The Best Panzer Generals Of WW2

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Finally, back to plan A. Back to basics.

For Best in the West, episode 5, part 3, but episode 5, because these six special episodes are leading us to the point where you, the We Have Ways listener, and in fact, We Have Ways Festival Festival Goer can help us finally put to bed the idea of who is the best general in the West.

And by West, we mean basically basically not the Eastern Front, as in the Russian front, the Soviet front, not Pacific, your Burmas, your Singapores, your Philippines, no.

Northwest Europe and contiguous theatres. So the Med.
Mediterranean. North Africa.
Yeah, well, North Africa is the Mediterranean, isn't it? So there's no need to even need to mention it.

No, you don't need to mention it. Exactly.
We've made our way through the Americans and the voting on the Patreon.

If you want the full rich cut of cloth from this experience, make yourself a Patreon member and you can vote and help us finally stop this endless endless arguing about who the best general is so that people can argue about other points of contention about the history of the Second World War.

It's a public service, isn't it, Jim? It very much is. We're just trying to help.
We're not trying to wind people up. We're trying to help with this, aren't we?

I'm just looking at the results on the so far on the G, it hasn't moved a huge amount. Dick McCreary still got zero points.

Oh, dear. And Alex and Monty are neck and neck at 26%.

Anyone would think we were both voting on it.

I've done it 120 times. And the Facebook comments are completely explosive so far, which is exactly what we want.

Because what we're trying to do is settle this so that no one need ever go on Facebook to have to post about this ever again.

Anyway, we are onto the Germans now. We're on the other side of the hill,

ladies and gentlemen. Z Germans, we've done the Americans and we've done the Brits and the Duke contingent.
And now we're onto the Germans.

And I think what we're going to be spared here is a George Marshall or Alan Brook figure, really, aren't we? Because there's no one really floating above in that kind of.

We haven't even included Keitel in the long run. But of course, they don't have any strategy of the Germans.
So.

Well, it's Hitler. Well, I mean, you know, why don't we put Hitler in the mix?

Famous but not included is the part that we've had. If you want to call him include Hitler, I mean, if you want to call him a strategist, I mean, it's not a strategy.

Well, he's commander-in-chief of the army. Yeah, but it's daft lunges from place to place.
What I mean is, you know, there's no plan beyond the next 10 years. Well, there is a plan.

There's to destroy global Jewry and Bolshevism. That's not a plan, though, is it?

That's just nuts.

But before we get stuck into the individuals, just very quickly, I just wanted to point out that there is a school of thought, and it's been quite a strong school of thought, that would argue that the Germans were the best at this and that they had the best troops and the best trained men and the best kit and certainly the best, most enlightened generals

that could run rings round the Allies.

But I've got to say, you know, going through it, I mean, it's a catalogue of failure rather than success, is the truth of it.

Yeah, and, you know, people being clean on war crimes is that's another issue altogether, isn't it? So we're going to start with General, to give him his proper title, Ernst Gunter Bader. Bader.

And the good thing about

Ernst Gunter Bader is that he kind of sort of is okay as they come. I mean, he hasn't got too much.
I mean, okay, he's fighting for the Führer and the Reich and all the rest of it.

But, you know, that's a given, obviously. But with that caveat, he's actually one of the better ones, I would say.
From a moral point of view. Yeah, let's get this out of the way.
He's a Prussian.

He's from Pomerania. He's from Pomerania and Prussian military family people are the backbone of the Wehrmacht.
He's fought in the First World War in the 9th Grenadiers, only 17 when he joined up.

He's commissioned to Leutnant in 1915. Eastern and Western fronts.
Iron Cross, first and second class for bravery. And he's gassed towards the end of the war in August 1918.

And he's still recovering at the the time of the armistice. There's going to be patterns for him, just as there were with the Brits and the Americans.

He joins the Freikorps after the war, which is what people who like uniforms, who don't know what to do with themselves, do when Germany isn't allowed an army base.

He wants to try and make sense of this crazy nonsense in which they find themselves and try and persuade themselves that there is still a military tradition in Prussia. Yeah, exactly.

And he's involved in border conflicts in the Baltic, Silesia, and then leaves, doesn't he? Yep.

He's out at the age of 22, goes back to one of the family estates in Holstein, and he becomes a notable horse breeder and an equestrian and he's absolutely the business and he gets married and his his wife's um muster keen on horses too and also not half bad at show jumping and they become they get an international reputation as show jumpers i think they do the olympics if i remember rightly he's also he speaks english absolutely flawlessly yeah he's quite eccentric he's very well well read and learned you know he's quite quite the jack about town really yeah yeah in a kind of posh way yeah and takes an interest like so many people do in um um mechanization and what you do actually with cavalry he rejoins the the reichswehr yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and come out and by the outbreak of the war he's an oberstleutnant yeah so he's a half colonel half colonel he commands the reconnaissance elements of the second light division during the september campaign the fact they've got a second light division sort of suggests that this is still an army very much in transition that hasn't quite sort of worked out its modus operandi which indeed it hasn't in the invasion of poland and poland is very much a testing ground for the new um Wehrmacht.

