Panzer Leader (Penguin World War II Collection) [Paperback]

Opening with an excellent foreword which puts you in the mindset of the German General Staff, this book allows you to understand WWII from the German perspective.

The book starts off by describing the development of German armoured warfare which arose out of a need for mobile defence, a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles. This gives valuable insight into how the Germans were able to bring about swift victories in Poland and France at the start of the war by using their experiences from re-militarising the Ruhr region and the friendly invasion of Austria.

Guderian then gives an account of his campaigns in Poland, France and Russian up to the end of the first year when he was dismissed by Hitler. The account is backed up by sketch maps and you get an impression of what it was like to be there with the difficulties they faced from supplies to weather, the enemy and worst of all with their own high command.

Later in the war Guderian is recalled to service to try to reverse the worsening fortunes of the Army and it is this part of the book which is probably the most interesting as you see his constant battles with Hitler and the high command to make them see sense such as not to launch operation Citadel (at Kursk). However in the end sense rarely prevails and you see the disastrous consequences that Guderian has predicted come to light.

At the end of this book you come away with a good impression of Guderian and I feel that he was trying to make the best of a bad situation. However like Antony Beevor says in his book Stalingrad this type of book was written after the war and is no doubt written in such a way that the suffering of civilians is rarely mention, such as soldiers evicting russian peasants into the freezing cold and also the interactions between the Generals and the infamous SS divisions 'clearing up' behind the lines. You'll also find that the disaster at Stalingrad is not really covered in this book due to the book being a personal account from Guderian and not a full history of the campaigns.

All in all this is a great book and gives a good perspective of the war from the German perspective from the rise of German military power to it's catastrophic downfall.

I've always had a sneaking admiration for Heinz Guderian and what he managed to achieve during WW2. His behaviour from other sources and historical books on the period would indicate he was something of a maverick and didn't care too much for the National Socialist government or his superiors who couldn't see the strategic view that Guderian did.

When I saw this book was on amazon I jumped at the chance to buy it and read. I must admit that the book was interesting in that it gave an account from the pen of the man behind much of the success of the wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940 - and the first part of '41 too - but after a while it seemed to become a little cold and formal, being merely a succession of clipped reports on a day by day basis of where he was and who he saw.

Although factual, it hardly made for interesting reading and maybe the biographer taking down the notes from Guderian's conversations with him could have done us all a little more service by cutting down on the boring cold points and interspercing them with some interesting anecdotes that always confront the soldier in times of war.

I also began to doubt some of Guderians assertions that he was the only one within the entire high command who had any idea of what to do and that every setback that happened had been forseen by him and if only they had done what he said then things would have very different.

It seemed very much to me that this book, written in 1953 and so only 8 years after the final surrender, was still full of bitter resentment and a carry over of the back biting and back stabbing that was endemic within the upper echelons of the German armed forces and government. Guderian spent far too much time on scoring points over the others, both dead or still alive, and so made this book seem a little bit of a pulpit for self justification.

But this doesn't take away the fact it was overall a very important account of the panzer successes, and you wonder how on earth they managed to succeed with what was going on behind the scenes during even the victorious years.

Technically a successful account of his war years, but as an intersting story in itself not so successful, hence the three star rating. I also doubt his statements on a number of occasions but since every surviving German officer was trying his best to denounce the Nazi elements at that time I can see why.

"Panzer Leader," written by a former Colonel-General of the Wehrmacht, Heinz Guderian, is a fascinating book. It is fascinating in its own right in that it describes Guderian's efforts to create and operate effective all-arms formations including armor, armored infantry and towed (later self-propelled) artillery in spite of the opposition from the more traditional elements of the Wehrmacht. With Hitler's keen interest and help, Guderian succeeded in creating such formations in "Panzerdivisionen" - armored divisions. The subsquent successes which Guderian had as a commander of such formations in Poland, France and Russia make an exciting and informed reading.

However, the book is also fascinating because of the falsehood contained in it. Principally, there are two major "untruths" which often escape notice from the casual reader. The first falsehood is the credit which Guderian attributes to the late Sir Basil H. Liddell Hart as the "founder" of Blitzkrieg "doctrine." Guderian was jailed after the Second World War by the Allied authorities in the West, and it was Sir Liddell Hart who championed his (and other jailed German generals') cause. He brought them gifts and attempted to convince the authorities to free them, and eventually became the editor of their memoirs in the West. Sir Lidell Hart had been indeed an innovator of military doctrine in the 1920's, but he had, by 1930's, rejected the concept of armored warfare as viable. In any case, his reputation had fallen during the war, and this he attempted to salvage rather successfully with the help of the grateful ex-German generals after the war. Hence, Guderian inserted the line crediting Sir Liddell Hart as the founder of Blitzkrieg idea in the English edition of the book (it does not appear in the German edition) which was then edited by Sir Liddell Hart himself. Guderian really deserves the credit for integrating armor, motorized infantry and motorized artillery into an all-arms fighting formation known as Panzer Divisions.

Second major "irregularity" of the book concerns the infamous "Commissar Order." Prior to launching Case Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union, Hitler directed that German forces to eliminate Soviet political officers (and eventually other "undesirables" including Jews) among the captured Soviet POWs. Guderian claims in the book that he did not distribute this order to units under his command, the Second Panzer Group (later the Second Panzer Army) and that hence the order was not carried out in his command. This is an outright lie as was later effectively rebutted by the books written by Professor Omer Bartov. In fact, the Commissar Order was carried out in the Second Panzer Group.

There are other smaller problems. While the account of the war in the book is largely accurate, Guderian often fails to mention that his mistakes were at times reponsible for the failure of military operations under his command. Instead he blames Hitler who, though he shares a large part of the blame, did not make the mistakes alone.

This book was instrumental during the earlier years of the Cold War in implanting the idea that the "Shield of the Wehrmacht" was "untainted" - that it was Hitler and the SS who were responsible for the military failures and the atrocities and that the German army's honor and operational brilliance remained untainted. The book was welcomed in the West because it helped to buttress the argument for the rearming of the Federal Republic of Germany, and because it pointed a way to defeat the Russian "Slavic-Asiatic" hordes with West European operational and tactical brilliance.

We now have a more accurate portrayal of the war available. Nonetheless, the book is useful in that it provides an insight into why the Panzer Division was such an effective instrument of war. The books shows that it was the operational and tactical brilliance of integrating all arms and allowing the unit to deal flexibly with all forms of enemies while maintaining the momentum of operation which made the German armored units so formidable, not the superior number of German tanks during the early years as Sir Churchill inaccurately pointed out in his writings.

At the same time, the reader must understand the context of the book and what it does not contain and what it falsifies. For the shield of the Wehrmacht was tainted with the blood of its victims and occassional military blunders by its commanders. So long as that understanding is present, the book makes an interesting and fascinating military history reading.

James J. Na