7. The War Years: Conclusion
On March 1, 1948, the return of soldiers from Britain and Africa began in earnest. The British government was sufficiently stable to allow Reich troops to begin withdrawing to the mainland; however, this was not, as many had hoped, for immediate demobilization. The Fuehrer had decided to preserve Germany's military at a high state of establishment. Privately, he pointed out that the number of generals was rapidly eclipsing the number of divisions - drawing divisions down to cadre was fine in theory, but the officers needed men to lead.
He himself did little to stem the tide of promotion: the victory parade celebrating the destruction of the Western Powers began at the Garrison Church in Potsdam, where fifteen years prior, the Fuehrer had spoken to the Reichstag beside President Hindenburg, and stretched all the way to Berlin's Olympic Stadium - an unimaginably long distance of thirty kilometers' march, with the lead units departing the Garrison Church the night prior by torchlight and arriving at the stadium as the sun rose. The parade dwarfed the previous million-man Sowjet victory parade. At its culmination, in another torchlit ceremony, the Fuehrer celebrated the British victory by naming another forty-three Reichsheer and Waffen-SS field marshals, thirteen grand admirals, and two air marshals. The Fuehrer had, in fifteen years, created half as many marshals as in all German history prior to his rise. The marshals thus created were decorated as lavishly as they had been promoted, with the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross being awarded for the first time under the new Reich. The awardees were:
Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt (Poland, 1937)
Field Marshal Fedor von Bock (Russia, 1942)
Field Marshal Julius Ringel (Russia, 1943)
Hauptgruppenfuehrer Paul Hausser (Scandinavia, 1943)
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (Italy, 1946)
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (France, 1947)
Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (Britain, 1948)
Field Marshal Walter Model (Egypt, 1948)
Field Marshal Heinz Guderian (India, 1948)
It was an illustrious list, to be sure, but there remained the problem of peacetime employment both of these men and their armies. It was a problem which Germany had given little consideration to, outside of certain offices of the SS, including the Reich Settlement Main Office, which fell under Heydrich's purview.
What, then, had these men accomplished? True, Germany was free of Versailles, and had revenged all of the wrongs of 1918, but new problems arose. Germany held an empire stretching pole-to-pole, and from Ghent to Grozny, an empire which even the Fuehrer was forced to admit was largely useless, assimilated mainly to discomfit the Reich's enemies. They had accomplished this through a series of daring gambles resting on the idea of reaching a goal by any means available before the defense had a chance to organize. When this plan was executed according to these principles - such as throughout the Balkans - the world considered the German army the finest in the world. In circumstances ill-fitted to the German method of waging war, such as Italy, losses on the scale of the Great War could be expected.
There were solid foundations to this method of warmaking, however. Starting in the 1930s, the German military had begun working from the premise of being badly outnumbered in any potential conflict, or of the opposition being entrenched in the world's most modern fortifications. To this end, the Reich had established its armed forces on the principle of achieving local superiority, and requiring that the Reichswehr be the best-trained, best-equipped force which it could possibly be, invoking Voltaire's maxim that "God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best." Certain weapon systems epitomized this mentality. Foremost among these was the PzKpfW V "Panther" tank.
Figure 90: A column of Panthers advances through Russia
The Panther was the foundation of the Reichsheer's armored formations from the Sowjet War to the invasion of Britain, and in the form of the Standardpanzer, it continued to serve until the early 1950s. Its success was due to a number of features, foremost of which, as with all of the German military, was crew training. Beyond excellent, well-trained vehicle crews, though, the Panther was a vehicle developed in perfect tune with the doctrine by which it was employed, and equipped to overpower any vehicle of any opposing nation. Reservations which the Reich leadership had felt regarding tanks in first Russia, then France, and finally Britain were overwhelmed by the reality of the Panther's superiority on battlefield after battlefield. Even when the Panther was poorly employed, such as in Rome or London, it is hard to imagine another armored vehicle performing the same duties as well.
