Panzer-in-a-Box
(c) 2008 - Ned Barnett
(c) 2008 - Ned Barnett
Considering the remarkably innovative use Germany found for armored fighting vehicles in World War II, it is little short of incredible that 20 years before they launched the world’s first Blitzkrieg, German military leaders so ineptly handled their first experience with Panzers as to make you think they’d never “get it.” It’s hard to picture the French as innovators in armored warfare and the Germans as near-pathetic “also-rans” forced to create tank units out of captured vehicles, but General Petain “got it” while General Ludendorf considered tanks a passing fad, not worthy of real consideration. As a result, while the Allies fielded literally thousands of tanks in World War I, the Germans managed to field … dozens.
Which brings us to this book:
German Panzers 1914-1918
Osprey “New Vanguard #127” – © 2006
By Stephen J. Zaloga – Illustrated by Brian Delf
Reviewed by Ned Barnett
Review Copy Supplied by Reviewer
Considering the remarkably innovative use Germany found for armored fighting vehicles in World War II, it is little short of incredible that 20 years before they launched the world’s first Blitzkrieg, German military leaders so ineptly handled their first experience with Panzers as to make you think they’d never “get it.” It’s hard to picture the French as innovators in armored warfare and the Germans as near-pathetic “also-rans” forced to create tank units out of captured vehicles, but General Petain “got it” while General Ludendorf considered tanks a passing fad, not worthy of real consideration. As a result, while the Allies fielded literally thousands of tanks in World War I, the Germans managed to field … dozens.
Except for a few brief paragraphs that tantalize without fulfilling, this otherwise excellent book does not cover how Germany went from being the last one to get the word in 1916 to 1918, al the way to being the most progressive and innovative user of tank armies in the world in 1939-43. That kind of story is best covered in a book on the overall development of tank warfare in the first half of the 20th Century – there are a few good ones out there, including “Tank,” a remarkably thoughtful book on tank warfare development, as well as several good biographies of German General Guderian, the mastermind of the armored Blitzkrieg.
But the abject failure of Imperial Germany’s flirtation with armored warfare is a worthy subject in itself, and that’s the focus of this book. With his expertise in the entire history of armored warfare, few authors are better positioned to address Germany’s first experience with tanks than author Stephen J. Zaloga.
There’s an old saw about how “Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan” – and that can be said about the development of the tank. Clearly, then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had a hand in the development of “Mother,” the world’s first tank – a kind of “land ship” that would give the Royal Navy something to fight with while the fleet hunkered down at Scapa Flow, waiting for the Imperial German Navy to come out and fight. Some claim that it was Churchill himself who coined the name “tank” – implying a mobile water tank used for bringing drinking water supplies to troops at the front – as a kind of ruse. However, technology leading up to the first tank was well in-hand nearly a decade before the start of World War I – but it took bloody trench warfare and a military stalemate with no seeming end in sight to push forward the development of the tank in 1915 and 1916.
”Mother” – the first Mk. I tank – was a “rhomboid”-shaped tank designed to cross trenches and shell-holes, carrying machine guns and their crews toward the enemy while protecting them with bullet-resistant (but not artillery-proof) armor. Because the machine gun had become queen of the battlefield – in the process, freezing all offensive progress – it became imperative to take a machine gun “to the enemy” in support of attacking ground troops. The notion of carrying artillery forward – let alone the idea of tank vs. tank combat – was not considered at first. The tank – like poison gas – was designed to end the stalemate and return armies to wars of movement. Some even hoped (vainly, and rather stupidly) that this would lead to the return of the cavalry as a viable military force.
Of course, the British got it all wrong. Not mechanically – “Mother” and her offspring, most notably the Mk. IV – were about as mechanically effective as the crude automotive technology of the era would permit. No, they blew it tactically – and since there was no real precedent, that’s neither particularly surprising nor particularly damning. But the troops weren’t trained to work with Mother – they had no idea about supporting the tanks, nor were they ready to exploit the breakthroughs the tanks could produce. Their piecemeal introduction at the Somme had almost no impact on the battle, but they did tip their hand to the Germans – who might have launched their own aggressive tank-building program, but who instead focused on creating anti-tank large-caliber rifles and converting 77 mm quick-firing field artillery pieces into crudely effective anti-tank cannons.
By the time of Cambrai, the Brits finally got it right. Sort of right, anyway.
They put a lot of tanks into the field at one time, and some of the troops were even trained to work with these tanks – giving the British Army’s new tank corps the chance to make a difference. Because of the size of their attack and because of some initial infantry support, their breakthrough was monumental by World War I proportions – five miles in some places. But of course mistakes happened, reinforcements were not rushed into the breach and the Germans recaptured most of the lost ground within a day. Because of this, General Ludendorf – often an innovator himself – totally overlooked the tank’s potential, and kept the German tank-development program at a very low priority. Instead, he had his forces scour the Cambrai battlefield and recover broken-down Mk. IV tanks – these were restored and became a major part of the German’s overall tank force.
Back at the home front, German tank designers and Army officials were making a series of disastrous decisions about tank design – or, they would have been disastrous if tank production ever got any kind of reasonable priority. But because Germany produced fewer than 30 tanks during the war, the fact that they were flawed designs really didn’t matter all that much. In a war with millions of soldiers and a 500-mile trench-to-trench front line, the impact of even 30 great tanks would have been limited. But the German tanks weren’t great – even by the standards of the day, they weren’t even particularly good. Instead of mimicking the trench-crossing abilities of the British “rhomboid” tanks, German tank designs were based on the commercial Holt-Caterpillar track-laying system.
