Free To Lose a Battle by Alistair Horne Page B

party, the German Army was not saddled with the victor’s impedimenta of obsolescent ideas and equipment. Secondly, Hitler inherited some remarkably solid groundwork in the shape of Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt’s Reichswehr. As Mackensen’s Chief of Staff on the Russian front, Seeckt had been responsible for the spectacular breakthrough at Gorlice in 1915. His monocle and hard features, making him seem like a traditional, rigid Prussian Junker, in fact concealed a remarkable elasticity and breadth of vision. From the moment of taking over command of the Reichswehr on the morrow of defeat, his guiding principle had been to ‘neutralize the poison’ in the clauses of the Versailles Treaty by which the German Army had been disarmed, and to create a nucleus from which a new and greater army could one day be formed. When the Allied terms had forced the Reichswehr to purge some 20,000 of its officers, Seeckt made sure that it was the élite who remained. Every subaltern was trained to command a battalion, and every field officer a division. At one moment, out of the 100,000 men permitted by Versailles, 40,000 were N.C.O.s, and each of these was regarded as potential ‘officer material’. Mistrustful of the unwieldy mass armies of conscripts of 1914–18, so lacking in mobility, Seeckt selected the rank and file of the Reichswehr all from carefully vetted volunteers. Determined to safeguard traditional values, at the same time he introduced a new, closer and more comradely relationship between officers and men, based on mutual confidence. Gone was the stiff social segregation, which to a large extent still afflicted the French Army, and gone too was much of the harsh bullying, or Kommiss , of the old days. The result was a remarkably professional, technically efficient Force in miniature.
    Considerable ingenuity was employed to surmount the Allied restrictions imposed on heavy equipment. In Reichswehr manoeuvres right up to 1932, soldiers could be seen trundling along‘dummy tanks’ mounted on bicycle wheels. After protracted arguments with the Allies, the Germans were permitted to construct a small armoured vehicle with a revolving turret; although barred from carrying any weapon, it was of great use in teaching officers the art of armoured warfare. Barred from producing any tracked vehicles, 2 the Germans ingeniously developed eight- and ten-wheeled armoured cars, forerunners of the famous eight-wheeled reconnaissance vehicle which did such good service during the Second World War. Short of transport, Seeckt began experimenting with motor-cycle companies, later an essential component of the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg technique. But Seeckt’s greatest contribution lay in guiding German military thought on to the correct lines. He insisted, wrote Churchill,
that false doctrines, springing from personal experiences of the Great War, should be avoided. All the lessons of that war were thoroughly and systematically studied. New principles of training and instructional courses of all kinds were introduced. All the existing manuals were rewritten…
    Unlike the French with their vision fixed upon the static warfare of the Western Front, too gratified by the fact of final victory to study the military mistakes which had come so close to compromising it, Seeckt, together with many other German staff officers who had fought on the Russian front, enjoyed the advantage of having seen that there were other ways of waging war. He himself had helped devise the tactics of the great sweeping operations in the east, and had directed the breakthrough at Gorlice, leading to a depth of penetration such as was never to occur in the west. From these war-time experiences, he concluded as early as 1921:
The whole future of warfare appears to me to be in the employment of mobile armies, relatively small but of high quality, and rendered distinctly more effective by the addition of aircraft…
    Guderian and the Panzer Corps
    Seeckt retired for