Guderian: Panzer Pioneer or Myth Maker? (Military Profiles)
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 1574888102
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Biographers and historians have lionized Heinz Guderian as the legendary father of the German armored force and brilliant practitioner of blitzkrieg maneuver warfare. As Russell A. Hart argues, Guderian created this legend with his own highly influential yet self-serving and distorted memoir, which remains one of the most widely read accounts of the Second World War. Unfortunately, too many of Guderian’s biographers have accepted his view of his accomplishments at face value, without sufficient critical scrutiny, resulting in an undeserved hagiography.
While undoubtedly a great military figure of appreciable ego and ambition and with a volatile, impetuous, and difficult personality, Guderian was determined to achieve his vision of a war-winning armored force irrespective of the consequences. He proved to be a man who was politically naive enough to fall under the sway of Hitler and National Socialism and yet arrogant enough to believe he could save Germany from inevitable defeat late in the war, despite Hitler’s interference. At the same time, Guderian was unwilling either to participate in attempts to remove Hitler or to denounce as traitors the conspirators who did. In the end, he distorted the truth to establish his place in history. In the process, he denigrated the myriad important contributions of his fellow officers as he took personal credit for what were, in reality, collective accomplishments. Thus, he succeeded in creating a legend that has endured long after his death.
This brief biography puts the record straight by placing Guderian’s career and accomplishments into sharper and more accurate relief. It exposes the real Heinz Guderian, not the man of legend.
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Guderian through important command assignments clearly indicates Lutz’s leadership role. In early 1930 it was Lutz who gathered dummy tanks and antitank guns, as well as the first new armored cars under Guderian’s command in the 3d Motor Transport Battalion, to create Germany’s first, permanently constituted, combined-arms mechanized unit. In fact, it is not difficult to conclude that Lutz’s role was more important than Guderian’s. Moreover, Guderian exaggerated the central role his 3d Motor.
1913, Guderian entered the prestigious Kriegsakademie in Berlin. His obvious intellect, diligence, and aptitude quickly led his fellow academy students to dub him “Schnelle Heinz” (Quick Henry).3 These career accomplishments meanwhile offset the objections of Gretel’s parents and on 1 October 1913, Guderian and Gretel married. At the War Academy he demonstrated an idiosyncratic blend of studied thought, boundless energy, and alarming impetuosity that subsequently made Guderian infamous. Gretel.
Troops, 1943–1944 Chapter 8 Guderian and the 20 July 1944 Conspiracy Chapter 9 Guderian as Acting Chief of the General Staff, 1944–1945 Chapter 10 Guderian’s Fate and Legacy Notes Bibliographic Note Index About the Author Maps Guderian’s XIX Motorized Corps in the Polish Campaign, September 1939 Advance of Guderian’s XIX Motorized Corps from the River Meuse to the English Channel, 13–24 May 1940 Advance of Panzer Group Guderian from the River Aisne to the Swiss Frontier, 5–25.
Remained fixated with the Eastern Front and gave scant due to the strategic requirements of the other theaters. He was an army man (and exclusively an armor man at that) who disdained interarms and interservice cooperation and coordination, with disastrous consequences. His ego and unswerving advancement of his beloved panzer force engendered enormous personal animus and accentuated institutional rivalries and conflicts. He was actually little more successful than the other German generals in.
249ff. 20. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–45 (Bonn: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz, 1997), 111. 21. Streit, Keine Kameraden, 111. 22. Louis Rotundo, “The Creation of Soviet Reserves and the 1941 Campaign,” Military Affairs, 50, no. 1 (Jan. 1986), 23ff. 23. Russell Hart, Clash of Arms: How the Allies Won in Normandy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Press, 2000), 204. 24. Macksey, Panzer General, 141–2. 25. Koch, review of Macksey’s Guderian:.