Ernst Volckheim (11 April 1898 – 1 September 1962) was one of the founders of armored and mechanized warfare. A German officer in the First and Second World War, Volkheim rose to the rank of colonel, during World War II in the German Army. Little known outside of professional military and historical circles, Volkheim is considered the foremost military academic influence on German tank war proponent, Heinz Guderian, because both Volkheim’s teaching as well as his 1924 professional military articles place him as one of the very earliest theorists of armored warfare and the use of German armored formations including independent tank corps.
An aristocrat and a Prussian Guardsman, General Hans von
Seeckt fit none of the stereotypes associated with either. Educated at a
civilian Gymnasium rather than a cadet school, he had traveled widely in
Europe, visited India and Egypt, and was well read in contemporary English
literature. During the war he had established a reputation as one of the army’s
most brilliant staff officers. Having made most of that reputation on the
Eastern Front, he was untarnished by the collapse of the Western Front, and a
logical successor to national hero Paul von Hindenburg as Chief of the General
Staff in the summer of 1918. In March 1920 he became head of the army high
command in the newly established Weimar Republic.
Seeckt disliked slogans; he disliked nostalgia; he rejected
the argument, widespread among veterans, that the “front experience,” with its
emphasis on egalitarian comradeship and heroic vitalism that was celebrated by
author-veterans like Ernst Jünger and Kurt Hesse, should shape the emerging
Reichswehr. Instead he called for a return to the principle of pursuing quick,
decisive victories. That in turn meant challenging the concept of mass that had
permeated military thinking since the Napoleonic Wars. Mass, Seeckt argued,
“becomes immobile. It cannot win victories. It can only crush by sheer weight.”
Seeckt’s critique in part involved making the best of
necessity. The Treaty of Versailles had specified the structure of the
Reichswehr in detail: a force of 100,000, with enlisted men committed to twelve
years of service and officers to twenty-five. It was forbidden tanks, aircraft,
and any artillery above three inches in caliber. As a final presumed nail in
the coffin of German aggression, the Reichswehr’s organization was fixed at
seven infantry and three cavalry divisions: a throwback to the days of
Frederick the Great. Whatever might have been the theoretical hopes that the
newly configured Reichswehr would be the first step in general European
disarmament—when, presumably, the extra cavalry would give tone to holiday
parades—Germany’s actual military position in the west was hopeless in any
conventional context. In the East, against Poland and Czechoslovakia, some
prospects existed of at least buying time for the diplomats to seek a miracle.
Seeckt’s Reichswehr, however, faced at least a double, arguably a triple, bind.
It could not afford to challenge the Versailles Treaty openly. It badly needed force
multipliers. But to seek those multipliers by supporting clandestine
paramilitary organizations depending on politicized zeal was to risk
destabilizing a state that, though unsatisfactory in principle, was Germany’s
best chance to avoid collapsing into permanent civil war.
Seeckt’s response was to develop an army capable of
“fighting outnumbered and winning.” Among the most common misinterpretations of
his work is that it was intended to provide cadres for a future national
mobilization. Almost from the beginning the Reichswehr developed plans for
eventual expansion. These plans, however, were based on enlarging and enhancing
the existing force, not submerging it in an army prepared to fight the Great
War over again. The manuals issued in the early 1920s, in particular the 1921
field service regulations titled Fuehrung und Gefecht der Verbundeten Waffen
(Leadership and Employment of Combined Arms) emphasized the importance of the
offensive. The Reichswehr, Seeckt insisted, must dictate the conditions of
battle by taking the initiative. It was on the offensive that the superiority
of troops and commanders achieved the greatest relative effect. The leader’s
responsibility was above all to maintain pace and tempo. He must make decisions
with minimal information. Boldness was his first rule; flexibility his second.
Doctrine and training alike emphasized encounter battles: two forces meeting
unexpectedly and engaging in what amounted to a melee—a melee in which training
and flexibility had a chance to compensate for numerical and material
inferiority. Even large-scale attacks were envisaged as a series of local
combats involving companies, squads and platoons finding weak spots, creating
opportunities, cooperating ad hoc to exploit success.
