Vehicle Shortages
WHEN THE YOUNG Scotsman Eric Brown had been picked up by the Gestapo in Bavaria, he had assumed that for him the war was over before it had even started. But, to his intense relief, after three days he was freed and told he would be taken to the Swiss border. Bundled into a large Mercedes, he was driven out of Munich. Following behind was another SS officer driving his MG.
Once at the border, he was told he could have his car back. Brown was perplexed.
‘You’ve taken my books, my money, my clothes. Why are you giving me my car?’ he asked.
‘Because we have no spares,’ came the reply. It was a curiously prophetic comment.
Brown’s troubles were not over, however. The Swiss border guard then detained him until his presence was cleared with the Swiss government at Bern. Eventually, he was escorted to the British Embassy, where he was interviewed by the Ambassador. ‘You’ve got to go back home,’ he told Brown, ‘because I’ve got your call-up papers here.’ The Ambassador then gave him enough petrol coupons to get him to England and sent him on his way.
This small episode said much about Britain’s and Germany’s separate situations regarding resources, and particularly with regard to motor vehicles. Brown was solidly middle class but not especially well-off, yet he already had a car of his own; it was a luxury very few Germans of his age enjoyed. In 1935, there was one vehicle for every 65 people in Germany, and four years later, despite building autobahns, that figure was still only one vehicle for every 47 people. In Britain in 1935, the figure had been one vehicle for every 23 people and had risen to one for every 14 by the outbreak of war. In France, the leading user of motor vehicles in Europe, the figure had been one vehicle for every 19 people in 1935. In the United States, it had been one vehicle for every 5 people back in 1935 and had risen to almost one for every 3 by 1939. In contrast, in Italy in 1936, there had been just one car for every 104 people. Italy and Germany may have had already well-known – and Grand Prix-winning – names such as Mercedes, Audi and Alfa Romeo, but this only underlined just what an elite sport it was; it was no reflection on the wider German or Italian society.
For a nation like Germany that had entered into war against two of the leading and richest nations in the world, this was a major problem, because the lack of motor vehicles in the country had all kind of knock-on effects that went beyond a simple shortage of vehicles on the front line. The fewer vehicles there were meant there were also fewer factories than in say, France or Britain, making them. The fewer factories there were, the fewer people there were with the know-how to make vehicles, and the fewer mechanics there were to repair them; it meant there were also fewer people who knew how to drive them, and fewer petrol pumps to fill them. This shortfall in expertise could not be magicked out of thin air. It took time to build up.
Nazi propaganda had worked hard to give the impression that the Wehrmacht of 1939 was the most modern, most mechanized in the world. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as those trying to manage the Polish campaign and its aftermath had been struggling to come to terms with. Rather, just fifteen divisions out of the fifty-four used had been mechanized in any way; the rest had been dependent on vast numbers of horses and the men marching on their own two feet – just as Prussian and then German armies had moved for hundreds of years. Nor was there any ‘Blitzkrieg’ strategy – certainly it was not a phrase anyone would have been familiar with in Germany; rather, it was coined later, by Time magazine in the US on 25 September. Furthermore, because Hitler had ordered Case WHITE very suddenly, the planned war games in which air forces and ground troops would put theories to the test had to be cancelled. The time to test their Army and Air Force became the invasion itself, and although the campaign was effectively over in just eighteen days, the Poles were hardly much of a yardstick by which to judge the efficacy of their war machine. The planning had been good, but plenty of difficulties had arisen, not least with the limited amount of motor transport employed.
One of the men trying to deal with this really rather massive problem within the Wehrmacht was Oberst Adolf von Schell, who was General Plenipotentiary for Motor Vehicles under General Georg Thomas, head of the War Economics and Armaments Office (WiRüAmt) at the OKW. Now forty-six years old, von Schell had been a career soldier who had fought throughout the First World War from its opening manoeuvres in Belgium, through some of the major battles on the Western Front and across to the Eastern Front and the Carpathians. He had been wounded four times and awarded the Iron Cross First Class twice, and, having emerged still in one piece at the end, had remained in the Reichswehr, the much-reduced German Army.
By 1930, he was a captain, had served both in infantry regiments and as a staff officer at the RWM, the Reich Ministry for Economic Affairs, and had then been sent to Fort Benning in the United States as an instructor at the Infantry School. The Americans had been impressed by this hugely experienced infantry officer, and the US Army had even published a book based on his lectures there, called Battle Leadership. For his part, the genial and inquisitive von Schell had made the most of the opportunity of being in the United States to study the American motor industry, including spending time at the Ford motor plants in Detroit. When he returned to Germany the following year, he did so with his mind full of ideas about just how the Army could become more mechanized and what was needed from the German motor industry.