Although he's cavalry, he's in armor cars and motorcycles, you know, those motorcycles with sidecars with MG34s attached to them and all the rest of it. That's what he's doing.

And he's beetling around, sort of scouting ahead, shooting stuff up and so on and being fearless. And he repeats the same thing in France in 1940.

He's given a colonel C and given command of the Schutzen Regiment 115 in the 15th Panzer Division. So this is where he's heading.
He's heading towards Panzer Divisions.

And if you're in a Panzer division, that means you're in the elite.

you're in a very very small minority you're in the kind of sort of top five percent basically yeah after france he finds himself in north africa 1942 in the africa corps under ervin rommel who i expect at some point in this best of the west we might come to i don't know what about you jim do you think we're going to talk about rommel well i think he might come up he might come up we might just leave him off to settle the argument finally

He's commanding 115th Panzer Grenadier Regiment within 15th Panzer Division in Syrenaca and against 8th Army. He only gets there at the early part of 1942.
so he's there.

His first big action in North Africa as part of the Africa Corps is at the Gazala Line battles and the Fall of Tobruk. And there, he's absolutely fantastic.

He's part of the bit that goes around the bottom of the line, circles around the far end of the Gazala line, gets him round the back. He's beetling all over the place over the desert.

One point finds himself in a British minefield. Because he speaks fluent English and it's dark, he persuades an English colonel to.
I say, I don't know the way out. Yeah.

And he's a great one for getting on the radio and pretending to be British and confusing them all. He's quite the lad.
He also likes to wear a kilt and carry a claymore. Okay.

He's quite odd, isn't he? He's an eccentric. He's an eccentric.
But badly wounded at Alamein, so he's out of action for a bit.

And then he goes to the Commando Supremo because he's not fit enough to return to frontline duties. And Zicado Supremo is the General Staff of the Italian Armed Forces.
So he's based in Rome.

But by April

1943, he's recovered sufficiently to be posted to Italy. And his job is to salvage and retrain the remnants of various units returning from Tunisia from the Eastern Front.

There is this sort of reinforcement going on in Italy, and it's lots of sort of stomach, ears, and nose units and come out of hospital, and they're all kind of cobbled together.

And his job is to put them into a hold, and it becomes the Commando Division Sicilian, which then becomes the reconstituted 15th Panzer Grenadier Division.

It was a Panzer Division, now it's Panzer Grenadier Division. So, of course, they don't have that many tanks.

So it's Panzer Grenadier, which basically means it's a motorized infantry division with a handful of tanks and self-propelled guns and all the rest of it.

He is also, he doesn't, although he doesn't get given command of it during the Battle for Sicily, he is then given the task of evacuating the Axis troops from Sicily.

It's largely his plan and he does it supremely well. He's fantastically good at organizing stuff as well as being a kind of, you know, tactically very astute.

So operationally, I'd say he's pretty darn good, to be honest. He's fearless.

He leads from the front, all the rest of it, but he's got the kind of the staff work, the organizational skills to back that up.

And he's a real thorn in the side of the Allies when he's in in charge at monte cassino repeatedly where he designs the figure of eight defensive system in monte cassino yeah he's commanding the 65th infantry division on the sangro he gets he's constantly being seen as a firefighter to go in and sort of salvage kind of rubbish formations yeah yeah that that aren't going to work and then um and he's gives them a bit of sort of hut spur and a bit of kind of vim and and backbone yeah 65th infantry division is completely destroyed that then takes on the 90th panzer grenadier division which is that one that sort of takes over at autona which we've covered a lot.

This is a sort of, you know, the Stalingrad of the Adriatic, that terrible fight with the Fauschen Jäger and the 90th Panzergrenadier and the Canadians. That gets destroyed as well.

It's then reconstituted to a degree, then posted over to the kind of other side, to the casino front.

And he's airlifted into the casino situation at the end, at the beginning of February, when do you remember the 44th Hokken Deutsche Meister Division are doing so badly and the whole line's about to collapse?

He goes out there, sees exactly what needs to be done. And he, as you say, he's the one who creates the figure of eight.

So you could argue it's him rather than the Fauci Miego, the reason that it's so sticky at Monte Cassino. People like to get hung up on who the soldiers are.

It's actually the guy in charge and the way he's decided to approach things. But that's fair to say.
He carries on in this sort of sticking units together.

He's with 90th Panzergunadia until the end of 1944. And then he's recalled and placed on the Führer Reserve.
Interesting, isn't it, that they feel they need him for that?

He's got two Wehr Kaist commands in 1945. Then he's appointed commander of 81st Army Corps on the 1st of March.
And then he's in Cologne as Commandant.

When you look at his last bit of his career, he's sort of bouncing, he's like snakes and ladders, isn't it? He's down a bit, up a bit, up a bit sideways.

Keeps being reappointed and moved, which I think is a mark of how much trouble they're in.

Yeah, but it's also, it's actually, in this case, it's a mark of how much he's respected as a kind of miracle worker, as someone who can come in and just sort of, you know, change the tone, change the atmosphere and all the rest of it.

But of course, you know, it's all too little, too late, and all the rest of it. When do you need miracles? When you're in the, really in the shit.
Yeah, right.