This was a huge mistake – one repeated by the French in their St. Chamond and Schneider tanks, but avoided by their revolutionary, rhomboid-like Renault FT-17 light tank. This was a mistake which ensured that the A7V would be unable to cross any but the smallest trenches and shell-holes – and considering the terrain conditions prevalent on the Western Front, this track design decision was foolish and self-defeating – and unnecessary. Because the Brits tipped their hand at the Somme in 1916, the Germans already knew what kind of design could be counted on to effectively cross trenches and shell holes.
As noted, fewer than two dozen German tanks were built in a three-year AFV development program; more captured British and French tanks were put into German service than were produced by Germany, though the Germans did not formally use any French tanks in combat (some French-built tanks may have been used on-the-spot by those soldiers who captured them, but none were incorporated into established German tank units). However, compared to British and French production efforts, this was a drop in the bucket – far too few German tanks were manufactured to have any but the most limited tactical impact.
For instance, Germany’s largest single tank assault, in early 1918, involved just 13 A7V tanks, several of which broke down before they could cross the start-line and enter combat. Within a few weeks of this limited assault, Britain launched a tank attack with more than 400 tanks – and around the same time, France launched the world’s largest tank assault to date, committing nearly 500 tanks to the attack. Earlier in the war, at Cambrai, the British had abandoned more tanks on the field of combat – due primarily to mechanical breakdowns, and only secondarily to effective German anti-tank efforts – than all the tanks built by Germany throughout the entire war. Ironically, as noted above, these British tanks, once captured and refurbished, outnumbered A7Vs in the ranks of German armored fighting vehicles.
Although the A7V looked ungainly in the extreme, it was not without merits. For instance, it had two engines instead of one, and as a result it had a greater turn of speed than the British Mk. IV rhomboid. However, the radiators were inside the tank’s fighting compartment, raising temperatures inside to above 150 degrees F. In addition, each A7V was armed with a captured British-built Nordenfelt quick-fire 57mm cannon – a weapon that, based on limited records of tank-to-tank combat in World War I, was superior to the British 6-pounder cannon found on the “male” tanks (but not the “female” tanks, which had machine-gun armament but no cannons, making them useless in tank vs. tank combat). Again the however – the fumes from all these guns were so intense that the large crews had to wear gas masks. These, along with the intense heat, made serving in a German tank an agony, even when not in combat.
But it was in combat that the A7V stood out as something more than a large target. Though it may have been only coincidence – there were so few tank vs. tank combats in World War I that this is possible – in each encounter between Allied and German tanks, the Germans came out on top. This applies even to combats where captured British tanks were used by Germany, reinforcing the possibility of coincidence. Zaloga’s book details each of these very limited number of tank vs. tank combats; in total, A7Vs destroyed fewer than a dozen Allied tanks, but in those very few encounters, when they faced down British Mk. IV “male” gun-tanks, they tended to win. Of course, and unsurprisingly, the A7Vs dominated all combats against machine-gun armed Mk IV “female” tanks.
In all cases – and there were only a few instances of tank vs. tank combat in the First World War – mechanical breakdowns did more damage than did the enemy tanks. Even when they won, the A7Vs had to be hauled directly to the repair shops for a rebuild. A single day’s combat tended to wear them out mechanically, even if the tanks suffered no battle damage.
Beyond their limited number, German A7V battle tanks showed the apparently inherent German penchant for gigantism – a tendency that culminated late in World War II with the fielding of the grossly oversized and mechanically unreliable SturmTiger, and the even larger, thankfully never-operational monster, the E-100 Maus. However, as author Stephen Zaloga points out, the 18-to-24-man A7V was “pint-sized” compared to the proposed German K-wagen, a 150-ton monster tank that, even when downsized to a “mere” 100 tons was far larger than the mechanical abilities of the time could support. Fortunately for their designated crews, no K-wagens were completed. However, the effort to construct them diverted scarce resources into a futile effort – a self-defeating move that was revisited in Germany a generation later.
In 1944 – which paralleled their actions in 1918 to a remarkable degree – Germany spread scarce resources over the construction of too many designs that were too big, too expensive, too cumbersome and too mechanically unreliable to stand up to the rigors of combat. In spite of combat-worthy and cost-effective late-war designs, such as the Hetzer and the JagdPanzer IV, Germany pressed ahead with the King Tiger and Panther II, the SturmTiger and the E-100. Focus on more effective designs after June of 1944 would not have won them the war, but considering the successes of German “ambush tanks,” they would have prolonged the fighting and forced the Allies to pay a far higher blood-price.
Taking this a step further, if – during World War II – Germany had focused on matching the Russians and Americans tank-for-tank by producing a large quantity of good-enough tanks (instead of striving for world-beating designs that were expensive in terms of time and resources and challenging mechanically), the outcome of the war itself could have been different. Too many times, the Germans had almost enough panzers to win a battle – but almost only counts in horseshoes, not in combat. There are no prizes awarded for “Second Place” in tank vs. tank battles. Bottom line: the roots of this war-losing World War II tank development strategy – a strategy of developing too many designs that were too big, too complex and too few in (production) number can be found in Germany’s World War I tank program, as this book amply demonstrates.
This book is absolutely typical of the popular Osprey “New Vanguard” style – 48 pages, extensively photo-illustrated, with 8 pages of color plates illustrating markings, internal structure and captured Allied tanks impressed into German service. Modelers and historians will find this book a useful introduction to German armored warfare in World War I.