As he discovered, staff appointments at the Ministry of War as well as a stint as tactics instructor at the Institute of War gave him the opportunity to speak out about his views and what he had learned in the USA, the most automotive society in the world. By 1937, he was Chief of Staff of the Inspectorate of Mechanized Troops; a year later, he had been appointed Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Transport and had begun to be noticed by both Hitler and Göring. First came an appointment as the Automotive Engineering Delegate for the Four-Year Plan. Finally, in November 1938, as Göring had announced his plans to massively increase the rate of rearmament, he was given the key role of General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles. This meant he was the man who was to co-ordinate and oversee the mechanization of the Wehrmacht. For so long he had striven to influence the Wehrmacht and help make the Army, especially, more mechanized. Now, at last, he had that position of influence. Little did he realize at the time, however, just what a poisoned chalice this would be.
Even by the spring of 1939, some of the problems that would plague Germany’s drive for a more mechanized Wehrmacht were becoming all too apparent to von Schell. He recognized that only a motorized economy could produce motorized armed forces; it was not enough to simply demand greater mechanization – as both Hitler and Göring did – and expect it to happen out of thin air. Eventually, in the long term, maybe; but in 1939 there was a huge discrepancy between what was being demanded and what was actually achievable in the short term. The building of fortifications, for example, such as those along the Westwall, or Siegfried Line, required more trucks than had been anticipated; so too did the new divisions that were being raised. There was, however, no mass production as there was in the United States, and no co-ordination of effort, rather just a lot of innovative models being produced in low numbers. There was also a conflict between commercial and military requirements. The disparate and largely small-scale German motor industry was made up from individual companies that continued to produce their own, different types of trucks, cars and other vehicles. When von Schell had taken over as General Plenipotentiary of Motor Vehicles, there had been no fewer than 131 different types of truck and 1,367 different types of trailer, all of which required different parts, different repair knowledge and, all too often, different tools too.
The second big problem was that of raw materials. On the one hand, the Nazis were demanding more mechanization for the Wehrmacht, but on the other had reduced the iron ore quota, for example, as priority was switched elsewhere. Because of this, von Schell warned Göring in a long memo back in March, only 50 per cent of truck orders could realistically be delivered by the beginning of 1940. For the already inefficient factories, this was a disaster, because it meant there would be a lag of time when there was not enough work, and owners would have no choice but to lay people off. ‘Once this has happened,’ von Schell told him, ‘then an increase in production is unimaginable for several years. This would damage the motorization of the Wehrmacht, the Reich and commerce, from which it would hardly be able to recover.’
Amidst these conflicting demands and the deeply entrenched privatized motor industry, von Schell had spent the best part of a year valiantly trying to make improvements with a series of measures that became known as the ‘Schell Plan’. He knew that the still-privatized motor industry needed greater state interference, but the Nazis were curiously reluctant to do this, not least because it went against Hitler’s – and Göring’s – penchant for divide and rule.
None the less, von Schell would have to impose himself on the motor industry if he was to have any chance at all of making it more efficient, and top of his list of measures was to reduce the number of vehicle types – in the case of trucks, from 131 to twenty-three. The aim was for the old types to be discontinued through 1939. Because of the shortage of fuel, he also planned to increase the number of vehicles operating not with petrol but with gas generators of solid fuels, aiming for nearly 160,000 such trucks by 1941. Also encouraged was the production of the militarized version of Hitler’s planned car for the masses, the Volkswagen. Both the civilian and military version, which became known as the Kübelwagen, or ‘bucket car’, were designed by Ferdinand Porsche. However, even though Porsche’s first designs for the Kübelwagen were drawn up in 1938, it was still not in production by the invasion of Poland; instead, a handful only were field tested in the campaign. Full production was still a few months off, as the design was repeatedly refined and tweaked. Meanwhile, time was ticking away.
Another of von Schell’s plans was to improve maintenance, so he came up with the Home Motor Pool Organization, in which repair shops and garages would remain independent and in private hands but would be under the Wehrmacht’s control. This meant the military would take priority over civilian requirements, and there would at least be some form of pooling of maintenance resources. Finally, there was compulsory requisitioning. Some 50 per cent of all civilian trucks were taken for military use, on the basis that half could be taken without crippling the economy too severely.
