Storm of Steel

The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939

Mary R. Habeck

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780801479489
• eBook ISBN: 9780801471384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In this fascinating account of the battle tanks that saw combat in the European Theater of World War II, Mary R. Habeck traces the strategies developed between the wars for the use of armored vehicles in battle. Only in Germany and the Soviet Union were truly original armor doctrines (generally known as "blitzkreig" and "deep battle") fully implemented. Storm of Steel relates how the German and Soviet armies formulated and chose to put into practice doctrines that were innovative for the time, yet in many respects identical to one another.As part of her extensive archival research in Russia, Germany, and Britain, Habeck had access to a large number of formerly secret and top-secret documents from several post-Soviet archives. This research informs her comparative approach as she looks at the roles of technology, shared influences, and assumptions about war in the formation of doctrine. She also explores relations between the Germans and the Soviets to determine whether collaboration influenced the convergence of their armor doctrines.

CHAPTER ONE

The Unfinished Machine, 1919–1923

THE TANK appeared on the battlefield in 1916, as large as an elephant and just as frightening to ordinary German soldiers as Pyrrhus’s “secret weapon” had been to the Romans. Somewhat to their own surprise the British and French created a phenomenon new to the war: outright panic among the best infantrymen in the world. The Germans had to invent a new word, “tank horror,” to describe the panic inspired by the first use of these “monsters,”1 and there was some hope among the Allies that they had found, at last, an answer to the stalemate of the Western Front. In battles at Cambrai and Amiens the ungainly machines seemed to live up to this expectation, first shocking the Germans and then pushing through the front to create the largest breakthroughs of the war. The British, who had invented the tank, were particularly heartened by the successes of their armor forces and officers like J. F. C. Fuller were soon dreaming of the day when the machines would end the useless bloodshed of modern industrial war.2

Unfortunately for these early hopes, while the early tank could and did frighten unprepared soldiers, its defining characteristic was an imperfect technical design. It was first suggested by Winston Churchill in 1915 as the “land ship” that would break through the trench system on the Western Front, and engineers had only one year to create and test a completely new piece of technology. The result was obvious from the first time the British deployed the machines in the autumn of 1916. The small number of tanks available for use terrified the German troops, but they were also clumsy and noisy, and broke down frequently on the battlefield. The heavy tanks used in this battle, the British Mark series, were also incredibly slow, moving at no more than two to three miles per hour on the crater-filled battlefield. As soon as the German infantry stopped running, they also saw that the lumbering machines could be rather easily picked off by artillery fire. Later models developed by both the French and British were lighter and somewhat faster, but had only thin armor and machine guns, making them even more vulnerable to artillery and infantry fire. The frightening vehicles made an impressive entrance on the Western Front, but European armies were divided between officers who focused on the successes of early armor warfare and those who saw only the tank’s limited technical capabilities.

The German military establishment, once past their initial surprise at the successes of the early tanks, generally chose to emphasize, even overemphasize, their failings. This attitude had nothing to do with a natural disinclination to use new technology, a charge later leveled at the high command by its critics. In fact the Reichswehr had earlier found and used quite effectively technical answers to trench warfare (most especially gas, mortars, flamethrowers, and massive artillery pieces) that nearly broke the Allied lines. The British and the French adapted quickly, however, and soon were producing their own “frightful” weapons to answer German inventiveness. Realizing that the homeland could not afford to produce ever more expensive technology, by 1916 the German army became more interested in a tactical innovation known as “stormtroop tactics” that promised to create a strategic breakthrough without any manufacturing costs. Stormtroop tactics were predicated on a new conceptualization of the battlefield; one in which taking the entire front was no longer the goal of the army. Instead, picked forces would probe the line ahead of the main body of troops, seeking to push through any weak spots and creating gaps in the enemy line that reserves could exploit opportunistically.3 Stormtroop tactics caught the attention of the Reichswehr high command because they were based on three concepts that were seminal to German thinking about warfare: first, that the infantry had to be the core of any offensive; second, that to succeed the infantry had to cooperate closely with the other forces (in this case the artillery) in a combined-arms battle; and third, that local initiative (Auftragstaktik, or mission-based tactics) – giving low-ranking commanders in the field leeway to take advantage of favorable conditions and act as they saw fit – was absolutely vital for victory.