The Panther's main armament was a long-barreled 75mm smoothbore cannon, the KwK42/L70, which proved capable of penetrating the armor of its most notable opponent, the much scarcer Sowjet T-34, through its glacis plate (the thick, sloped armor plate on the front of any tank) at 300 meters, and through any point in its turret armor at 2000 meters - beyond the Sowjet tanks' theoretical maximum range! An emphasis on superior gunnery in German armored crews exacerbated this problem, with men like SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Balthasar Woll, once an enlisted tank gunner with Michael Wittmann, achieving confirmed kills against the Sowjet T-34 at ranges of up to 3000 meters. This combination of crew and armament superiority partially explains why the German advance through the Sowjet Union was so rapid: the Sowjets simply did not know how to respond, and even when they were able to lure German armored forces into confrontations nominally favorable to them, the German superiority in crew training generally won out - it was an armored force, after all, which broke through the Sowjet mountaineers' defenses north of Vladivostok and linked up with General Ringel to end the Sowjet War in 1943.
Figure 91: Parachutists fighting in southern Sweden, 1944
Ringel's parachutists were another area in which the Reichswehr was markedly superior to any of its rivals. Though the Sowjets had pioneered the use of air-deployed soldiers in the 1930s, they had failed to grasp their significance, and only Germany had developed any significant airborne assets by the early 1940s. They were under-employed during the Reich's early wars, with a few detachments participating as regular infantry in Poland and Hungary, and launched a massive, successful invasion of Crete in 1942, but the Sowjet war truly saw them come into their own, with a mass landing along the Dnieper which allowed the rapid advance of the armored forces deep into the Ukraine. The airborne forces were continuously upgraded during the war, but generally their armament from the Sowjet War onward remained fairly constant. The average soldier was armed with an MP43 rifle or variant thereof and a sidearm, the average squad equipped with at least two disposable anti-tank rockets and two machine guns, and the average platoon equipped with a long-range radio which allowed it to contact higher artillery assets. In peacetime conditions, they thought nothing of marching upwards of fifty kilometers in a day for days on end; this paid off in circumstances such as Africa or the isolation of Vladivostok, where generals like Student and Ringel were able to persuade them to continue operations where even mechanized units would have begged for a halt.
Figure 92: DRMS Ernst Thaelmann
during Mediterranean trials, 1944
If Germany's land forces were founded on the parachute and the Panther, the Reichsmarine rested on a tripod of battleships, aircraft carriers, and submarines, the so-called "balanced fleet" that the British had hoped to trap Germany into building so that it could be destroyed by their own home fleet. As it happened, the Fuehrer's decision to ignore the Anglo-German Naval Agreement proved prescient. It allowed the construction of more and larger vessels, and in the mid-1940s, Germany's aircraft carrier technology especially leapt forward. The primitive, flush-decked
Graf Zeppelin-class carriers of the 1930s were abandoned in favor of heavier, better-equipped ships which were in turn capable of launching heavier, better-equipped aircraft, generally the Luftwaffe's hand-me-downs; naval aviation design would not become fully independent until Goering's death. In comparison, the Reichsmarine generally felt that they had a perfectly designed set of weapons in the
Bismarck-class battleship and the
Scharnhorst-class battlecruiser. With a few updates such as strengthened belt armor, improved fire control, and the
Seetakt radar system, they remained virtually unchanged through twelve years of war. They proved themselves in engagements in the Mediterranean against the Italians, and again in the Channel against the Royal Navy, but increasingly the Reichsmarine became aware that the future of warfare rested with the carriers and, perhaps, the submarines.
Figure 93: Type XXI U-Boat at sea, unknown location, 1945
The main submarine used by the Reichsmarine during the 1940s was the Type XXI U-Boat, which, unlike previous models of submarine anywhere in the world, was designed to operate submerged for its entire patrol. It operated successfully against the French Navy during the Australian handover, and even in American waters during the temporary hostilities between the United States and Germany in 1947-1948. Even more than the surface vessels, the Type XXI saw improvements over the submarines of the Great War. These improvements were partially crew comfort - a freezer, a shower, a washroom - and partially technological - advanced passive acoustic sensors, a Zuse machine in each boat, and a sophisticated loading-firing system that would allow it to fire all of its torpedo tubes in the time once required to fire a single tube. The ability to fire and flee undetected made the Type XXI an exceptionally dangerous opponent, and it would not be until the mid-1950s and the advent of nuclear power that an adequate replacement could be found.
