prinCZess
Warrior, Writer, Performer, Perv
Really not sure where this goes, or if it's even of any interest to anyone, but it's something of an oddball interest of mine I expanded into a paper moons ago, and I'd be curious what folks (perhaps in particular any of those with military experience, interest in military history, or are just plain more critical than me) would criticize or comment upon it with. Other examples? Exceptions? Maybe I'm completely off-base on everything because I know nothing Jon Snow about the military or how command works (this seems likely)? Be curious for thoughts.
German military insubordination during the Battle of France
A very basic concept of military service is the duty to follow orders. When a superior issues a command, it is expected to be obeyed on the penalty of court martial or even harsher punishment in active combat zones. This concept, generally based on the fact that one’s superiors have more information about the situation and experience in handling it, has been part of the military ethos for many years. In popular conception, thanks to Prussia’s innovations in the realm of military organization, national stereotypes of German seriousness, and even the use of it as a defense in the Nuremburg Trials, the historical German military, particularly the Wehrmacht, is often presented as holding very strictly to this kind of military obedience. Often overlooked or ignored is how much individual commander’s resisted, skirted, or actively disobeyed orders and plans made by their superiors in order to do pursue the course of action they saw as best and were either excused or actively rewarded for such behavior. This phenomenon is perhaps most obvious during the second year of the war in Europe as the Wehrmacht marched on France.
Even on a strategic level before the invasion began this behavior is evident. As German and Allied forces faced each other with little movement during the winter of ’39-40, the German High Command, under Hitler’s constantly-hurrying direction, worked on designing an offensive to the west. Fall Gelb as the plan was called, ended up being a close copy of the Schlieffen Plan of the last war, with the German military attacking through then-neutral Belgium and Holland to attempt and defeat French and English forces without being forced to attack the famed Maginot Line. It was militarily conservative; the High Command assuming that the rolling, maneuver-heavy warfare employed months before to overwhelm Poland would not be practical against the militaries of the western allies.[1]
But the plan had a very loud detractor in the form of Erich von Manstein, who pushed his own variation on the idea that instead concentrated panzer forces for an attack through the Ardennes and envisioned a mobile breakout that could surround Allied forces in the Low Countries. This variation was dismissed by the General Staff, with one member even saying the idea was entirely without merit.[2] Despite this rejection, Manstein is said to have been so annoying and insistent in his advocacy of the idea and the usage of the German panzers in a concentrated manner that he was ‘promoted’ into the command of an Infantry Corps.[3] Despite Manstein’s fate and the General Staff’s rejection of his proposal, thanks to the misfortune of a German officer carrying information about early forms of Fall Gelb falling into Belgian hands and Hitler intervening to overrule his generals decision in favor of something he saw as more bold, when the German invasion of France came, Fall Gelb would much more closely resemble Manstein’s Plan than it would the original. The success of the German military despite the General Staff’s skepticism would become a point focused on and continually-emphasized by Hitler for the next five years to justify his decision-making and silence detractors.[4]
Things became even more chaotic after the German invasion began on May 10, and there seem to have been a small waterfall of creatively-interpreted or intentionally-ignored orders over the course of the next weeks as the German offensive pushed to the English Channel and then towards Dunkirk. Not even the very first days of the operation were immune. As German tanks in Panzergruppe Kleist, so-named after its commander, traveled through the small number of very thin roadways in the Ardennes that could support them, concern grew over the slow pace of advance, especially in the northern portion of their sector, and the potential of a French cavalry unit attacking from the south. To try and speed things along, orders were issued that the German panzer units under Kleist had absolute right-of-way along the available roads—their tanks marked by Ks stenciled-on to the front and back.[5] Despite these orders, presumably in the hopes of speeding the attack along, the III Army Corps, a non-mechanized infantry unit, attempted to travel along the same roadways, and the route through the Ardennes descended into a traffic-jammed mess during the first days of the attack.[6]
In the south, thanks to smaller problems and no small amount of luck, the resistance to orders was more helpful than damaging to the German cause. Heinz Guderian, who was in command of three of the German panzer divisions under Kleist, was ordered to shift one of his divisions south to defend against the possibility of a French attack from that direction. Likely driven by how difficult such a move would be to accomplish on the traffic-clogged roads in the Ardennes, Guderian did not do so.[7] Instead, without informing Kleist, Guderian ordered the closest panzer unit to change its advance slightly to bypass the French unit entirely. When an order was issued to the unit itself to detach a portion of its strength to its original route as a screening force, the division commander ignored the order entirely. As it happened, the French cavalry unit worrying the two disobedient German officers superiors was not organized for an attack and there was enough time to shift an infantry division into place. [8] Panzergruppe Kleist continued on towards their first-day objectives relatively free of the confusion present in the north because of two different commanders ignoring the orders issued to them.