General-audience writings like Friedrich von Taysen’s 1921
essay on mobile war also stressed what was rapidly becoming a new—or
rediscovered—orthodoxy. Machines, Taysen declared, were useless unless animated
by human energy and will, when they could contribute to the rapid flanking and
enveloping maneuvers that alone promised decision in war. Two years later he
restated the importance of fighting spirit and warned against allowing infantry
to become addicted to armor support.
Taysen’s soaring perorations on “Germanic limitlessness” and
“living will” were a far cry from Seeckt’s practical approach. They
nevertheless shared a common subtext: the centrality of mobility in both the
figurative and the literal senses. The Reichswehr had to be able to think
faster and move faster than its enemies at every stage and in every phase.
Paradoxically, the banning of cutting-edge technology facilitated cultivating
those qualities by removing the temptations of materially focused faddism.
Elsewhere in Europe, J. F. C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell-Hart depicted fully
mechanized armies with no more regard for terrain than warships had for the
oceans they traversed. Giulio Douhet and Hugh Trenchard predicted future wars
decided by fleets of bombers. French generals prepared for the “managed battle”
structured by firepower and controlled by radio. The Red Army shifted from an
initial emphasis on proletarian morale to a focus on synergy between
mechanization and mass as ideologically appropriate for a revolutionary state.
In sober reality, not until the end of the 1920s would the
technology of the internal combustion engine develop the qualities of speed and
reliability beyond the embryonic stages that restricted armored vehicles to a
supporting role. Aircraft as well were limited in their direct, sustained
contributions to a ground offensive. Wire-and-strut, fabric-covered planes with
fragile engines, even the specialized ground-attack versions developed by the
Germans, were terribly vulnerable to even random ground fire. Artillery,
despite the sophisticated fire-control methods of 1918, was a weapon of mass
destruction. In that context the Reichswehr cultivated its garden, emphasizing
human skills—a pattern facilitated because much of the process of maintaining
effectiveness involved preventing long-service personnel from stagnating as a
consequence of too many years spent doing the same things in the same places
with the same people.
The cavalry in particular emerged from its wartime shell.
The treaty-prescribed order of battle gave it an enhanced role faute de mieux.
The mounted arm was forced to take itself seriously in the tasks of securing
German frontiers and preserving German sovereignty. Further incentive was
provided by tables of organization, internal organizations that authorized one
cavalry officer for two of his infantry counterparts. There were fewer
opportunities to withdraw into nostalgic isolation—everyone had to pull his
professional weight. As early as spring 1919, a series of articles in
Militär-Wochenblatt, the army’s leading professional journal, dealt with the
army’s projected reconstruction and included two articles on cavalry.
Maximilian von Poseck, the arm’s Inspector-General, argued that in the east,
large mounted units had been effective for both reconnaissance and combat, and
mobile war was likely to be more typical of future conflict than the high-tech
stalemate of the Western Front.
The Reichswehr’s cavalry cannot be described as taking an
enthusiastic lead in Germany’s military mechanization. Its regimental officers
initially included a high percentage of men who had spent their active service
in staffs or on dismounted service, and who were now anxious to get back to
“real cavalry soldiering.” In the early 1920s Seeckt consistently and
scathingly criticized the mounted arm’s tactical sluggishness, its poor
horsemanship, and its inaccurate shooting, both dismounted and on horseback.
Too much training was devoted to riding in formation—a skill worse than useless
in the field, where dispersion was required. Horses did not immediately become
“battle taxis.” Lances were not abolished until 1927—a year earlier, let it be
noted, than in Britain. Neither, however, did the cavalry drag its collective
feet, or pursue horse-powered dead ends with the energy of their European and
American counterparts. After 1928, through judicious juggling of internal
resources, each Reichswehr cavalry regiment included a “Special Equipment
Squadron” with eight heavy machine guns and, eventually, two light mortars and
two light cannon—a significant buildup of firepower, achieved without doing
more than slightly bending treaty requirements.
The cavalry also benefited from the absence of institutional
rivals. There was no air force to attract forward thinkers and free spirits.
Germany had no tank corps, no embryonic armored force, to challenge the horse
soldiers’ position and encourage the narrow branch-of-service loyalties that
absorbed so much energy on the mechanization question in France, Britain, and
the United States. Instead, German cavalrymen were likely to find motor
vehicles appealing precisely because they were deprived of them.