But finally, he's posted to the headquarters staff of the Commander-in-Chief of the the north west uh 18th of april and he's en route on the 24th of april when he's seriously wounded when his car gets strafed by a british fighter aircraft by a spitfire and he dies of wounds on the 8th of may yeah you'd rate him because what we're looking at here is is a is a guy who did really really well in difficult circumstances and i think we're gonna

see well he does he does well when they're winning and he does well when they're losing i mean that's the point i i think he is outstanding in the right sense of the word i mean he sticks out as someone who is really really good but he doesn't get to kind of army command, really.

He kind of sort of does, right at the end, but it doesn't really count. But is he better or worse than General Hemann Balk, our next contender for Best of the West Deutschland edition?

Well, I think Balk is very, very good. Yeah, and he's of the similar mold, isn't he? Your German Empire, so Danzig, which is now Gdansk, of course.

So he's Prussian, enters the Prussian army in 1913, Eloitnand in 1913, Western Front, Iron Cross first to second class, wounded multiple times, gains a reputation for tactical skill at the Company battalion level by the end of the

holds a series of stays in the Reichswehr after the Treaty of Versailles, serves in infantry, later cavalry units, focusing on mobile warfare concepts. Yes, Tick.

Howls a series of staff positions and commands, training units, gaining experience in modernization and mechanization. Exactly.
By the outbreak of war, he's an Ober Esleitnand, a lieutenant colonel.

He's also been a staff officer in the Oberkommando de Gira's army in the Inspector of Motorized Troops. But

by Poland, he's commanding the first

rifle regiment in the first Panzer Division. And 1st Panzer Division is very much the creme de la creme of the Wehrmacht.
You know, Panzer divisions are tops.

The first one is the toppermost of the tops, you know, and so he's taking an absolute key part in

the battles in Poland. And, you know, he does very, very well.
at Sedan. I mean, it is his troops that are the first to cross on the 13th of May 1940 across

the river Mers at Sedan, at the Draperis Sedonnaise, you know, the main crossing point, where they crossed in 1870, where they crossed in 1914. They're crossing again.
This is Gudarian's troops.

This is the absolute strike force. And this is the thing.
Everyone talks about these panzer divisions crossing the Mers.

That is true, but it is infantry that are doing the crossing. Yeah.
The whole point is they're a combined arms formation of Panzer Division. And he's doing that.

And he also has this inspirational moment where his men are all absolutely exhausted.

But overlooking Sedan, and I've been up to this hill, and you can still see the gun scrapes at the top of the hill, is Hill 301, where a lot of the French artillery is.

And he looks at it and he remembers Battle of the Marne in the First World War, where they forewent an opportunity to take the advantage on one night because they were all knackered.

And the next day, it cost them a lot of... a lot of lives.
So he says, what is easy today could cost rivers of blood tomorrow. Let's do it now.
And they storm up the hill and capture it.

He gets the Knight's Cross on the 27th of June, 1940. Who's good when they're winning again?

He's very good when they're winning. You know, and he's inspirational and charismatic and leads from the front.
And he doesn't expect his men to do anything he wouldn't do.

And he's a student of warfare and he's interested in tactics and he's kept up with modernity and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And by 1941, spring of 1941, he's in the 3rd Panzer Regiment. So he's now switched over to armor.
He's leading that in the Balkan campaign and Yugoslavia and Greece.

Then he's commanding a brigade in the 1st Planzer Division, so he's staying in this elite unit.

But right just before Barbarossa, he's recalled because they remember that he's had to stint in the motor transportation bit of the Wehrmacht, of the army, and they need that is their big challenge: how are they going to keep the mechanized mollock kind of on the road in the vast expanse of the Soviet Union?

And everyone's starting to really sweat about this. And he's brought back that as a staff officer and is absolutely furious about it.
His son is killed in battle in the opening days of Barbara Rossa.

And he is general of mobile forces at OKHHQ, even though he's just a colonel. And he's very blunt with von Braukich about the state of things.

He gets sent to the front in November 1941 and he says, We're running out of steam here. This isn't, you know, we should sue for peace right now.
We haven't got the re enough supplies.

We can't replace the losses. You know, the distances are too great.
We're stuffed.

We've shot our bulk. We've reached our culmination point.

And von Braukich, who at that point is just about still ahead of the army, isn't very impressed but he gets a chance about gets a chance to say this to hitler yeah and he says it you know hat us off he says you know you need to sue for peace my führer and despite saying that he's promoted to major general in may 1942 and given an 11th panzer division oh well leads the advance into the caucasus in the summer offensive then directs defensive actions against the soviet counter-offensives you know which is a shape of things to come in late 42 and avoids encirclement after stalingrad he doesn't get swept up in that it's decorated again with the oat leaves and then then he gets the swords and actually he gets the diamonds as well.

His really big moment on the Eastern Front is when he leads the 11th Panzer Division in the Battle of Kharkov in March 1943

where the Soviet Red Army is trying to kind of make the most of its gains of the previous winter 42, 43 and the and they get a massive bloody nose.

And basically his one division largely destroys the Red Army's fifth tank army. You know, they destroy something like sort of 400 tanks or something.
I mean, it's just incredible.