This would not be the first of Kleist or others orders which Guderian or his subordinates would show little regard for. During the course of the German drive to the sea, it became almost commonplace. On May 12, as Guderian’s command prepared an attack across the Meuse river, the pair would butt heads over both where the crossing should take place and the best use of air support. Guderian’s suggestions of crossing points would be overruled by Kleist, as would previously-arranged plans Guderian had made with the Luftwaffe officer responsible for covering the attack. Guderian ignored Kleist’s recommendation in the former case and focused his attack on the crossing points he wanted.[9] In the latter case, despite the orders Kleist had issued to them, the Luftwaffe also attacked according to Guderian’s plan as well—something the panzer commander claimed to be pleasantly surprised by in his memoirs, but which the Luftwaffe officer attributed to Kleist’s order arriving too late to reach his flyers.[10] There is some disagreement as to whether this reason by the Luftwaffe officer is truthful, or was merely used as a convenient smokescreen to cover up his deciding in favor of Guderian’s plan over Kleist’s.[11]
By May 15, German forces had crossed the Meuse river and entered northeast France, threatening the flanks of the Allied units to their north in the Low Countries, the rear of the Maginot Line to their southeast, and Paris itself to their west. Kleist ordered his panzer divisions to stop temporarily so that the infantry following behind them could catch up and form a defensive line. Guderian heatedly contested the order, and Kleist allowed for a 24-hour postponement of the order, ostensibly so that “…sufficient space be acquired for the infantry corps that were following.”[12] A little more than a day later, the argument ignited again, this time passed-down from not only Kleist but also the German General Staff. Once again, it was contested by Guderian, who either resigned in protest[13] or was allowed to resign as opposed to being sacked for his refusal to follow the order to halt. Only the intervention of another officer who rejected Guderian’s resignation and offered a compromise where he was given permission to perform ‘reconnaissance in force’ settled the matter.[14] Guderian is said to have liberally interpreted what ‘reconnaissance' meant—with a number of sources outright saying it was an artificial excuse he used to continue attacking and advancing. Guderian, for his part, specifically noted in his memoirs that he established a forward headquarters to manage the reconnaissance explicitly to avoid the General Staff from intercepting his communications, and it is difficult to read the idea and tone of his words as anything but a way to avoid his superiors noticing the scale of his ‘reconnaissance in force’.[15]
Guderian was not the only German commander to dismiss or loosely interpret orders given him during the attack into France. To his north over the same period another German commander was doing much the same thing. Erwin Rommel, who had earned the beginnings of a reputation during the initial days of the attack for leading from the front—and consequently not being easily-contacted by superiors—had been ordered to stay at his seventh panzer division’s headquarters and oversee his panzers temporary halt and defense of Kleist’s northern flank. The German commanders in his wedge of the advance wanted to concentrate panzer and infantry forces for what they thought would be a difficult assault against a line of French fortification that the previous days panzer-led offensive had reached. [16]
After meeting with his own commander on the morning of May 16, the details of which are not immediately available, Rommel ordered an attack he was not supposed to order towards the French forts by his Panzer division, with the goal of reaching the French city of Avesnes-sur-Helpe on the other side of the defenses. He then left the office he had been ordered to stay in and rode-along with a regimental commander to observe and direct.[17] Only a few hours later, when the regiment’s panzers and support-troops had broken through the French defenses and reached the outskirts of the city where previously-made German plans said he was supposed to wait for new orders, Rommel instead continued on with the goal of capturing an intact bridge over the river Sambe miles to the west. He would be successful, though the mad dash forward would take him out of radio contact with his commanders as well as the rest of his own division, necessitating he drive back to retrieve them in an armored car. This, too, would be successful and would form the basis for Rommel’s subsequent fame in both the German and Allied militaries.[18]
Over the course of May 16th to the 17th, Rommel’s command would cover some 30 miles of French countryside, suffer a little under a hundred casualties, and capture more than 10,000 French soldiers, all while going against the orders given to him a number of times and contravening the operational plans that had been made for a combined assault on the French defenses. Rommel’s command would end up so spread-out over the French countryside that the French High Command, the German High Command, and even he did not have any accurate knowledge of where his forces were. The actions, even based as they were on disobeying orders, would earn Rommel his Iron Cross.[19]
