reduced by a third to facilitate control. The major issue, however, involved
armour’s use in the coming campaign against the Western Allies. The genesis of
the original German plan is familiar. Hitler wanted the Western campaign to
begin immediately after the fall of Poland. The high command was reluctant to
mount an offensive under any circumstances. Its foot dragging produced no
fewer than twenty-nine postponements and a concept that involved sending
seventy-five divisions, including most of the army’s mobile formations, into the
Low Countries to engage the main Anglo-French strength in what was expected
to be an encounter battle in central Belgium.
Even before Hitler became directly involved in the planning process, this
unpromisingly conventional proposal was generating increasing criticism. It
incorporated no proposals for destroying enemy armed forces, speaking rather
of creating favourable conditions for future operations. The high command’s
thinking seemed to go no further than punching a hole and seeing what devel-
oped. In that sense, their proposal owed more to Ludendorff’s abortive 1918
offensive than the Schlieffen Plan to which it has often been compared. 70
It required little more than a back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine
that the force-to-space ratios imposed by the proposed operation would invite
exactly the kind of head-on engagements the army’s mechanized elite was ill-
configured to fight. Inter-war theorists of independent armoured warfare like J. F.
C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart tended to stress disruption, paralysis, as an end in
itself. Cut an enemy’s nervous system and all that remained was rounding up the
demoralized and hungry masses. The Polish campaign had convinced the panzer
community that armoured forces were also able to achieve initial breakthroughs
even against prepared defences. At a war game held on 7 February, Heinz
Guderian, the tankers’ horsefly (‘gadfly’ is too limited to describe Guderian’s
take-no-prisoners approach), proposed concentrating the armoured forces for a
drive across the Meuse River around Sedan, then expanding the bridgehead
north-west towards Amiens. The chief of staff insisted on a measured build-up,
waiting for the infantry before seeking to exploit the initial success.
A month later, a second war game evaluated the same issue. This time the
pressure from on high for using infantry to force the crossing was even stronger.
Guderian and the commander of XIV Panzer Corps responded that the proposed
conservative employment of the armour was so likely to produce a crisis that they
could have no confidence in a high command that ordered it. War games were
intended to generate spirited debate with no hard feelings. But when two experi-
enced senior generals flatly declared ‘no confidence’ in a plan, it was the closest
thing possible to saying ‘get yourself another boy’. 71
German doctrine, both generally in the army and specifically in the armoured
force, was based on destroying enemy forces by breaking their will and ability to
resist. That was also the basis of the alternative concept put forward by Erich von
Manstein, then chief of staff to Army Group A. Manstein’s proposal was intended
as much to provide a central role for his commanding general Gerd von Rund-
stedt as to furnish a programme for victory. His projected thrust through the
Ardennes would transform Rundstedt’s army group from a secondary player to
Prussian–German Operational Art, 1740–1943 53