Just as the German high command was considering the new tactics, the sudden appearance of huge and noisy machines able to crush the strongest defensive placements shocked even the most battle-hardened of troops. Given that tanks had broken through in areas that normally would have repulsed the strongest infantry and artillery assaults, the immediate response by part of the officer corps was to call for the development of a German tank that would be able to imitate the success of the Allies.4 Other officers were not convinced that the new weapon had any value at all. Analyses of battles in which tanks had taken part showed that even in those clashes in which they had been most successful, German troops had been able to blunt the assault, bring artillery to bear, and retake lost ground.5 The fear caused by tanks persisted among the ordinary soldiers, but if one could stop this initial reaction, then the technical failings of the machines made tank attacks easy to repulse. In November 1917, Ludendorff distributed a memorandum on defensive measures against tanks in which he warned against this denigration of tanks, while acknowledging that it was, for the most part, justified.6

The strict discipline of the German army, along with a growing conviction that tanks were not the omnipotent weapon soldiers had first thought them, thus combined to dissipate the fear of the tank.7 In a short while notable triumphs in defeating tank attacks considerably lessened the first enthusiasm in the General Staff for developing a native version of the weapon.8 The lower priority given to tanks, together with the new enthusiasm for stormtrooper tactics, helped to delay the deployment of the tank by almost two years. Yet the high command was forced by the limited successes of Allied tanks in 1916 and 1917 to acknowledge that the machines might have some use in positional warfare, and they requested the construction of a German version. The vehicle turned out by industry, the A7V, was even more technically flawed than the British or French tanks, which only added to the high command’s reluctance to depend on armor.9 By the beginning of 1918, German industry had managed to build only fifteen A7Vs, plus another five for a reserve. Added to the thirty British and French tanks that the army had captured in earlier clashes, there was a grand total of forty-five German tanks set to oppose the hundreds of the Allies.10

In January 1918, as these tanks prepared to take part in the coming spring offensive, Ludendorff issued a handbook entitled Guide for the Deployment of Armored Vehicle Assault Units that set out the official views of the General Staff on tank usage. The guide dealt with concrete problems of command, control, and terrain reconnaissance, as well as tank tactics, reflecting the German army’s practical experience in the war. Interestingly enough, rather than placing tanks at the disposal of the infantry or cavalry, the General Staff chose to separate them bureaucratically from the main army branches, subordinating them directly to the Army High Command or, when assigned to an army, to the Commander of Motor Vehicle Troops. This would become significant when the German army began rearming with modern weaponry during the thirties, since it created a precedent for a separate organization for tank forces that could serve as a model for the Wehrmacht. The tank doctrine that the booklet suggested was, not surprisingly, similar to that of the Allies. The main mission of tanks was “by offensive action, to support the advance of the infantry through (a) rolling over and destroying enemy obstacles, (b) the suppression of enemy troops, in particular those occupying bases and machine gun nests, (c) the repulsion of enemy counterstrikes.”11 Like the stormtroopers, tanks were not to attack the strongest point of the enemy but rather to push through a weakly occupied front, exploiting their surprise appearance to clear the way for an infantry breakthrough. The description in the handbook of an actual tank attack, in line with accepted German practice, gave only general principles and left the particulars to local commanders. Tanks were to fight in several waves, for instance, but there were no guidelines on how many of these there should be or what types of tanks would fight in each. Other details of the battle were similarly vague, left to the discretion of the officers on the spot and to the special conditions of each battle.