Rommel and Guderian may have been recognizable names who held a dismissive or hostile attitude towards orders they disliked, but they do not seem to have been alone. At multiple times during the German advance, orders seem to have been taken more as suggestion than actual commands. In Guderian’s memoirs, one German commander is said to have moved his unit off of a bridgehead he was ordered to stay and defend in order to support an attack. A few days later, after a hard order to stop the advance on Dunkirk at the river Aa had been issued with Hitler’s backing, one of the more bizarre and debated moves of the war, Guderian tells of an infantry division commander who lead an attack across the river anyways. In the former instance, Guderian is somewhat neutral, and merely notes it’s good that the enemy didn’t take advantage, in the latter instance he notes actively congratulating the commander disobeying orders which had been issued by the High Command with Hitler’s explicit endorsement.[20]
At a wide level, if it is as dramatic as it would seem on first look, the willingness of German commanders to question orders and contest those they found to be imprudent or ineffective has some relevance to modern discussions about WWII. The myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ as compared to more explicit Nazi organs has been seen since practically the closing days of the war itself, and the reasoning they were ‘just following orders’ persists among modern apologists for the Nazi regime and its appendages. Rommel himself, and Guderian to a much lesser extent and with much less justification, are often used as examples in both of these cases. But if those in the German military, especially Rommel, understood the value of challenging their superiors and disobeying orders when necessary, as they seem to have during Fall Gelb, then we must question why they followed or ignored those which murdered and brutalized the peoples they conquered. From this perspective we can only come to the conclusion that German commanders who might object to or disobey orders they saw as militarily wrong went along with or even approved of those made by the Nazi government which ordered war crimes and other moral wrongs—when they didn’t order those things to be done themselves because of what could only have been agreement with Nazi goals.
At the same time, we should be cautious from speculating too far based upon the above material alone. It is gathered from a limited pool of resources in a limited amount of time, and necessarily compromises on the depth and variety of instances examined. Additional research into the actions of less well-known commanders, attempting to find further verification of those related from memoirs, as well as consulting someone with either military experience in a large-scale operation or documenting such a thing all seem like they would be prudent. It is possible that the kind of disobedience and resistance to orders seen during the Battle of France is less remarkable from a military perspective than it seems from a civilian viewpoint, or was not as prevalent in reality as memoirs would have us believe. There have been criticisms of Panzer Leader in particular as something Guderian wrote to intentionally emphasize or exaggerate his own accomplishments, and it is possible Guderian intentionally presented himself as a young rogue with a tendency to contest his orders to further his own self-image. Similarly, Rommel has been the focus of much historical myth-making of his own, with a tendency, especially in the immediate after years of the war, to present him as a representative of the 'Clean Wehrmacht'. More extended research might better settle the question of how common disobeying, contesting, or ignoring orders was in the Wehrmacht during the invasion of France, upon which any hard conclusions depend.
What can be said with certainty is that the unprecedented forward momentum the Wehrmacht managed to attain during the attack across the Ardennes threw Allied defensive strategies into chaos and was instrumental in the Fall of France. We can only speculate how or if events may have changed had commanders like Guderian or Rommel actually obeyed all the orders given to them in the above or other instances during the Battle of France instead of taking their own initiative to pursue the objectives as they saw them and press the attack. More chaos during the march through the Ardennes, less successful or speedy crossings at Sedan, or less of the ground-covering, panic-inducing mad-dashes across northeast France that were carried out during the offensive even as the High Command or their superiors ordered stops all come to mind as items which might have influenced the final result of the battle and might have allowed for an Allied regroup and counter-attack (as De Gaulle famously attempted midway through the invasion only to be stymied by lack of organization, time, or support).
It would seem that a goodly number of German commanders, at least those whose actions are documented in readily-available sources, were willing to stretch, argue, or even actively ignore orders issued by their superiors during Fall Gelb if they considered doing so the proper move to achieve the objective. On a small scale, we might be able to explain this by the way armored warfare was still being developed and those closer to the bottom, like Guderian or Rommel, were more willing to adjust their thinking to fit the new model and timeline of tank-based, maneuver warfare so much different from the trench-warfare of WWI. But we also see indications that at least some German officers in the Luftwaffe and the infantry also shared a similarly insubordinate or disrespectful mindset—even for orders coming directly from Hitler—and it has been offered that the German military actively benefited from and tried to instill an institutional acceptance of subordinates challenging their superior’s assumptions and ideas. (see: “Lost Victories, or the Limits of Operational Thinking”).