It is recognized that his leadership is one of the key points there. And he becomes one of only 27 men to receive the Knight's Cross with Oakleave, Swords, and Diamonds.

So that's basically, I guess, in the Knights Cross, and bar, and bar, and bar. How political is he? Not massively.
He becomes increasingly anti-against the regime.

Yeah, he's still going up the tree, despite having... He keeps a very detailed diary, which is fascinating.
It's fascinating.

And he really is not enamored. You know, he is, there are still question marks on him, you know, bad things happen.

You know, reading his diary, which he keeps at the time, you know, you can be cynical and say, well, he knew he was doing this with a nod.

I kind of, you know, I just don't, I don't really think that because I don't think he's senior enough at that stage to kind of warrant a kind of after the war, I want it on record kind of thing.

I don't know, maybe. But he goes up and does well in the commands he gets.
So, you know, in early 1944, he's General de Panzer Trupper. He's got 4th Panzer Army Eastern Front.

Don't forget, he's commander of 14th Panzer Corps at the time of Salerno. Yeah.
So he's, yes, he's firefighting as well. I mean, it's interesting.
Lots of these people end up doing that.

Basically, we're talking about i mean does he stand out though yes i think he does why do people when they're doing the top three german generals why does he not come out why why is he not jostling with manstein and model and student and well because he's not in senior command at the start of the war when they're winning i think he's in he's in medium to low command at that point but i think he is outstanding i think he's one of the really top flight ones you know the the the combination of what he's done the range i mean he can't help his age um and he can't help the circumstances in which he is at the start of the war.

He's a general Guerrero de Panzer trooper by early 44, as you point out. He's transferred to the Western Front.

He's an army group commander. He conducts the orderly withdrawal from southern France into Lorraine.
You know, he's pretty good. So I would say he's very good at aggressive warfare.

He's very good at defence. You know, he's a 360-degree man, really.
Okay. But for some reason, his name's not in the same breath as your Gadarians and your, you know.

Yeah, but, you know, he wasn't sort of sucking up to Little Heart after the war, was he? But here's the thing. If you do rate Balk, then what you've got to do is vote on the Patreon.

I'm just going to say right now, he's definitely going to be in my top three. Okay.
How does he compare to Gennar Leitnant Fritz Bylein? Oh, Freilin. Oh, such a sweet nurse.
Yeah.

Oh, it's a sweet nurse. I ran into him as an Ardennes.
Stole my heart. It's a critical moment.
Now, we talked about Bylin a bit in our Battle of the Bulge series. It's what we're referring to.

They're the, I mean, extraordinary incident that he omits to, which is the weird bit involving an american nurse but bilein is stop me if you've heard this before he uh he serves in the first world he's quite young he's only for 1899 only the iron cross second class for bravery in 1918 so um some of the he joins it right at the end give me no no but these other chaps have not doing as well retained in the army after the war yeah he's a lightning in 1922 so yes as you say he's younger than these other chaps he's in the bavarian 21st bavarian infantry and then its regimental staff posts goes to the military academy until 1938.

And he's a logistical officer to the general staff of 15 Army Corps in 1938. And then in Poland, he takes part in the Polish campaign as part of the 10th Panzer Division as chief of staff.

So this is interesting. He's a guy who understands how things work from the inside.
He does Poland, he does France, and then in February 1940. Chief of staff.
Yeah. To the Big G.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To Gudarian. Gudarian's Panzer Group, which is 19 Army Corps, by the way.
Now, that's a plum posting, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And

you are absolutely there at the kind of number one most successful operation that the Germans do. You know, this is the crossing of the Merz of the Great Breakthrough.

This is the great triumph of 1940, you know, all the rest of it. The greatest victory that Hitler has, and he's there.
Yeah.

And must have seen it all happen, been instilled in Gudarian's spirit and all that sort of thing. Then he goes to the Eastern Front and is involved in the sort of early successes of Barbarossa.

But it's interesting is he's sent to North Africa in October 1941 to work with Rommel. So he's sort of like he's following around the big names, isn't he?

I mean, this is a, is he a big name signing himself or the big name saying, get me by line? He knows how to run a staff. But he, you know, he's busy in North Africa, isn't he? Yeah, very busy.

Well, because I think one of the things we always think of North Africa as 8th Army going backwards and forwards. And isn't that ghastly? But Africa Corps goes backwards and forwards.
Well, they do.

And he's a good coalition partner, which is not something you can say about many Germans. I mean, you know, most of them don't get on with their Italian allies, but he does.

He proves himself to be a very courageous frontline soldier, as well as a staff officer. He does briefly command the Deutsche Africa Corps after Nering is wounded at Alam Halfa.

And he again temporarily commands the Deutsche Afrika Corps after von Thommer is captured on the 4th of November.

He's appointed Chief of Staff of the Panzer Army Africa in December 1942, prototype major on the 1st of March 1943, then becomes chief of staff to what becomes the Italian First Army, which is what was the Panzer Army Africa.

And then he gets ill, so he's out of Tunisia, so he doesn't get captured. He gets transferred to the Fuhrer Reserve, and then he's warded the Oak Leafs of Knights Cross, which is a big deal.

