noted, that can be indispensable in breaking down molds and matrices in armies, which by their nature tend to groupthink and formulization. He makes a solid case for Guderians understanding of Germanys fundamental strategic requirement: short, decisive conflict as opposed to the grinding attrition of the Great War. He demonstrates Guderians ability to translate theoretical concepts of mobility, flexibility, and coordination into operational realities in 1940. His performance in Russia was a tour de force of economy of force, maximizing the effect of limited resources in a campaign that defined shock and awe. In his last significant exercise of field command during the German debacle of 1944, Guderian managed on a military shoestring to check, albeit temporarily, the triumphant Red Army in front of Warsawan indication that he could perform in adversity as well as advantage.

Outside the operational sphere, Guderians performance is nuanced if not ambiguous. His relationship to Hitler, and to National Socialism, was shaped not by ideology but by perspective. Guderians vision of mechanized warfare implied total focus to the end of preventing total war. It implied the coordinated mobilization of army, government, and society behind not the nineteenth-century dead end of mass war, but elite war: war made and controlled by the best, the brightest, and, not least, the hardest. In that context, Guderians perspective on the Third Reich was instrumental, a means to an end. As Hitlers regime moved ever further from Guderians meritocratic/aristocratic frame of reference, dissonance became discord. Guderian was marginalized. The defects of his wider visions have been highlighted by the ultimate disaster that was Nazi Germanys World War II. Yet even understood warts and all, as Heinz Guderian is today, Macksey establishes him as a seldom-equaled master of war at its sharp end.

Introduction

It is with immense pleasure that I welcome this revised edition by Greenhill Books of my Guderian Panzer General, which was first published in English in 1975 and since then has been republished in many different languages, world-wide. For the advance of history always is an inexorable one and that of the Second World War has, since 1970, been almost unprecedented in the scale of its enormity as vast new sources of information have been released to the public gaze from official archives. Needless to say these revelations have had some impact on the life story of Generaloberst Heinz Wilhelm Guderian and much more than that of the vast majority of German General Staff officers.

To begin with, there has recently come to my attention fascinating information concerning Guderians involvement with certain people who organised the attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. I refer in particular to his remarkable relationship with his great friend General Erich Fellgiebel and his wonderfully brave efforts to protect the lives of that great mans menaced family in the aftermath of the events of 20 July 1944. Efforts which, for some incomprehensible reasons, he chose to retain to himself even though that was to be detrimental to his own reputation.

Nevertheless, it may be claimed to this day that, without his influence, the war could easily have followed a very different course to the highly dramatic and disastrous one that it did and in so doing might never have brought upon the German General Staff the fierce condemnation which befell that exalted body from the judges of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. Even though, in fact as an organisation, it had been acquitted of War Crimes.

They have been a disgrace to the honourable profession of arms. Without their military guidance the aggressive ambitions of Hitler and his fellow Nazis would have been academic and sterile. These structures of high moral tone related, of course, only to a small minority, to the ruling clique of the Army General Staff who had occupied posts of the highest responsibility. Eventually several senior commanders and staff officers, who were not in the dock at Nuremberg, would stand trial in various European courts and be found guilty. Some of them would be executed. Yet the most celebrated of this group, the creator of the Panzertruppe which, of all the elements in the Wehrmacht, had made feasible conquests that were economically swift and withdrawal prolonged, and whose battlecraft was most feared of all in the days of its mastery, was never arraigned.