[1] Brian J. Hanley, “Case Yellow and the Modern Campaign Planner,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 53 (2009): 118
[2] Antony Beevor, The Second World War, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 80-81.
[3] Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, (Boston: De Capo Press, 2002), 89-90.
[4] Stephen Hyslop, “Blueprint for blitzkrieg: Hitler's chiefs harnessed lightning--then discovered the difficulty of making it strike twice." World War II, June 2007, 50+.
[5] Beevor, The Second World War, 87.
[6] Karl-Heinz Freiser, “Panzer Group Kleist and the Breakthrough in France, 1940,”, in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art ed. by Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, (Washington DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 175
[7] J.E and H.W. Kaufmann, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Campaigns: The Invasion and Defense of Western Europe, 1939-1940, (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1993), 221.
[8] Samuel Cook, “The German Breakthrough at Sedan,” Armor, September-October 2004, 9-10.
[9] Kenneth F. Mackenzie Jr, “Guderian: The Master Synchronizer”, Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 78, 35.
[10] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 102-104.
[11] Beevor, The Second World War, 90.
[12] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 107.
[13] Ibid., 109-110.
[14] Freiser, “Panzer Group Kleist…”, 175.
[15] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 109-110.
[16] Martin Samuels. “Erwin Rommel and German Military Doctrine, 1912-1940,” In War in History 24, no. 3 (2017): 318-323.
[17] David Fraser, Knight’s Cross A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, (Great Britain, HarperCollins, 1993), 175-176.
[18] Freiser, “Panzer Group Kleist…”, 176.
[19] Fraser, Knight’s Cross…, 179.
[20] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 112, 117
German military insubordination during the Battle of France
A very basic concept of military service is the duty to follow orders. When a superior issues a command, it is expected to be obeyed on the penalty of court martial or even harsher punishment in active combat zones. This concept, generally based on the fact that one’s superiors have more information about the situation and experience in handling it, has been part of the military ethos for many years. In popular conception, thanks to Prussia’s innovations in the realm of military organization, national stereotypes of German seriousness, and even the use of it as a defense in the Nuremburg Trials, the historical German military, particularly the Wehrmacht, is often presented as holding very strictly to this kind of military obedience. Often overlooked or ignored is how much individual commander’s resisted, skirted, or actively disobeyed orders and plans made by their superiors in order to do pursue the course of action they saw as best and were either excused or actively rewarded for such behavior. This phenomenon is perhaps most obvious during the second year of the war in Europe as the Wehrmacht marched on France.
Even on a strategic level before the invasion began this behavior is evident. As German and Allied forces faced each other with little movement during the winter of ’39-40, the German High Command, under Hitler’s constantly-hurrying direction, worked on designing an offensive to the west. Fall Gelb as the plan was called, ended up being a close copy of the Schlieffen Plan of the last war, with the German military attacking through then-neutral Belgium and Holland to attempt and defeat French and English forces without being forced to attack the famed Maginot Line. It was militarily conservative; the High Command assuming that the rolling, maneuver-heavy warfare employed months before to overwhelm Poland would not be practical against the militaries of the western allies.[1]
But the plan had a very loud detractor in the form of Erich von Manstein, who pushed his own variation on the idea that instead concentrated panzer forces for an attack through the Ardennes and envisioned a mobile breakout that could surround Allied forces in the Low Countries. This variation was dismissed by the General Staff, with one member even saying the idea was entirely without merit.[2] Despite this rejection, Manstein is said to have been so annoying and insistent in his advocacy of the idea and the usage of the German panzers in a concentrated manner that he was ‘promoted’ into the command of an Infantry Corps.[3] Despite Manstein’s fate and the General Staff’s rejection of his proposal, thanks to the misfortune of a German officer carrying information about early forms of Fall Gelb falling into Belgian hands and Hitler intervening to overrule his generals decision in favor of something he saw as more bold, when the German invasion of France came, Fall Gelb would much more closely resemble Manstein’s Plan than it would the original. The success of the German military despite the General Staff’s skepticism would become a point focused on and continually-emphasized by Hitler for the next five years to justify his decision-making and silence detractors.[4]