German and German-language military literature of the 1920s
projected the development of a genuine combined arms formation. While details
varied, the core would be three horse-mounted brigades—a total of six
regiments, each with a machine-gun squadron. These would cooperate with an
infantry battalion carried in trucks, a cyclist battalion, and an independent
machine-gun battalion, also motorized. Fire support would be provided by a
battalion each of horse-drawn and motorized artillery. With a detachment of
around a dozen armored cars, a twelve-plane observation squadron, an
antiaircraft battalion, an engineer battalion, and signal, medical, and supply
services, this theoretical formation combined mobility, firepower, and
sustainability to a greater degree than any of its forerunners or counterparts
anywhere in Europe.
In the delaying missions that were generally recognized as
probable in a future war’s initial stages, the division could keep an enemy off
balance by its flexibility, with its brigades controlling combinations of other
units in the pattern of the combat commands of a US armored division in World
War II. Offensively the division could operate independently on an enemy’s
flank, and behind the kind of rigid front line projected throughout Europe by
French- influenced doctrines, disrupting movement by hit-and-run strikes or, in
more favorable circumstances, developing and exploiting opportunities for
deeper penetration.
Though their concepts could be tested temporarily in
maneuvers, these divisions were impossible to create under the original
provisions of Versailles. The initial direct impulses for motorization and
mechanization instead came from a source no one would have been likely to
predict. The Versailles Treaty allocated each infantry division a
Kraftfahrabteilung, or motor battalion. As this organization developed it was
not the orthodox supply formation most probably envisaged by the Allied
officials who structured the Reichswehr, but rather a general pool of motor
transport. The hundred-odd men of a motor company had access to two dozen heavy
trucks and eleven smaller ones, six passenger cars, four buses, seventeen
motorcycles, and two tractors. Treaty interpretation even allowed each
battalion a complement of five wheeled armored personnel carriers. These
Gepanzerter Mannschaftstransportwagen resembled those used by the civil police,
without the twin machine-gun turrets, and could carry a rifle squad apiece.
With that kind of vehicle pool on call, it was a small wonder that as early as
1924, units conducted on their own small-scale experiments with organizing
motorcycle formations, and provided dummy tanks for maneuvers. The motor
battalions were also responsible for the Reichswehr’s antitank training—a
logical assignment since they controlled the only vehicles able to provide
hands-on instruction.
The motor transport battalions’ practical support for
operational motorization was not necessarily a straw in the Reichswehr’s
institutional wind. A front-loaded, offensively minded Prussian/German army had
traditionally regarded logistics as unworthy of a real soldier’s attention.
Under the Kaiser, train battalions had been a dumping ground and a dead end for
the dipsomaniac, the scandal-ridden, the lazy, and the plain stupid—the last
stage before court-martial or dismissal.
In January 1918, as part of the preparation for the great
offensive, Ludendorff ’s headquarters issued the Guide for the Employment of
Armored Vehicle Assault Units. It described their main mission as supporting
the infantry by destroying obstacles, neutralizing fire bases and machine-gun
positions, and defeating counterattacks. Because tanks by themselves could not
hold ground, the document emphasized the closest possible cooperation with
infantry. Tank crews were expected to participate directly in the fighting,
either by dismounting and acting as assault troops, or by setting up machine-gun
positions to help consolidate gains. In fact the tanks and infantry had, for
practical purposes, no opportunity to train together—a problem exacerbated by
the continued assignment of tank units to the motor transport service. In
action, the tanks’ tendency to seek open ground and easy going clashed
fundamentally with the infantry’s doctrine of seeking vulnerable spots. Nothing
happened to change the infantry’s collective mind that tanks were most
effective against inexperienced or demoralized opponents.
The widespread and successful Allied use of tanks in the
war’s final months made a few believers. In the first months after the
armistice, before the Republic’s military structure was finally determined,
critics suggested the German army had seriously underestimated the tanks’
value. After Versailles made the question moot in practical terms, theoretical
interest continued.
