Attention to Detail
IT IS TEMPTING still to assume Nazi Germany in those first months of war had the finest Army the world has ever seen, in terms of both training and equipment, and especially when compared with other armies at that time. Propaganda certainly shielded both most Germans and the wider world from the truth of its levels of mechanization. As regards its tanks, again the reality was rather different from the perceived wisdom. The vast majority were Mk I and Mk IIs and Czech T35s and T38s, all of which were small, under-gunned and under-armoured. The Panzer Mk I, for example, stood about six feet off the ground and carried nothing more than a brace of machine guns. This accounted for around a third of all German tanks.
The artillery – both field howitzers and higher-velocity anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns – were good, but the majority were designed to be coupled with horsepower, as Siegfried Knappe had discovered to his horror. The German soldier was well equipped with personal weapons. The rifle, the K98, was accurate and reliable, even if it could only fire a maximum of five bullets before reloading. Also starting to come into wider use was the MP38 Machinenpistole, or sub-machine gun. This was ideal for close combat and house-clearing, with its ability to lay down considerable fire in a short, sharp burst. Its practical range was little more than 30–40 yards, but it was beautifully balanced and engineered, and no other side had anything like it.
The basic infantry light machine gun was the MG34, which had been developed in the early 1930s by the firm Rheinmetall and was designed to be used in a number of different roles, including as an infantry weapon, as an anti-aircraft gun, and also on vehicles. It was originally even designed to go in aircraft. As it happened, it was rejected by the Luftwaffe as an aircraft-mounted weapon, but thanks to a series of different mountings could be used in either a mobile or a ‘light’ role with just a bipod, or in a static or ‘heavy’ role with a more elaborate and sturdy mount. It had been quite deliberately designed to have these different functions, which had first been suggested in the previous war, and which, on one level, certainly made sense.
To be any use as an anti-aircraft gun, for example, it needed a high rate of fire. Military advisors also wanted their machine gun to pack a big punch in any initial engagement, and so, unlike the Maxim, the MG34 fairly ripped out the bullets, with a rate of fire of around 900 per minute. Like the MP38, it was beautifully made with rolled steel and a number of attractive touches, such as wooden, metal or Bakelite grip, a detachable stock and with an assortment of accoutrements, such as detachable sights, the bipod, whose two legs could be clipped together and tidied away entirely, and an array of impressive maintenance equipment, all delivered in leather-lined wooden boxes and with no small detail overlooked. There was a heavy mount, an additional optical sight and a lightweight tripod too. In fact, the MG34 was the most elaborate machine gun ever built, with more than a hundred individual parts on the main weapon itself. Unquestionably, its incredible finish was designed to impress any onlooker, and no doubt it did.
It was a fine weapon and its rate of fire had a debilitating and demoralizing effect on the enemy – at least, certainly at first, as the Poles found out. The MG34 was one of the weapons that seemed to demonstrate Germany’s highly advanced weapons technology and superiority on the battlefield.
There were, however, drawbacks to the MG34, regardless of its sophisticated lethality. To start with, it was expensive, which was understandable with the level of fine engineering devoted to each and every one. For example, nearly 50 kilograms of iron was needed to make the weapon, which weighed just 11 kilograms when it was finished; this was a pretty wasteful use of precious metal. The end product was also on the heavy side for a ‘light’ machine gun. It cost 312 Reichsmarks, which amounted to around $1,300 in 1938 prices. This was no small sum, but perhaps is not so surprising considering the amount of iron, the number of parts and the fact that it took around 150 man-hours to make. The Bren, by contrast, took just fifty. In other words, Britain could, in theory, produce three times as many Brens as MG34s in the same time, or could use the saving in time to make something else, such as more aircraft or ships.