You know, not many people get that. He's given command of 3rd Panzer Division on the Eastern Front.

Again, he's fighting at Kharkov and Poltava, Dnaper, Kiev, and then he gets appointed as the first commander of the Panzer Lair Division.

For my money, the Panzer Lair Division is the best Panzer Division in the Wehrmacht by 1944. Yeah.
It's stuff full of really well-trained, hugely experienced people who know what they're about.

It is bristling with armoury. But its big problem is it's going to run into the Allied war machine in its finesse glory.

But by the time, you know, once you're a month into the Overlord campaign, really, once the Allies have figured out which way around they're going and all that sort of thing, you are really in trouble if you're a German division.

It doesn't kind of matter which one you are, really.

You can be as well organised and well equipped and well-led as you like, but you're under the hammer of Allied air power and allied artillery power, aren't you? Is the problem?

Yeah, I mean, you know, he does pretty well in the Ardennes, I think.

I mean, you know, he's criticised a little bit for not taking an opportunity to go into Bastogne when he could, but actually, you know, we've discussed this at some length.

And, you know, I think his decision-making was perfectly reasonable and exactly what anyone with any sense would have done in the circumstances.

Towards the end of the war in March to the end of March 1945, he's given command of the 53rd Army Corps, but, you know, so what? I mean, it's the end of the war and all the rest of it.

He is told not to surrender, but he does to save his men. He's very well known for caring about his men.
He really does care. He has served on the Eastern Front.
There is no stain on him at all.

Absolutely none whatsoever.

And once he becomes, once he's a captive of the Americans, he cooperates with their kind of foreign field studies thing, their project they're doing, sort of capturing the evidence of Germans and how they went about things.

But he also volunteers to work as a mechanic, gets never puts on his general's uniform ever again, and becomes a humble mechanic to be with the lads.

And it's this Rommel's widow and son in preparing the Rommel papers.

He works with US Army intelligence and he later runs shops selling Arabian tapestries in Würzburg.

I think he comes across really well. He's a very, very likable fellow.
Is he the best? He's obviously a supremely competent commander.

I would say from a German point of view, why doesn't he become a corps commander or an army commander earlier on? I think he's perceived to be a bit too nice. Yeah.

Cares about his blokes. I mean cares about his blokes, but

I don't think you can fault his generalship in the war i mean you know everything he does he does excellently and and does very well i think he's pretty high caliber a lot of the people have a hard time in normandy are blamed for that aren't they and it's not their fault that's a career dead end for for several people i've gone into his career in great detail both in ardennes but also particularly normandy and it's absolutely clear from the papers and and what he's writing at the time and you know his contemporary papers so not his sort of wise after the event sort of you know it was all hitler's fault kind of stuff in 1953 or anything like that no this is all at the time and uh or or immediately afterwards.

It's absolutely clear that he is messaging the right things and getting the wrong answers from the high aboves. Okay, and one more before the break.
General Leipnant Heinrich Eberbach.

Well, I think we can rush through him. Iron Cross First Second Class First World War.
He's Prussian. Prussian army.
Loses half his nose. Does all the stuff in the Reichsfair in the interwar years.

He's his lieutenant colonel. Serving in mechanised and armoured units.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Development roles.
He's in an armoured regiment in the invasion of Poland.

I mean, what this indicates, actually, this pattern with all these people, is nothing succeeds like success, right?

So if you are fortunate enough to be part of that little spearhead, because as we've talked about this over and over again, that the Blitzkrieg is a small spear on the tip.

But if you're part of it and you're part of the incredible explosive victory, your career is going to prosper in a way that someone who was involved in the feint into the Netherlands is going to have less sexy time, right, within the army, even though the German army still remains largely horse-drawn and infantry composed.

They're in the elite.

They're in the ten percent. But that's what it is.

You think there were kind of seventeen motorized units and out of one hundred and thirty-five for the Britskrieg in the West. There were twenty out of two hundred for Barbarossa.
It's ten percent.

So he he does well in France in this regard. He's for Barbarossa, he's got Fourth Panzer Division.
You know, he's involved with the biggest. He's in all the biggies.

Yeah, yeah, Minsk, Smolensk, all the big, all the big stuff. Even in nineteen forty-two, when things are starting to unravel, he's still doing he's still maintaining his reputation and doing well.

He's involved in Kursk as commander of 4th Panzer Division. And of course, Battle of Kursk doesn't go well for anyone, really, does it?

It's another one of those battles where the Germans absolutely have to win. And if they don't win, they've lost.
And the Soviets are like, well, what we'll do is we'll let that happen.

We'll take the cost in order to defeat you, one way or another. He does the losing bit very well, conducting kind of fantastic delaying actions, you know, going beyond what was expected.

He gets promoted to Lieutenant General in January 1944. And then in July 1944, after Gervaisberg is sacked at the beginning of July, he's transferred to take command of Panzer Group West.

So, you know, he is now the Panzerman. You know, it's his job to kind of marshal all those panzer divisions which are being flung into the fray around Corn and the British and Canadians.

Yeah, and then he's given the completely thankless task Operation Lutich. So he's commanding forces during the Mortain battle in August 44, trying to cut off the American advance.