Things became even more chaotic after the German invasion began on May 10, and there seem to have been a small waterfall of creatively-interpreted or intentionally-ignored orders over the course of the next weeks as the German offensive pushed to the English Channel and then towards Dunkirk. Not even the very first days of the operation were immune. As German tanks in Panzergruppe Kleist, so-named after its commander, traveled through the small number of very thin roadways in the Ardennes that could support them, concern grew over the slow pace of advance, especially in the northern portion of their sector, and the potential of a French cavalry unit attacking from the south. To try and speed things along, orders were issued that the German panzer units under Kleist had absolute right-of-way along the available roads—their tanks marked by Ks stenciled-on to the front and back.[5] Despite these orders, presumably in the hopes of speeding the attack along, the III Army Corps, a non-mechanized infantry unit, attempted to travel along the same roadways, and the route through the Ardennes descended into a traffic-jammed mess during the first days of the attack.[6]
In the south, thanks to smaller problems and no small amount of luck, the resistance to orders was more helpful than damaging to the German cause. Heinz Guderian, who was in command of three of the German panzer divisions under Kleist, was ordered to shift one of his divisions south to defend against the possibility of a French attack from that direction. Likely driven by how difficult such a move would be to accomplish on the traffic-clogged roads in the Ardennes, Guderian did not do so.[7] Instead, without informing Kleist, Guderian ordered the closest panzer unit to change its advance slightly to bypass the French unit entirely. When an order was issued to the unit itself to detach a portion of its strength to its original route as a screening force, the division commander ignored the order entirely. As it happened, the French cavalry unit worrying the two disobedient German officers superiors was not organized for an attack and there was enough time to shift an infantry division into place. [8] Panzergruppe Kleist continued on towards their first-day objectives relatively free of the confusion present in the north because of two different commanders ignoring the orders issued to them.
This would not be the first of Kleist or others orders which Guderian or his subordinates would show little regard for. During the course of the German drive to the sea, it became almost commonplace. On May 12, as Guderian’s command prepared an attack across the Meuse river, the pair would butt heads over both where the crossing should take place and the best use of air support. Guderian’s suggestions of crossing points would be overruled by Kleist, as would previously-arranged plans Guderian had made with the Luftwaffe officer responsible for covering the attack. Guderian ignored Kleist’s recommendation in the former case and focused his attack on the crossing points he wanted.[9] In the latter case, despite the orders Kleist had issued to them, the Luftwaffe also attacked according to Guderian’s plan as well—something the panzer commander claimed to be pleasantly surprised by in his memoirs, but which the Luftwaffe officer attributed to Kleist’s order arriving too late to reach his flyers.[10] There is some disagreement as to whether this reason by the Luftwaffe officer is truthful, or was merely used as a convenient smokescreen to cover up his deciding in favor of Guderian’s plan over Kleist’s.[11]
By May 15, German forces had crossed the Meuse river and entered northeast France, threatening the flanks of the Allied units to their north in the Low Countries, the rear of the Maginot Line to their southeast, and Paris itself to their west. Kleist ordered his panzer divisions to stop temporarily so that the infantry following behind them could catch up and form a defensive line. Guderian heatedly contested the order, and Kleist allowed for a 24-hour postponement of the order, ostensibly so that “…sufficient space be acquired for the infantry corps that were following.”[12] A little more than a day later, the argument ignited again, this time passed-down from not only Kleist but also the German General Staff. Once again, it was contested by Guderian, who either resigned in protest[13] or was allowed to resign as opposed to being sacked for his refusal to follow the order to halt. Only the intervention of another officer who rejected Guderian’s resignation and offered a compromise where he was given permission to perform ‘reconnaissance in force’ settled the matter.[14] Guderian is said to have liberally interpreted what ‘reconnaissance' meant—with a number of sources outright saying it was an artificial excuse he used to continue attacking and advancing. Guderian, for his part, specifically noted in his memoirs that he established a forward headquarters to manage the reconnaissance explicitly to avoid the General Staff from intercepting his communications, and it is difficult to read the idea and tone of his words as anything but a way to avoid his superiors noticing the scale of his ‘reconnaissance in force’.[15]
Guderian was not the only German commander to dismiss or loosely interpret orders given him during the attack into France. To his north over the same period another German commander was doing much the same thing. Erwin Rommel, who had earned the beginnings of a reputation during the initial days of the attack for leading from the front—and consequently not being easily-contacted by superiors—had been ordered to stay at his seventh panzer division’s headquarters and oversee his panzers temporary halt and defense of Kleist’s northern flank. The German commanders in his wedge of the advance wanted to concentrate panzer and infantry forces for what they thought would be a difficult assault against a line of French fortification that the previous days panzer-led offensive had reached. [16]