The other problem was that while there was an unquestioned advantage in being able to lay down an incredible amount of bullets in any initial exchange, there was a pay-off for being able to spit out lead at such a rate. The MG34 was air-cooled, but with some fifteen bullets per second detonating their charge in the breech and down the barrel, it soon got very, very hot. In fact, it quickly became so hot that the barrel began to melt. The way round this was twofold. First, its users had to maintain a very resolute fire discipline and employ it in short, sharp bursts of a few seconds’ length, and second, they had to frequently change the barrel. Each MG34 had to be accompanied by no fewer than six spare barrels, all of which had to be carried with the weapon itself, which on its own weighed around 20 pounds. Unlike the Bren, there was no wooden handle attached to the perforated sheath of the barrel, but experienced handlers none the less quickly got the hang of the rapid barrel change – a clip was flicked open, the breech unlocked and the over-hot barrel tipped out, usually extremely close to the user’s face. Crews were given a giant padded mitt to help, but in practice these were rarely used.
Training manuals were quite firm about not getting carried away when firing. ‘Shooting more than 250 shots in one continuous burst from one barrel,’ noted one instruction manual, ‘is forbidden.’ That meant absolutely the longest continuous burst of fire was around sixteen seconds. In practice, however, the barrel would have started to lose accuracy well before that, while the amount of smoke from so many bullets being fired at that rate caused further problems. A well-trained machine-gunner would expect to fire around only 120 rounds per minute, which, coincidentally, was about the same as for a Bren, even though the Bren’s theoretical rate of fire was only a little over half that of the MG34.
The final problem was that if users were not sparing with the trigger, they tended to get through an awful lot of ammunition very quickly. The MG34 could use twin 34-round drums, but more commonly was belt-fed and these were usually 250 rounds in length and weighed no small amount. The Bren was absolutely a light machine gun and could easily be operated by just one man; the MG34 was a hybrid, and really needed two men to operate it – one to fire and one to feed the belt, and to get the best from it the weapon needed a highly trained crew. In practice, the entire ten-man Gruppe – the German equivalent of the British section – tended to be used to service this one weapon. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the heavy rate of fire did, certainly, have advantages. But like almost every weapon in war, for all the plus points, there were invariably minuses too.
There were, in some ways, a number of curious paradoxes to the German Army. It may have had innovative sub-machine guns and other finely engineered weaponry, for example, but despite the impression of vast military might, there was also something rather old school about the German Army in other areas. Certain forward-thinking officers, such as General Heinz Guderian, may have spent time writing treatises on the future of armoured warfare, but for the most part the Army was still dominated by a traditional Prussian military aristocracy that cited an inheritance which stretched back to Frederick the Great and the Seven Years’ War in the middle of the eighteenth century. Men like von Clausewitz, von Moltke, von Schlieffen, von Hindenburg, von Ludendorff were all household names in Germany – and now the Army was commanded by von Brauchitsch. Even in Nazi Germany, it was hard to climb to the top of the pole without a ‘von’ before your name.
It still had a rather nineteenth-century look to it too. The Pickelhaube, the old pointed helmet, had gone, but the large amounts of leather, the high jackboots, the baggy-thigh breeches and the traditional high-collared tunics all harked back to an earlier era when looking the part – looking militaristic – was very much the brief. They looked smart, they looked efficient. They looked like they meant business, which was precisely the effect they were supposed to achieve.
This more traditional military look was eagerly adopted by the Nazis, not least because a powerful military tradition was what set the German character apart; Germany had been forged in 1871 with the Prussian states at its heart, and they, during the 1860s, had drawn upon militarism as being at the very core of their existence. There is no question that the German nation which emerged from the collection of kingdoms, duchies and principalities less than seventy years earlier was a militaristic society, but the idea that the Prussian – and later German – military was manifestly superior to any other in the world was a dubious claim. Prussia – the largest German kingdom prior to unification – had fought only a handful of small wars in the century that separated the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the conflict in 1914. When it had gone to war alongside Austria against Denmark in 1864, it had barely fought since Waterloo fifty years earlier and most certainly did not out-perform Austria militarily. Two years later, Prussia was at war with its former ally, but Austrian mistakes were every bit as important to Prussia’s subsequent victory as any military genius. Four years after that Prussia was at war again, this time against the mighty France, and it was on this stunning success that much of its military swagger, which would be sustained and would grow further within the newly formed Germany, was based. Interestingly, however, all three wars, and indeed German unification in 1871, were orchestrated not by a military leader but by a political one, namely Otto von Bismarck.