Much of this was conventional, repeating wartime arguments
that tanks were most effective in creating confusion and panic, in the pattern
of antiquity’s war elephants. Positive theory on the use of tanks closely
followed contemporary French concepts in projecting a first wave of heavy tanks
acting more or less independently, followed by a second wave of lighter
vehicles maintaining close contact with the infantry. But in contrast to the
French, who saw tanks as the backbone of an attack, the Reichswehr’s infantry
training manual of 1921 warned against the infantry laming its offensive spirit
by becoming too dependent on armor.
These positions were in good part shaped by the tanks’
existing technical limitations. In particular they were considered too slow and
too unreliable to play a central role in the fast-paced offensive operations
central to Reichswehr tactics. At the same time, German military thinkers and
writers, Seeckt included, recognized that even with their current shortcomings,
tanks had a future. The trailblazer here was Ernst Volckheim. He had been a
tank officer during the war, and afterward returned to his parent branch. In 1923
he was assigned to the Reichswehr’s Inspectorate for Motor Troops. That same
year he published an operational history of German tanks, affirming armor’s
continuing technological development and its corresponding importance in any
future war. “If tanks were not such a promising weapon,” Volckheim dryly
asserted, “then certainly the Allies would not have banned them from the
Reichswehr!”
Above all, Volckheim argued, tanks were general-service
systems, able to engage any objective and move in many different formations. In
that way, they resembled the infantry more than any other branch of service.
The tanks’ future correspondingly seemed to lie with emphasizing their basic
characteristics: speed, reliability, and range. In contrast to a general
European predilection for light tanks that focused on improving their mobility,
Volckheim saw the future as belonging to a medium-weight vehicle built around
its gun rather than its engine. In a future war where both sides had tanks,
speed might provide some initial tactical opportunities. The tank with the
heaviest gun would nevertheless have the ultimate advantage.
The next year Volckheim published two more books on tank
war. One repeated his insistence that tanks would develop to the point where
infantry would be assigned to support them—a hint of the rise of the panzer
grenadier that was near-heresy in an army focused on infantry as the dominant
combat arm. Volckheim’s second book went even further, projecting the future
main battle tank by asserting that technology would eventually produce a family
of armored vehicles specially designed for particular purposes. Equipped with
radios, exponentially faster, better armed, and with more cross-country ability
than anything even on today’s drawing boards, they would in fact be able to
operate independently of the traditional arms—an echo of the theories of
Volckheim’s British contemporary, J. F. C. Fuller. He admired as well the
designs of American J. Walter Christie, which could be switched from wheels to
tracks as needed.
Volckheim was also an officer for the working day. First
detached to the Weapons Testing School at Doeberitz, in 1925 he was promoted to
First Lieutenant and assigned to teach tank and motorized tactics at the
infantry school at Dresden. From 1923 to 1927 he also published two dozen
signed articles in the Militär-Wochenblatt, the army’s long-standing
semiofficial professional journal. Most of them dealt with tactics of direct
infantry support by setting problems and presenting solutions. An interesting subtext
of these pieces is the scale of armor Volckheim’s scenarios usually presented:
an armor regiment to a division, a battalion supporting a regiment.
Volckheim also addresses the subject of antitank defense—a
logical response to the Reichswehr’s force structure—and some of the best were
published in pamphlet form. Volckheim recommended camouflage, concealment, and
aggressive action on the part of the infantry, combined with the forward
positioning of field guns and light mortars to cover the most likely routes of
advance. Unusual for the time, Volckheim also recommended keeping tanks in
reserve, not merely to spearhead counterattacks but to directly engage enemy
armor as a primary mission.
Volckheim, with the cooperation of Militär-Wochenblatt’s
progressive editor, retired general Konstantin von Altrock, made armored
warfare an acceptable, almost fashionable, subject of study in the mid-1920s
Reichswehr. Initially most of the material published in MW translated or
summarized foreign work. By 1926 most of the articles were by German officers,
both from the combat arms and—prophetically—from the horse transport service as
well. Fritz Heigl’s survey of world developments, Taschenbuch der Tanks (Tank
Pocketbook), whose first edition appeared in 1926, was widely circulated. Its
successors remain staples of chain bookstore and internet marketing.