Since his appointment as controller of all motor vehicles, von Schell had been aiming to fulfil all his plans by 1942, and by the beginning of September 1939 there was an awful lot of work yet to be done. Getting the various companies to toe the line had been no easy task and still there were too many variations and production was too low.
Film crews were careful to focus on the units that did have trucks and panzers, and stopped the cameras rolling whenever things started to go wrong. However, even before troops crossed over into Poland, it was clear there were nowhere near enough maintenance facilities. This was because that part of Prussia was an area of especially few motor vehicles, which had meant there were fewer civilian repair shops to incorporate into the Home Motor Pool Organization. And once they were in Poland, the roads had proved particularly bad, putting a greater strain on the vehicles themselves, all too many of which were originally civilian and never designed for robust military use. Inexperienced drivers were also too rough with them. The grinding of gears, numerous potholes, pressure of battle and a host of other factors all conspired to make mechanical breakdown a major issue. Once kaput, the problem was further exacerbated by the still large range of vehicles. Getting the right spares to the right broken-down vehicle, deep inside Poland, was no easy task. Von Schell was relieved it had been all over bar the shouting within a couple weeks. A much longer campaign, and the mechanized arm of the Wehrmacht would have ground to a halt.
It wasn’t only the outside world that had thought of the emerging Wehrmacht as a giant, modern, mechanized force. Most Germans believed it too, including Siegfried Knappe, who, as a nineteen-year-old back in October 1936, had joined the artillery with visions of becoming part of an elite force of modern motorized guns. His father had been a naval gunnery officer in the last war and during Siegfried’s childhood had told him many thrilling tales of his wartime exploits. During his final years at the Gymnasium, his secondary school, and his six months’ conscription in the Reich Labour Service, Knappe had read much in the newspapers and magazines about the new self-propelled artillery weapons that were coming into service so, on joining the Army, signing up for the artillery had been an easy choice.
As he had arrived at the barracks in Jena, however, Knappe had been in for a shock. Far from being kitted out with shiny modern equipment, there were instead vast rows of stable blocks.
‘You mean they still pull the artillery with horses?’ he asked hiscompanion, desperately hoping it was not true.
‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ came the reply.
The following morning, before dawn and in the cold darkness, the new recruits were taken straight to the stables and each man was given a horse stall to clean. A deflated Knappe began what would now become a daily routine – mucking out. ‘I still could not believe,’ he noted, ‘I was actually in the horse-drawn artillery. It all seemed so backward in this modern age.’
Almost three years later, Knappe, now a lieutenant and battery commander, had come to terms with his earlier disappointment. He had become a keen horseman and was proud of his battery, his regiment and their high standard of training. They knew their task so well that operating and firing had become instinctive; they had trained with the infantry too, and while their guns were still horse-drawn, they were high-quality pieces all the same: 24. Artillerieregiment began the war with justifiable confidence.
Not all the regiment had headed into Poland, however. Twenty per cent had been left behind to form a new regiment. This was because only a comparatively small part of the German Army was fully trained. Fully trained Regular troops had amounted to around 684,000, while there were a further 410,000 fully trained reservists. Some 709,000 reservists had received only very rudimentary training, and on top of that there were nearly 1.7 million older reservists and First World War veterans. The Field Army was 2.5 million strong, while the Replacement Army numbered 1.2 million.
The Field Army was made up from a mixture of fully trained Regular troops and reservists, while a fifth of the personnel of Regular Army divisions were pulled out of the Field Army and put into the Replacement Army. Siegfried Knappe was among the 20 per cent taken from 24. Artillery Battalion and sent to form the cadre of a new formation. Generally speaking, replacement divisions were spread around the country and drew on locally mobilized men, largely because they then had less distance to travel – and with the chronic shortage of vehicles and an already over-burdened railway network, this made good sense.
In 1939, the unit by which the scale of a fighting force was judged tended to be the division. Numbers varied, but as a rule of thumb, most were between 14,000 and 17,000 men strong, and this was the case for British and French – and even American and Italian – divisions too. Two or more divisions made up a corps, while two or more corps made up an army and two or more armies made an army group. Divisions were described by the make-up of their core regiments, either panzer (armoured), panzer grenadier (motorized) or infantry. In an infantry division, for example, there would be three regiments consisting of three battalions each, as well as pioneers (engineers), artillery and support troops. Each regiment would be 3,250 strong with a number of ancillary companies and battalions of around 800 troops. The British had regiments, but while these were divided into battalions, the equivalent formation to a German regiment was known as a brigade, i.e. made up of three battalions, but usually from different regiments.