Following unification, the military was elevated in society, with veterans venerated and uniforms and military bearing considered the aspiration of every self-respecting young German male. No one was more fond of standing ramrod straight and wearing military garb than the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who was always to be seen in a variety of uniforms, shiny breastplates and Pickelhaube, but had never actually seen any combat himself or, frankly, been much of a soldier.
Also woven into the military heritage was von Clausewitz’s widely read and acclaimed work On War, but this was based on analysis of Napoleon, who was French, and was, in any case, interpreted to suit Nazi ideology. The other iconic figure was the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, who belonged to the eighteenth century, and who, despite continued veneration by a stream of Germans from Admiral Tirpitz through to Hitler, had won just eight of his sixteen battles and even one of those, the Battle of Zorndorf in 1758, might more accurately be considered a stalemate. None the less, von Clausewitz’s military theories and Frederick’s victories certainly added to the belief in Germany’s military inheritance. Somehow, the Prussians, and then Germany, had created not only a militaristic society in which soldiers were greatly venerated, but also a reputation for military brilliance, which was based on not a huge amount if they were really honest. At the turn of the twentieth century, when Britain had threatened Imperial Germany with economic blockade and the destruction of its Navy if it became involved in the Boer War, the Kaiser backed down and kept out of it. This humiliation – and his obsession with ships – contributed to the vast building programme of capital vessels, and resulted in a giant fleet that ventured out once, at Jutland in 1916, then retreated, and was scuttled at the end of the war.
Germany’s great military tradition was thus based on a somewhatspurious reputation and had, in any case, taken a massive blow with the catastrophic defeat of 1918. The Nazis were emerging at a time when morale within Germany was low, but they cleverly appealed to this suspect military tradition and to German pride in that sense of martial inheritance. By strutting around with straight backs and chests out, wearing snappy brown or black uniforms, and with starkly striking insignia that harked back to ancient Aryan runes, the Nazis were inviting people to come and join an exciting new club. The message was simple: be a National Socialist, and wear a smart-looking uniform and be reinvigorated with a renewed sense of national pride, identity and purpose. It was hardly an original ruse, but the cut and design of the uniforms were very deliberately intended to look both smart and debonair while also nodding to the military past. Nazi uniforms were as beautifully tailored as an MG34 was engineered, and when it came to dressing the rapidly growing Army, these principles were rigorously maintained.
The field tunics of the ordinary German soldier were not quite so sartorially elegant as the SS outfits, but they were smart enough and certainly supremely well made. A private was not paid much, but he was given very decent kit. The jacket, the Feldbluse, was lined in soft cotton or rayon, was thigh length with two generously large and pleated pockets on the chest and two on the waist; it was also pleated at the back, while the cuffs had buttons that could be undone and the waist four lots of eyelets through which metal belt clips could be threaded. The buttons were all aluminium, rounded at the edges for easy use and with a dotted pattern, and quite deliberately designed as opposed to simply mass-stamped. The collar of the Feldbluse was well stitched and around the inside was another row of buttons on to which a smart and comfortable collar liner could be attached. It was warm, comfortable and produced with the kind of attention to detail that would make a bespoke tailor smile with pleasure. In 1939, each soldier was given no fewer than seven uniforms: field, service, watch, parade, report, walking out and sport. The numbers of cloth suppliers and tailors involved with making all these uniforms was immense, but like most German war production there was no adherence to the principles of mass production. There were, for example, no fewer than 323 different companies producing just one particular type of military linen. This was a trend repeated across the board.
Most of the soldier’s webbing was made of black leather: the ammunition pouches, holsters, belts, straps and even the case that held the stout short-handle entrenching tool. Boots came up almost to the knee rather than the ankle. Field packs, although made of canvas, came with leather straps and a fur-covered outer flap. One particularly well-engineered piece of personal kit was the gas mask case, a steel cylinder with grooves down the side to give it added strength. It was quite large and even bulky, but the attention to detail on it was impressive, with a spring metal catch and inside, within the lid, a further little compartment in which spare lenses for the mask were stored and held in place by a delicate spring-loaded catch. The intricacy with which these millions of tins were manufactured – each some 25 centimetres tall – was impressive; and they even came with a leather carrying strap. It became an instantly iconic piece of the soldier’s equipment.