I mean, if you want me to, sir, I'll try. And he can't stop the fillets encirclement.
Escapes, but only just. He's replaced.
He's sacked again. Yeah, sacked again, sent to the Eastern Front.

He's a journeyman, isn't he? And also has been given some pretty shit jobs. I mean,

if you're commanding forces during Operation Lutich, you're not winning at life, are you?

I suppose the point is, with people like Eberbach and Bauk and Bairline, you know, if they had the material strength of the Allies and air support and they were kind of, you know, they were in the role of Ernest Harmon,

you know,

or Middleton or any of these guys, you know, they would be doing doing really well.

So, you know, they are really competent and they are really good, but they've got this poison chalice and an impossible task and they're trying to make, you know, do miracles with not very much.

You know, and I think they probably perform better than could be expected in the circumstances. All the time they're operating with their hands tied behind their backs.

Well, they're hands tied behind their backs in terms of the decision making they're allowed and also up against an enemy that has figured out how to beat them. Well, yeah, and also

at the very top, you've also got a high command which is exceptionally cruel.

Right, well join us after the break for more Best of the West German generals and go to the Patreon and vote right now while you're thinking about it, while it's fresh in your mind.

We'll see you in a tick.

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Right, Jim, a quick one before we crack on. And this is 100% We Have Ways, isn't it? Yes, it is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Welcome back to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Almery and James Holland. And of course, Best in the West continues.
And we come, I think, to one of the, I mean, genuinely, giants.

We've been working our way through some of the sort of journeymen, I think it's fair to say, and some of the lesser players. But this guy, it's Heinz Guderian, of course.

And I think, and we've talked a lot about the success of Blitzkrieg and, you know, that it's infantry doing it really, but Guderian is absolutely central.

Heinz Guderian is absolutely central to the story, certainly. And we'll get to Manstein in a minute, the story of Germany's greatest success, which is the fall of France in 1940.
His idea.

You know, it might be von Manstein who kind of came up with the, hey, here's an idea. Let's go through the Ardennes.
It's not going through the Ardennes that's a key thing here.

The key thing here is the method to a large part. It is his concept.
Yeah. He's born in 1888.
He's Prussian, ladies and gentlemen. What a surprise.
What a surprise.

And it may amaze you to know he served in the First World War. He enters the army in 1907.
So he's into it. He's a professional soldier.
Married before the war. Married before the war, exactly.

And then, you know, does lots of signals intelligence and that sort of stuff. And then ends up commanding infantry, ends up in the General Staff Corps, finishes up in Italy.

I think it's quite interesting. But the point is with Kadarian, he is then who who is following what's going on with tank thinking between the wars.
He sees the future, right?

And he's keeping abreast of people like Percy Hobart. Funnily enough, who we've talked about on the other, the other side of the English Channel.

He's keeping abreast of the, he's part of the sort of tank knitting circle that emerges between the wars. There's a group in our village called Nit and Natter.
Well, there we are.

So he's tank and natter or something.

Panzer and Peruse. Yeah.
Panzer and Perouse. But basically, they're all figuring out what do you do with tanks?

Of course, it's all quite theoretical if you're German, but they're keeping abreast of the theory. Should it all come back, they're going to motorize and all this sort of stuff.

And he's also been, he's a military historian teaching at Stettin. Yes.
And he's a guy who's sort of his personality as well, Guderian, known for his wit, his sarcasm, and all this sort of thing.

It's in the 30s when things crystallize for the Wehrmacht. And of course, you know, one of the reasons the army likes Hitler so much is because he gives them back their toys, doesn't he?

One of the reasons the army's on side is

giving them what they want. He is really, really, really like influential in formulating ideas to the point where he's asked to write the book called Akhtong Panzer.

A famous tome.

Well, before that, he's taken command of the third motor transport battalion,

which he uses as a kind of sort of blueprint for combined operations. So, although it's a motor transport battalion, but it's this is the genesis of the panzer division.

And as we've talked about many times on this podcast, the panzer division is not a division stuff full of panzers. It is an all-arms motorised outfit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can't talk about German mobilized motorized warfare, panzer warfare, without talking about Guderian and the fact he did, the fact is his bestseller is called Acton Panzer. Yeah.

I mean, the great, I mean, you know, credit by credit to you, it does what it says on 10, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this means that he's at the forefront of German army thinking.

And he's certainly, although part of the thing is, is he's, you know, he's a bit of a handful. So he's not necessarily liked in the army.
He's loved by his men, though. He is loved by his men.

Yeah, exactly. But it's his peers and his superiors.
Because

he's one of these, I've got this pioneering way. I know I'm right.
You're all wrong. You need to come with me.
Or else you're a bunch of losers. And he starts getting really frustrated.

Yeah, I mean, that always goes down well, that attitude. Why can't you understand this? This is so...

so blindingly obvious and and but he knows i mean particularly when he i mean he gets through poland and stuff but the the the concept is leading forward that's his mantra And it is this idea that your combined arms, motorized outfit, you can't possibly keep up.

You know, the infantry can't keep up because they're on foot and they're using horseback, or, you know, horse and cart and all the rest of it, and ditto a lot of the artillery.

