David Fletcher investigates the origins of the Panzer and its use in World War Two
If you are given to reading books about German tanks of World War Two you will probably find the Panzer I dismissed in most of them as a training tank. “If that is so,” once asked a friend, “why did the Germans bother to armour it and why fit a pair of machine guns; surely for training purposes one would suffice?”
Well, as it happens my friend, who is no longer with us, knew the answer but was unable to prove it. Many years ago, in the library of a large military establishment outside Washington DC, he came across a translated German document which he read but was unable to copy.
To his memory the document gave some idea of the extent of German war plans, well before the war, when they were considering how to deal with France.
When it came to tanks, for example, they needed some yardstick to work from and decided that their tanks needed to outnumber the quantity of French anti-tank guns – those fitted to vehicles and those on ordinary gun carriages – by a substantial amount.
The argument was that if every French gun took out just one tank before being overrun then there had to be enough Panzers left to ensure victory. It …