At any rate, the German Army of September 1939 was made up of 106 divisions, which included the Field and Replacement Armies. Only half of those divisions, however, were what were called ‘First Wave’ troops, i.e. those sent into Poland.
Knappe and the 24. Artillery Battalion had been based at Plauen, in south-east Germany, near the Czech border. With much of the regiment gone, the remainder stayed behind at the barracks waiting for new replacements to arrive. For Knappe, it meant a lot of new faces, including a new battery commander, who was over forty and a reservist, as well as 150 others and the same number of horses. At least, however, he was able to keep his own horse, his beloved Schwabenprinz.
Within a few days, this newly formed artillery regiment moved out and headed west, taking up positions near the Luxembourg border. There they immediately began a vigorous training programme in order to accustom the horses and men to working together and to get them ready as soon as possible to face a potential attack by the Allies. Still no attack came, so that by the end of September, and with confidence rising, Knappe heard the troops starting to make jokes about it. A few days later, they pulled back a short distance out of their bunkers to more comfortable surroundings. It seemed that the French were not going to attack after all. ‘Even though we were technically at war with England and France,’ noted Knappe, ‘everyone assumed that the war was really over with the defeat of Poland.’
Siegfried Knappe wasn’t the only German soldier thinking such thoughts. Hans von Luck, who had fought in Poland and survived unscathed along with most of his colleagues, had also heard much talk that the war was now over, both from soldiers and from German civilians as they returned to Bad Kissingen. But von Luck wasn’t so sure; he’d noticed the propaganda machine was once again cranking up against Britain and France. Hitler, he knew, held a deep-rooted loathing of France ever since the last war. The names ‘Alsace’ and ‘Lorraine’, taken in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 but handed back to France in 1919, were also cropping up repeatedly.
Von Luck was quite right not to be seduced by premature thoughts of peace, although many of those at the very top of the Wehrmacht, horrified by the declaration of war by Britain and France, had hoped the war could be brought to an end by political means now that the campaign in Poland was over. Even the more pessimistic, like General Walter Warlimont at the OKW, hoped that by adopting a firm defensive approach and building up military strength further, they might eventually draw the Allies to the negotiating table.
They were, however, about to be stunned by a bombshell. Warlimont had been visiting Hitler’s forward headquarters, temporarily set up in the Casino Hotel in Zoppot, in Poland, on 20 September, when he saw an ashen General Keitel. The Chief of the OKW then told him that Hitler intended to launch an offensive on the West almost immediately. It was, he told Warlimont, top secret and he was not to breathe a word; Keitel confessed he had only heard through one of Hitler’s aides.
Warlimont was dumbstruck. At no point had Hitler ever discussed the matter with any of his senior generals – not Keitel, not General Walther von Brauchitsch, the head of the Army, not even Göring. The Polish campaign was all but over by then, but, even so, it had shown up some worrying deficiencies, not least shortages of just about everything, from vehicles and vehicle spare parts to ammunition. The fighting in Poland was also demonstrating the lack of training in many of the divisions. Taking on Poland was one thing, but going on the offensive against the two powerhouses of Europe was quite another. Hitler had decided to strike quickly before Britain and France could build up a sufficient advantage in terms of men, machines and equipment. What he singularly failed to realize was the Wehrmacht needed time to build up strength too, because Germany was simply not ready for all-out war in the autumn of 1939. Furthermore, winter was coming, which massively affected the efficiency and operational capability of forces on the ground and in the air; using the Luftwaffe in tandem with the Army on the ground was a key part of Germany’s war plan, but in the shortening days and worsening weather this was much harder to put into action. Yet again, Hitler’s lack of understanding of the operational art of war was becoming all too apparent; he was envisioning attacking the West within a matter of weeks. That would lead to a plan that was insufficiently prepared and inadequately thought through. It was madness.
Warlimont was so horrified he decided to try to take things into his own hands. Recognizing that neither Keitel nor General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of Staff of the OKW, would act, he decided to ignore Keitel’s warning of secrecy and let the Army General Staff know what the Führer was planning. Despite this tip-off, the Army did nothing.
A week later, on 27 September, Hitler assembled his Commanders-in-Chief at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, along with Keitel and Warlimont, and announced they would be attacking in the West as soon as possible. Warlimont noticed he had been holding a small piece of paper with some notes on it; having said his piece, he tossed the paper into the fire. No one said a word in protest.