German troops using the minenwerfer as an anti-tank gun in October 1918
September 15, 1916, began as a
routine day for the German infantrymen in the forward trenches around Flers on
the Somme—as routine as any day was likely to be after two and a half months of
vicious, close-gripped fighting that bled divisions white and reduced
battalions to the strength of companies. True, an occasional rumble of engines
had been audible across the line. But the British had more trucks than the
Kaiser’s army, and were more willing to risk them to bring up ammunition and
carry back wounded. True, there had been occasional gossip of something new up
Tommy’s sleeve: of armored “land cruisers” impervious to anything less than a
six-inch shell. But rumors—Scheisshausparolen in Landser speak—were endemic on
the Western Front. Then “a forest of guns opened up in a ceaseless, rolling
thunder, the few remaining survivors . . . fight on until the British flood
overwhelms them, consumes them, and passes on. . . . An extraordinary number of
men. And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters: the first
British tanks.”
Improvised and poorly coordinated,
the British attack soon collapsed in the usual welter of blood and confusion.
But for the first time on the Western Front, certainly the first time on the
Somme, the heaviest losses were suffered by the defenders. Reactions varied
widely. Some men panicked; others fought to a finish. But the 14th Bavarian
Infantry, for example, tallied more than 1,600 casualties. Almost half were
“missing,” and most of them were prisoners. That was an unheard-of ratio in an
army that still prided itself on its fighting spirit. But the 14th was one of
the regiments hit on the head by the tanks.
Shock rolled uphill. “The enemy,”
one staff officer recorded, “employed new engines of war, as cruel as
effective. . . . It is necessary to take whatever methods are possible to
counteract them.” From the Allied perspective, the impact of tanks on the Great
War is generally recognized. The cottage industry among scholars of the British
learning curve, with descriptions of proto-mechanized war pitted against
accounts of a semi-mobile final offensive based on combined arms and improved
communications, recognizes the centrality of armor for both interpretations.
French accounts are structured by Marshal Philippe Petain’s judgment that, in
the wake of the frontline mutinies of 1917, it was necessary to wait for “the
Americans and the tanks.” Certainly it was the tanks, the light Renault FTs,
that carried the exhausted French infantry forward in the months before the
armistice. Erich Ludendorff, a general in a position to know, declared after
the war that Germany had been defeated not by Marshal Foch but by “General
Tank.”
In those contexts it is easy to
overlook the salient fact that the German army was quick and effective in
developing antitank techniques. This was facilitated by the moonscape terrain
of the Western Front, the mechanical unreliability of early armored vehicles,
and such technical grotesqueries as the French seeking to increase the range of
their early tanks by installing extra fuel tanks on their roofs, which
virtually guaranteed the prompt incineration of the crew unless they were quick
to abandon the vehicle. Even at Flers the Germans had taken on tanks like any
other targets: aiming for openings in the armor, throwing grenades, using field
guns over open sights. German intelligence thoroughly interrogated one captured
tanker and translated a diary lost by another. Inside of a week, Berlin had a
general description of the new weapons, accompanied by a rough but reasonably
accurate sketch.
One of the most effective antitank
measures was natural. Tanks drew fire from everywhere, fire sufficiently
intense to strip away any infantry in their vicinity. A tank by itself was
vulnerable. Therefore, the German tactic was to throw everything available at
the tanks and keep calm if they kept coming. Proactive countermeasures began
with inoculating the infantry against “tank fright” by using knocked-out
vehicles to demonstrate their various vulnerabilities. An early frontline
improvisation was the geballte Ladung: the heads of a half dozen stick grenades
tied around a complete “potato-masher” and thrown into one of a tank’s many
openings—or, more basic, the same half dozen grenades shoved into a sandbag and
the fuse of one of them pulled. More effective and less immediately risky was
the K-round. This was simply a bullet with a tungsten carbide core instead of
the soft alloys commonly used in small arms rounds. Originally developed to
punch holes in metal plates protecting enemy machine-gun and sniper positions,
it was employed to even better effect by the ubiquitous German machine guns
against the armor of the early tanks. K-rounds were less likely to disable the
vehicle, mostly causing casualties and confusion among the crew, but the end
effect was similar.
As improved armor limited the
K-round’s effect, German designers came up with a 13mm version. Initially it
was used in a specially designed single-shot rifle, the remote ancestor of
today’s big-caliber sniper rifles but without any of their recoil-absorbing
features. The weapon’s fierce recoil made it inaccurate and unpopular; even a
strong user risked a broken collarbone or worse. More promising was the TuF
(tank and antiaircraft) machine gun using the same round. None of the ten
thousand TuFs originally projected were ready for service by November 11—but
the concept and the bullet became the basis for John Browning’s .50-caliber
machine gun, whose near-century of service makes it among the most long-lived
modern weapons.