So you have to operate as this spearhead, and the spearhead has to operate in isolation. But speed of maneuver coordinated with aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe to pave the way.

When we think of Blitzkrieg, this is what this is. And this is the concept.
And what Guderian is doing is playing on something that's always been in the Prussian mindset.

This idea that because they're landlocked, because they're in the continent, because they don't have access to many resources and the world's oceans and all the rest of it, when they do fight, they have to fight and win very overwhelmingly, very, very quickly because they can't do long war stuff.

This is just an extension of that. So it's using, and what he's really good at is harnessing radio.
So radio technology.

So every part of your Panzer division, your motorized battalion, whatever it is, is connected to the other part. So that means you can exploit success.

That's one one of the failures of the First World War: an infantry would have a breakthrough, but they wouldn't be able to exploit it because you wouldn't be able to pour in reinforcements quick enough.

This is the antidote to that. And that's what it's about.
So it's not worrying about your flanks. It's not worrying about your tail.

It's just go hell for leather, completely overwhelm your enemy, shock and oar, and win. And that's the blueprint.
And of course, Hitler goes for it because...

That's exactly the language he wants to hear. He knows he's got himself in a pickle, that he's invaded Poland.

He's called Britain's bluff, and Britain and France have declared war and he's going to have to turn and confront them. There is no way he's going to win in a long attritional war.

So he knows that the only way to do it is to do something spectacular. And this offers the opportunity.

And he has the good fortune that the French provide him with sort of all the fumbles and missteps that he could possibly need to make that work. Yes, they're worse than the Germans think.
Yeah, yeah.

The rest of his career, though, he very much in Barbarossa is going forward.

But as he, I mean, one of the interesting things about Guderian is as he drifts higher and as the Germans become less mobile and less able at this sort of thrusting form of warfare, because basically their opponents have caught up with them operationally.

Their situation's getting worse and worse. What he doesn't do, which was what a lot of people do, is distance himself from the regime the worse things get.

He gets, if anything, he gets closer to the regime and is as Nazi as you can be at that level, really, isn't he? Yeah, and he's got lots of Russian Soviet blood on his hands and war crimes.

And then, you know, don't forget, he's a guy who's running the honour court after the salfenberg plot um and the honor courts are where you know you it's already decided you're guilty you're stripped of all your rank you become a commoner again and then you're you know you're executed by guillotine or by piano wire or whatever you know it's all pretty gruesome stuff and i'd say you know one last thing i say about him really is is that he is very brilliant in in barbarossa but he overreaches himself and the problem is is his brand of leading forward doesn't work in the huge distances of the soviet union it's a fatal flaw of blitzkrieg it's a fatal flaw of the barbarossa plan and he's he's guilty of that you So he spends his whole time going, why aren't you reinforcing me?

Why haven't I got more tanks?

Me, me, me, me, me. I mean, he's a bit of a narcissist, if we're honest.
Well, logistics is the ball and chain of armoured warfare, he says. Do you think you know, you've culminated?

That's what happens to the Germans in Barbarossa. They culminate and give the Soviets time to catch them up.
But

if we're going to penalise Patton for his unsavouriness, I mean, you know, you've got to... There's a big back mark against Guderin, but he delivers the greatest triumph that Hitler has.

Yeah, and I think when people now study blitzkrieg or try to sort of reinvent it, he's the example that people are never to be turned to.

Anyway, following Gaderin, quite a different character in many respects, we have General Franz Howder. Well, I include him because I also think he's one of the one.

I think, you know, this is why we've got him in, is because he's also one of the architects of the Blitzkrieg. You know, he's, he's, you know, he has to develop the plan for Poland in breakneck time.

He puts down all sorts of markers as to why they need to do Barbarossa differently, all of which is ignored, of course by hitler he is a very very good chief of staff i mean no he's right up there with marshall and brooke and everything it's just that he's an army chief of staff and he's on the wrong side and he does get sacked in 1941 he is sort of kind of tortured in his dealings with hitler isn't he doesn't like him does he no hates him absolutely hates him thinks he's a disaster thinks going to war in 1939 is a disaster there's a moment in november i think it's november where he's got an opportunity to to to pistol him to shoot him and he just gets to shakes he can't do it yeah Yeah.

Although, you know, whose word have we got for that? His.

The point is, is we're just talking about Gudarian, who's the architect of 1940, but in fact, is by the end of the war is absolutely still, you know, cozied up to the regime.

I mean, having been sacked several times and then promoted. Yeah, but still keeps returning.
Whereas Halder ends up one of the prominenten, you know, he's held by Kaltenbrun in the South Tyrol.

You can almost mark Howder up for having fallen out with the regime, can't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Howder ends up in Dachau. So there we are.
Right. So.
But on the other hand, he's not a battlefield commander. He's a chief of staff.
So, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we have to kind of do we park him or whatever. I mean, funnily enough, everyone's gone for Eisenhower and the American generals on the Patreon.
So what can we say? Now, Hans Falentin Huber. De Man.

Hey, everybody. He's born in the 1890s.
He's Prussian. He joins the Prussian army.
Yeah.

In 1909. I mean, 1909 seems to be the golden year rather than 1915 as it is in America.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Oh, Iron Cross first.