The Reichswehr’s Truppenamt, often described simply as the
successor to the treaty-banned General Staff, was actually formed from its
predecessor’s Operations Section. Reorganized into four bureaus—operations,
organization, intelligence, and training—and more streamlined than its
predecessor, the Truppenamt shed responsibility for the kind of detailed
administrative planning that had increasingly dominated the prewar General
Staff. That was just as well, for while the methods might be transferable, the
fundamental reconfiguration of Germany’s security profile demanded fresh
approaches.
On the specific subject of armored warfare, the intelligence
section monitored foreign developments in tactics and technology systematically
enough to issue regular compilations of that material beginning in 1925. German
observers took careful notes on postwar French experiences with combining
horses and motor vehicles, new material such as half-tracks, and patterns of
armor- infantry cooperation. They noted as well the British maneuvers of 1923
and 1924, observing in particular the appearance of the new Vickers Medium,
whose turret-mounted 47mm gun, good cross-country mobility, and sustainable speed
of around 20 miles per hour made it the prototypical modern tank. English was
the fashionable foreign language in the Reichswehr, and Britain was an easier
objective for short-term visits. And German officers regularly visited a United
States whose army was more willing than any European power to show what they
had. In objective terms that was not very much, and most of it existed as
prototypes and test models. But the German army offered three months of
subsidized leave as an incentive to improve language proficiency, and America
offered attractive possibilities for travel and culture shock.
In 1924 Seeckt ordered each unit and garrison to designate
an officer responsible for acting as an advisor on tank matters, conducting
classes and courses on armored warfare, and distributing instructional
materials. These included copies of Volckheim’s articles, Heigl’s data on
foreign tanks, and similar material issued by the Inspectorate of Motor Troops.
The armor officer had another duty as well: to serve as commander of dummy tank
units in the field. Seeckt ordered that representations of state-of-the-art
weapons, especially tanks and aircraft, be integrated into training and
maneuvers. Tanks in particular must be represented as often as possible in
exercises and maneuvers, to enable practicing both antitank defense and
tank-infantry cooperation in attacks. Troops were to practice both tactical
motor movement and firing from the treaty-sanctioned troop transports. Reports
from the annual maneuvers were to include “lessons learned” from operating with
mock armored vehicles.
By the mid 1920s the Truppenamt was moving doctrinally
beyond the concept of tanks as primarily infantry-support weapons and organi
zationally by considering their use in regimental strength. In November 1926,
Wilhelm Heye, who the previous month had succeeded Seeckt as Chief of the Army
Command, issued a memo on modern tanks. Heye wore an upturned mustache in the
style of Wilhelm II, but that was his principal concession to Germany’s
military past. Like Seeckt, he had spent a large part of the Great War as a
staff officer on the Eastern Front. In 1919 he had been in charge of frontier
security in East Prussia, and from 1923 to 1926 commanded the 1st Division in
that now-isolated province. Heye argued that technical developments improving
tanks’ speed and range had repeatedly shown in foreign maneuvers, especially
the British, the developing potential of mechanization. Operating alone or in
combined-arms formations, tanks were not only becoming capable of extended
operations against flanks and rear, but of bringing decisive weight to the
decisive point of battle, the Schwerpunkt.
During the same year, Major Friedrich Rabenau prepared a
detailed internal memorandum for the Operations Section. Rabenau was an
established critic of the heroic vitalist approach to modern war and its
emphasis on moral factors such as “character.” He went so far as to argue that
future armies would depend heavily on a technically educated middle class and
technically skilled workers. Now he synthesized developments in mobility with
the concepts of the Schlieffen Plan. Schlieffen’s grand design, Rabenau argued,
had failed less because of staff and command lapses than because its execution
was beyond the physical capacities of men and animals. Comprehensive
motorization would enable initial surprise, continuing envelopment, and a
finishing blow on the enemy’s flanks and rear. Rabenau’s ideas, widely shared
in the Operations Section, percolated upwards. A directive in late 1926
asserted that not only could tanks be separated from foot-marching infantry,
they could best be used in combination with other mobile troops—or
independently. In 1927, section chief General Werner von Fritsch went on record
to declare that tanks, in units as large as the British brigades, would
exercise a significant influence at operational as well as tactical levels.