When something heavier was desirable,
the German counterpart of the Stokes mortar was a much larger piece, mounted on
wheels, capable of modification for direct fire and, with a ten-pound shell,
lethal against any tank. The German army had also begun forming batteries of
“infantry guns” even before the tanks appeared. These were usually mountain
guns or modified field pieces of around three-inch caliber. Intended to support
infantry attacks by direct fire, they could stop tank attacks just as well.
From the beginning, ordinary field pieces with ordinary shells also proved able
to knock out tanks at a range of two miles.
In an emergency the large number
of 77mm field pieces mounted on trucks for antiaircraft work could become
improvised antitank guns. These proved particularly useful at Cambrai in
November 1917, when more than a hundred tanks were part of the spoils of the
counterattack that wiped out most of the initial British gains. They did so
well, indeed, that the crews had to be officially reminded that their primary
duty was shooting down airplanes. As supplements, a number of ordinary field
guns were mounted on trucks in the fashion of the portees used in a later war
by the British in North Africa.
If survival was not sufficient
incentive, rewards and honor were invoked. One Bavarian battery was awarded 500
marks for knocking out a tank near Flers. British reports and gossip praised an
officer who, working a lone gun at Flesquieres during the Cambrai battle,
either by himself or with a scratch crew, was supposed to have disabled anywhere
from five to sixteen tanks before he was killed. The Nazis transformed the hero
into a noncommissioned officer, and gave him a name and at least one statue.
The legend’s less Homeric roots seem to have involved a half dozen tanks
following each other over the crest of a small hill and being taken out one at
a time by a German field battery. The story of “the gunner of Flesquieres”
nevertheless indicates the enduring strength of the tank mystique in German
military lore.
Other purpose-designed antitank weapons
were ready to come on line when the war ended: short-barreled, low-velocity
37mm guns, an automatic 20mm cannon that the Swiss developed into the World War
II Oerlikon. The effect of this new hardware on the projected large-scale use
of a new generation of tanks in the various Allied plans for 1919 must remain
speculative. What it highlights is the continued German commitment to tank
defense even in the war’s final months.
That commitment is highlighted
from a different perspective when considering the first German tank. It was not
until October 1916 that the Prussian War Ministry summoned the first meeting of
the A7V Committee. The group took its name from the sponsoring agency, the
Seventh Section of the General War Department, and eventually bestowed it on
the resulting vehicle. The members were mostly from the motor transport service
rather than the combat arms, and their mission was technical: develop a tracked
armored fighting vehicle in the shortest possible time. They depended heavily
on designers and engineers loaned to the project by Germany’s major auto
companies. Not surprisingly, when the first contracts for components were
placed in November, no fewer than seven firms shared the pie.
A prototype was built in January;
a working model was demonstrated to the General Staff in May. It is a clear
front-runner for the title of “ugliest tank ever built” and a strong contender
in the “most dysfunctional” category. The A7V was essentially a rectangular
armored box roughly superimposed on a tractor chassis. It mounted a 57mm cannon
in its front face and a half dozen machine guns around the hull. It weighed 33
tons, and required a crew of no fewer than eighteen men. Its under-slung tracks
and low ground clearance left it almost no capacity to negotiate obstacles or
cross broken terrain: the normal environment of the Western Front. An improved
A7V and a lighter tank, resembling the British Whippet and based on the chassis
of the Daimler automobile, were still in prototype states when the war ended. A
projected 150-ton monster remained—fortunately—on the drawing boards.
Shortages of raw material and an
increasingly dysfunctional war production organization restricted A7V
production to fewer than three dozen. When finally constituted, the embryonic
German armored force deployed no more than forty tanks at full strength, and
more than half of those were British models salvaged and repaired. Material
shortcomings were, however, the least of the problems facing Germany’s first
tankers. By most accounts the Germans had the best of the first
tank-versus-tank encounter at Villiers Bretonneaux on April 24, 1918. British
tankers, at least, were impressed, with their commanding general describing the
threat as “formidable” and warning that there was no guarantee the Germans
would continue to use their tanks in small numbers.
In fact, the German army made no
serious use of armor in either the spring offensive or the fighting retreat
that began in August and continued until the armistice. In the ten or twelve
times tanks appeared under German colors their numbers were too small—usually
around five vehicles—to attract more than local attention. The crews, it is
worth mentioning, were not the thrown-together body of men often described in
British-oriented accounts. They did come from a number of arms and services,
but all were volunteers—high-morale soldiers for a high- risk mission: a legacy
that would endure. Europe’s most highly industrialized nation nevertheless
fought for its survival with the least effective mechanized war instruments of
the major combatants.
In public Erich Ludendorff loftily
declared that the German high command had decided not to fight a “war of
material.” His memoirs are more self-critical: “Perhaps I should have put on
more pressure: perhaps then we would have had a few more tanks for the decisive
battles of 1918. But I don’t know what other necessary war material we should
have had to cut short.” For any weapon, however, a doctrine is at least as
important as numbers. In contrast to both the British and the French, the
German army demonstrated neither institutional nor individual capacity for
thinking about mechanized war beyond the most immediate, elementary contexts.