Well, that's just because basically the Germans start five years earlier, isn't it?

Yeah.

In all respect.

Five, six years, early. Both classes of Iron Cross.
And he loses an arm in 1914. You know, and, you know, for most people, that would be it.

That would be, you know, for you, my friend, the war is over. Not a bit of it.
He becomes known as the man with the silver arm among his comrades and goes back into action. Incredible, isn't it?

And despite having only one arm, he remains in the Rijks after the war, which means he's got to be pretty special, I reckon. Yeah, or very hard to say no to.
Yeah, yeah, one of those things.

But he's obviously something about him. Well, Douglas Barder, you know, the people had a problem saying no to him, didn't they? He, in between the wars, he's in.
He's an instructor. He does.

He's known for discipline, leadership, personal bravery. He's a pioneer of all arms, combined arms cooperation.

And he's a divisional commander by the start of the war. 16th Infantry Division in the invasion of Poland.
He's very aggressive.

gets into southern Poland, which is, of course, you know, where the Germans run rampant. Then his Army Group B, he's in the northern thrust through the Low Countries in 1940.

Gets a Knight's Cross 27th of October for leadership in the campaign in the West. Yeah, and then he gets himself a Panzer Division in 1941.

General Leutenen goes to the Eastern Front with 16th Panzer, who are new. Takes part in Barbarossa, goes through Ukraine towards the Dnieper and Rostov.
Yeah. Circumutor Kiev.

Fully in the thick of it. Awarded the Oakleys to his Knights Cross.
Very good. Yep.
So he's clearly a solid chap as a divisional commander.

I mean, the idea of him having one arm is quite extraordinary, actually. Yeah, he ends up in Stalingrad, but Hitler pulls him out at his insistence.
He wants to stay of his men. Hitler goes, no.

He's all for advocating a major effort to pull out of Stalingrad. Gets denied.
Hitler personally insists, orders that he has to come out. So he comes.
So that's why.

By that point, he's 14 Panzercorps commander, and that gets destroyed. Of course, 14 Panzercorp then gets reconstituted in Sicily, and that's where he's sent next.

And it has to be said, you know, he's pretty impressive in Sicily as far as it goes. I mean, you know, his defensive system in the northeast of Sicily is pretty effective.

You know, we've talked a lot about Sicily in the past and, you know, with his depleted resources and all the rest of it and, you know, no air cover, blah, blah, blah, not as much firepower as the Allies, he does pretty well, really.

Yeah, then gets sent back to the Eastern Front for his troubles. So, I mean, and he's now an army commander.
First Panzer Army.

There's the breakout of the Chikassi pocket in February 1944, where he's encircled and he gets out, which I think is, that's pretty impressive, isn't it?

Which shows that the Germans still can do mobile things against the Soviets if they need to. He's a General Oberst, Lieutenant General.
That's kind of... What is a General Oberst?

If a Leutenant General is a Lieutenant General, what's a General Oberst? It's a four-star general. Right, okay.
A general is a five-star general. Yeah.

Whereas a full general is a four-star in the US and British. So it's a common as that.
Anyway,

but he doesn't have much time to enjoy it because he gets killed in an aircraft crash, crashes near Salzburg, returning from an audience with Hitler at at the Berghoff.

Well, there we are. I mean, he's sort of super competent, known as De Man, isn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, he's really, really good.

I mean, I suppose if you if you think about this, he is in the west because he's there in 1940, he's in Sicily in 1943, he is in Italy for part of 1943 or the part where Balk takes over him while he's ill.

Then he's back to the, you know, he spends more time on the Eastern Front. He's right up there.
I mean, you know, he's very, very competent. There's no getting away from it.

I mean, all these guys are, you know, they're operating operating with a kind of massive poison chalice.

And one half-time behind their back because of Hitler, and another one because, you know, they're losing the war.

Well, and because the other side has figured it out is the other issue.

Because so much of why 1940 and then 1941 goes well is because the French and the BEF really don't know what's hit them and the Soviets are rubbishy refusing to face facts in lots of ways.

So which gives these people all a real head start. I mean, think of all of all of the people in the episode, though, that we've talked about.

The sort of towering figure, unfortunately, is Gudarian, really, because so many they're emulating his mold certainly 1941 it's sort of the gudarian way isn't it barbarossa well yes i was sort of thinking about this you know maybe you can sort of you know there's a black cross against someone like patton for his anti-semitism and grotesque views at the end of the war which got him sacked after all for the second time um as an army commander maybe you can't really hold that against the germans in quite the same way because they're all part of the nazis i mean you know they're nazis anyway i mean i don't know jim i don't know i don't know either these are moral questions for people to debate while they're looking at the patron and deciding which one of these generals to vote for.

That's all from this part of Best of the West. This is section three, episode one.
So the fifth episode. You know how we like tangling ourselves in knots with numbers on this podcast.

Thanks very much for listening. We'll be back with more men in black hats, field grey, steely-looking binoculars surveying.
Who've been pioneers of mobile warfare in the 1930s? Exactly.

Iron Cross, first class, second class, James Holland saying goodbye. Thanks very much, Jerio.
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