Figure 94: Surviving Me-262 "Weiss-1" of JG7, Berlin-Tempelhof, 2006
The Luftwaffe suffered from two major drawbacks in its war planning. The first was that, unlike the Reichsheer and Reichsmarine, it was seemingly impossible for the Luftwaffe to achieve local superiority, even in the Sowjet War. Sowjet anti-aircraft guns seemingly outnumbered Sowjet tanks; even so, the Luftwaffe, not the Reichsmarine, claimed the first battleship of the war years, the
Marat at Leningrad. The second deficiency was compounded by the first. Despite Goering's tremendous political influence, the clear superiority of its aircraft, and the best efforts of its officers, the Luftwaffe was never able to maintain air parity in the West, against Britain's Royal Air Force. Even during the British war, when the RAF was flying antiquated propeller-driven, cannon-armed Spitfires against the Reich's cutting-edge
Kurzbogen missile-armed Me-262 jets, there were simply so many British aircraft that they could not be swept clear until the Reichsheer overran the British Isles - as General Galland exclaimed,
"We have to land sometimes, and the damned Tommies are there when we do!" It was not until the postwar reforms and the "Grossere Staffel" movement, spearheaded by Galland and Field Marshal Kesselring, would establish the Luftwaffe at sufficient size that this difficulty would never again arise.
These, then, were the weapons and men who fought the wars; however, their planning processes have not been thoroughly outlined. Much has been made, especially by the British historian B.H. Liddell-Hart, of the influence of British prewar thought on German doctrine during the war years; however, this influence exists largely in the minds of Hart and his supporters. Even in Field Marshal Guderian's own writings, which Hart claims clearly show his influence, no distinct philosophy in the Clausewitzian manner emerges. What emerges is the idea of a fighting
spirit, rather than a system. The foundation of this spirit is the offensive mentality, and the desire to seize any opportunity presented to achieve the objective. The momentary removal of enemy troops from one section of the line to reinforce another, for instance, may be ruthlessly exploited, such as happened in Warsaw in 1937. Similarly, on the national level, the political isolation of a small neighboring country is practically an invitation for intervention in its internal affairs by the Reich by this viewpoint.
The establishment of local superiority and the ruthless exploitation of any opportunity presented are the foundations of the offensive spirit inculcated by Guderian and his followers; however, it had its risks. A common "what if?" exercise involves the airborne forces - what if, at any point during the war, the vulnerable air transports had been intercepted by enemy aircraft? It is unlikely that they would have been able to achieve their objectives at all, and if they had, considerable loss of life would ensue. Similarly, Guderian especially was guilty of rushing forward ahead of his supporting elements and leaving himself vulnerable to encirclement and destruction. In Russia especially, units would occasionally find themselves encircled by Russian troops even as they attempted to encircle the enemy themselves.
Similar problems permeated the Reichsmarine. The achievement of local superiority could only occur in a battle such as that of the Thames by denuding Germany's entire naval frontage, and this is why subsidiary actions against the Americans were fought in Normandy-Brittany and Sicily. The Reichsmarine was capable of overwhelming any one enemy in any one location, given sufficient planning, but such success came at a steep price, which is to say the exposure of the Reich to landing anywhere else along its rather extensive coastline and the inadequate protection of the vulnerable supply convoys to Indochina and Africa.
In the 1930s and 1940s, then, German military policy was one of calculated gambling. The Fuehrer guessed, correctly as it turned out, that the Western powers would not intervene until it was too late for them to stop the eastward, northward, and southward expansion of the Reich, and his military staff followed his lead, gambling over and over again on the superiority of German arms and soldiers against a succession of opponents. If any one of those opponents had proven to be more than the Reich had been prepared to face, especially in Russia, it is chilling to think of what the present political situation might be. Captured Sowjet documents make it clear that Germany was to be subjected to the most brutal of occupations, with no clear end save perhaps a Communist-controlled puppet government and the wrecking of the Reich's most treasured institutions (for more information, see Suworoff,
Icebreaker and related works).
Figure 95: The Reich, European Economic Union, African Economic Union, and Asian Economic Union spheres after de-colonialism, 1950
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Next up - The Occupation (1948-?), including decolonialism, the death of Goering, and an update on that fellow in the basement of the RLM building with his clicky machines.
EDIT - Two points before I go back to playing the game in very close to real time (multiple nations with thousand-plus division armies equals bog-down).
1 - That's an actual flying Me-262 replica, though not the "real" White-1 of JG7, which is a two-seater you can apparently pay to ride.
2 - The map shows it badly because Kazakhstan and NatChi have the same map color, but NatChi has NOT become a super-monster in central Asia, that's Kazakhstan.