The one exception to this general rule was the infantry’s role, which the handbook took care to describe in detail. Constant, very close contact with the infantry was of vital importance for a tank attack and should always be maintained. While tanks could create a tactical breakthrough, they were unable to hold any territory gained, and therefore they would require infantry to follow them closely. Tank crews themselves were to take part in the infantry battle, either to act as shock troops or to man machine gun bases for defense against counterthrusts. The concepts that tanks should stay in very close contract with infantry and that tanks were unable to hold territory constituted the core of German armor doctrine for the next ten years. Together they implied that tanks, and thus the entire tempo of an attack, had to remain tied to the speed of the infantry. This conception of the role of the infantry vis-à-vis tanks was prompted both by the German army’s commitment to the infantry as the heart of the army and by the common image of the tank as a delicate machine that could not be trusted to function throughout the entire battle. Only in the twenties, when the tank became faster and technically more perfected, would some military thinkers begin to question the idea of tying the armor forces so closely to the infantry.

Equipped with the General Staff’s guide, the new German “Assault Armored Vehicle Units,” consisting of five tanks each, saw action more than ten times between March and November 1918.12 In the spring Hindenburg launched what he hoped would be the final offensive of the war using troops from the now quiet Eastern Front to reinforce the army in the West. The offensive was at first successful, pushing back the exhausted British and French units almost at will. But for those officers who had hoped that the new weapon would prove worthwhile, tank combat during the offensive was a disappointment. The small number of the vehicles available for deployment during any single battle was the source of one major problem, since Allied use of tanks had been most successful when they had massed for a single effort.13 In the attack by the German army on Villers-Bretonneux, the largest clash of the war in which both the Allies and the Germans fielded tanks, only three German tank units, fifteen A7V’s in all, took part.14

The technical shortcomings of the German tanks, and the ease with which the Allies could destroy them, created more serious problems. The A7V was a heavy tank, with thick armor and a large number of machine guns and main guns which ought to have provided protection against its natural enemy, the artillery. It was, however, even slower on the battlefield than the British Mark series, with a newly designed engine and tread parts that engineers had not completely perfected. In addition, due to the way in which the caterpillar treads were fitted onto the vehicle, it was unable to maneuver on rough terrain as well as other tanks.15 All this made the vehicles vulnerable to artillery fire and to mishaps in the deep trenches and bomb craters that covered First World War battlefields. It was no wonder that the main impression their own tank made on the German officer corps was of a weapon useful for terrorizing ill-trained troops, but unsuited for more complex missions.

This lukewarm feeling for tanks changed completely during the Allied counteroffensive, where armor played an important role in several key battles. As soon as the German advance had exhausted itself, the Allies began an offensive that would end only in November with the defeat of the Kaiser’s army. On 8 August 1918, which Ludendorff would later bemoan as the “black day of the German Army,” the Allies pushed back German troops from Amiens, gains made possible only because tanks were able to create the initial breakthrough.16 The British used their tanks in waves, divided according to weight and armament, to punch through the German trenches and lead the infantry, who followed closely, into the enemy’s deep rear. The German high command, belatedly conscious that the machines could make a difference, formulated ambitious plans to expand their tank and armored car corps for the 1919 campaign. Then came the devastating, and for some in the officer corps, unexpected declaration of a cease-fire on 11 November. The German soldier had, however, seen enough war, and as soon as the Armistice came into effect, whole units melted away. Yet there were officers who believed that this was nothing more than a pause to reach terms with the enemy rather than a surrender, and they did not give up hope that some day soon plans for an armor force might be fulfilled.17 During the months between the end of fighting and the signing of the peace treaty, official planning for the future of the German military was thus ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Unfinished Machine, 1919–1923
• 2. Materiel or Morale? The Debate over the Mechanization of Warfare, 1923–1927
• 3. Technology Triumphant Early German-Soviet Collaboration, 1927–1929
• 4. Consensus and Conflict, 1930–1931
• 5. A New Confidence? The End of Collaboration, 1932–1933
• 6. Trading Places, 1934–1936
• 7. The Evidence of Small Wars Armor Doctrine in Practice, 1936–1939
• Epilogue Armor Doctrine and Large Wars, 1939–1941
• List of Abbreviations