Just Finished Reading: Achtung Panzer! – The Development of Tank Warfare by Heinz Guderian (FP: 1937)

As one of the architects and founding fathers of Blitzkrieg, as well as one of its finest later practitioners in Poland, France and Russia, the author definitely has the authority to discuss the ins and outs of tank warfare looking back to the last world war and forward to the next. This he does with an attention to details that is sometimes gripping in its intensity.

Coupled with my previous read on the development of the tank in Britain and France this is a great complimentary read. Spending most of the slim volume dissecting the later battles on the Western Front in which tanks took part, the author teases out what went right and wrong for both the attacking and defending sides. Writing at the time when Hitler had been in power for 4 years already the author was not afraid to point out where Germany had failed in the First War and admonished the General Staff at the time for failing to build anti-tank defences in sufficient quantity and failing to regard tanks as an effective weapon. Construed very much as a propaganda piece for the new way of fighting Guderian still managed to show how and when tanks failed in their mission to accomplish a breakthrough leading to the long hoped for breakout whilst still maintaining his advocacy for their use in large numbers and as a force in themselves untied from babysitting the poor bloody infantry.

Although a little dull in places – it was after all rather ‘dated’ taking into account what we know came next as well as being essentially a primer to tank warfare aimed at future tank commanders as well as their superiors in the High Command so contained logistical details that would only be of interest to purists and tank ‘geeks’ – the first 130 pages of a total of 212 where well worth the sometimes plodding nature of the remaining chapters. I was particularly taken by a piece of information almost casually thrown into a discussion of the Third battle of Ypes (known to history as Passchendaele) where he states that, in their opening barrage, the British artillery fired 93,000 TONS of shells at the German positions over a four week period. To put that in perspective, because a figure that large is hard to grapple with, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. In other words the British hit the German lines with 1.5 Hiroshima bombs each week for four weeks and yet the attack, when it was finally launched, failed spectacularly with 400,000 British casualties. That, in a nutshell, was just how difficult it was to crack the defensive lines of the trench system without tanks – bloody impossible for the weapons available pre-tank. If only I’d know of this juicy bit of information when I was writing my college essay on trench warfare!

Not only is this slim volume an often very interesting read it is probably correctly touted as one of the most significant military books of the 20th century. A must read for anyone interested in either the use of tanks in WW1 or in the thought processes behind the development of the Blitzkrieg technique. Translated from the German by Christopher Duffy.