Young officers, such as Hans von Luck and Siegfried Knappe, for example, had even more elaborate uniforms. Their field dress was made of the same wool as those of their men, but their service dress was gabardine with silk or rayon lining and with a cuff that doubled back almost halfway to their elbows, which was almost eighteenth century in its design. Officers were given wool greatcoats or full-length leather versions. There were different uniforms for mountain troops, different uniforms for paratroopers, yet more uniforms for the panzer arm, and even more for the Luftwaffe. Pilots like Hajo Herrmann could choose from a staggering array of breeches, woollen trousers, leather trousers, cotton, wool and leather jackets of differing shades of brown and black, some fur lined, others not.
This attention to detail and to producing a sartorially unbeatable armed services was all well and good and had certainly, in the early years of the Nazis at any rate, served a valid purpose. Unlike Britain, however, Germany had few sheep farms and no Dominions on the far side of the world from where it could easily purchase what it lacked at home. In fact, Germany had very few natural resources of its own at all – no oil, very little iron ore, no tungsten, no bauxite, no copper; a coal industry was about all it did have and even that was as nothing compared with Britain’s, for example. And because so much of the economy was now devoted to war production, Germany had little to export in return. Yet rather than watching the pfennigs in areas where costs could easily have been kept down, there was, in 1939, no army that was more expensively turned out. The cost of German uniforms, however, was, from the Nazi perspective, a small price to pay to make soldiers believe they were part of a modern and technologically advanced militaristic society.
The standard of training was, by and large pretty good, particularly among the Regular Army divisions, and helped by a rigid adherence to discipline. Good training could paste over many deficiencies elsewhere. Young soldiers began the process of militarization and indoctrination to the values of National Socialism with the Hitler Youth, which boys would join at fourteen, and then followed this with a stint in the Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD, in which young men fresh from school were further indoctrinated, given a harsh daily routine of early rises, extensive drill and then back-breaking manual labour, such as building roads or defences. By the time they were recruited into the military proper, at eighteen, they were already halfway to being soldiers, having been taught rigid discipline and imbued with powerful national ideals. Divisions tended to have a strong regional base, with recruits largely drawn locally. They would then be taught as part of a training battalion within the division. This helped morale but also saved on transport. It did mean, however, that the quality of the division tended to depend on the quality of the command.
However, now, after Poland, over half the Army’s divisions had the added advantage of having tasted combat, the greatest trainer of all. Throughout the 1930s, as the Army expanded and also searched for answers to the failure of 1918, much thought was given to the form that future warfare would take. Unlike in the British Army, where it was considered infra dig to discuss military matters out of hours, within the German Army it was positively encouraged. Hans von Luck eagerly absorbed all the latest military thinking. He had been particularly impressed by General Heinz Guderian, who was emerging as something of a pioneer of mobile tactics, as opposed to the largely static warfare that had been experienced during the previous war. Guderian, who had written articles and a book on his theories, had visited every single company in von Luck’s 8. Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, and discussed his ideas with all officers and NCOs, which had gone down very well; junior officers and NCOs were not usually spoken to by generals, and von Luck, for one, found it inspiring. He also thought his training right up to the outbreak of war was consistently intensive, and was concentrated primarily on two aspects. ‘On the one hand we were made familiar with the technology and armaments,’ he noted, ‘on the other, we practised mobile engagements in the field.’
Martin Pöppel was also training every bit as intensively. The Fallschirmjäger had been on standby for an airborne drop, but in the event had been surplus to requirements. Pöppel and his comrades had been deeply frustrated not to see action in Poland, but, with hostilities over, training continued as hard as ever: more drops and, crucially, more radio exercises at both regimental and divisional level.
Along the Western Front, Siegfried Knappe was now training alongside the infantry, and as a junior officer was incredibly well drilled in all facets of artillery tactics and deployment. At the very least, this gave him and his men a huge amount of confidence. Knappe may have been startled to discover horses rather than a tracked self-propelled gun when he had first joined the Army, but any doubts had long been swept aside. And self-belief and discipline were crucial elements of any fighting power. It was true that the Wehrmacht was not nearly so well equipped as the propaganda suggested, but at the ground level, at any rate, the men believed they were ready for war with the West. Time would tell soon enough whether their confidence was well placed.