After meeting with his own commander on the morning of May 16, the details of which are not immediately available, Rommel ordered an attack he was not supposed to order towards the French forts by his Panzer division, with the goal of reaching the French city of Avesnes-sur-Helpe on the other side of the defenses. He then left the office he had been ordered to stay in and rode-along with a regimental commander to observe and direct.[17] Only a few hours later, when the regiment’s panzers and support-troops had broken through the French defenses and reached the outskirts of the city where previously-made German plans said he was supposed to wait for new orders, Rommel instead continued on with the goal of capturing an intact bridge over the river Sambe miles to the west. He would be successful, though the mad dash forward would take him out of radio contact with his commanders as well as the rest of his own division, necessitating he drive back to retrieve them in an armored car. This, too, would be successful and would form the basis for Rommel’s subsequent fame in both the German and Allied militaries.[18]
Over the course of May 16th to the 17th, Rommel’s command would cover some 30 miles of French countryside, suffer a little under a hundred casualties, and capture more than 10,000 French soldiers, all while going against the orders given to him a number of times and contravening the operational plans that had been made for a combined assault on the French defenses. Rommel’s command would end up so spread-out over the French countryside that the French High Command, the German High Command, and even he did not have any accurate knowledge of where his forces were. The actions, even based as they were on disobeying orders, would earn Rommel his Iron Cross.[19]
Rommel and Guderian may have been recognizable names who held a dismissive or hostile attitude towards orders they disliked, but they do not seem to have been alone. At multiple times during the German advance, orders seem to have been taken more as suggestion than actual commands. In Guderian’s memoirs, one German commander is said to have moved his unit off of a bridgehead he was ordered to stay and defend in order to support an attack. A few days later, after a hard order to stop the advance on Dunkirk at the river Aa had been issued with Hitler’s backing, one of the more bizarre and debated moves of the war, Guderian tells of an infantry division commander who lead an attack across the river anyways. In the former instance, Guderian is somewhat neutral, and merely notes it’s good that the enemy didn’t take advantage, in the latter instance he notes actively congratulating the commander disobeying orders which had been issued by the High Command with Hitler’s explicit endorsement.[20]
At a wide level, if it is as dramatic as it would seem on first look, the willingness of German commanders to question orders and contest those they found to be imprudent or ineffective has some relevance to modern discussions about WWII. The myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’ as compared to more explicit Nazi organs has been seen since practically the closing days of the war itself, and the reasoning they were ‘just following orders’ persists among modern apologists for the Nazi regime and its appendages. Rommel himself, and Guderian to a much lesser extent and with much less justification, are often used as examples in both of these cases. But if those in the German military, especially Rommel, understood the value of challenging their superiors and disobeying orders when necessary, as they seem to have during Fall Gelb, then we must question why they followed or ignored those which murdered and brutalized the peoples they conquered. From this perspective we can only come to the conclusion that German commanders who might object to or disobey orders they saw as militarily wrong went along with or even approved of those made by the Nazi government which ordered war crimes and other moral wrongs—when they didn’t order those things to be done themselves because of what could only have been agreement with Nazi goals.
At the same time, we should be cautious from speculating too far based upon the above material alone. It is gathered from a limited pool of resources in a limited amount of time, and necessarily compromises on the depth and variety of instances examined. Additional research into the actions of less well-known commanders, attempting to find further verification of those related from memoirs, as well as consulting someone with either military experience in a large-scale operation or documenting such a thing all seem like they would be prudent. It is possible that the kind of disobedience and resistance to orders seen during the Battle of France is less remarkable from a military perspective than it seems from a civilian viewpoint, or was not as prevalent in reality as memoirs would have us believe. There have been criticisms of Panzer Leader in particular as something Guderian wrote to intentionally emphasize or exaggerate his own accomplishments, and it is possible Guderian intentionally presented himself as a young rogue with a tendency to contest his orders to further his own self-image. Similarly, Rommel has been the focus of much historical myth-making of his own, with a tendency, especially in the immediate after years of the war, to present him as a representative of the 'Clean Wehrmacht'. More extended research might better settle the question of how common disobeying, contesting, or ignoring orders was in the Wehrmacht during the invasion of France, upon which any hard conclusions depend.
What can be said with certainty is that the unprecedented forward momentum the Wehrmacht managed to attain during the attack across the Ardennes threw Allied defensive strategies into chaos and was instrumental in the Fall of France. We can only speculate how or if events may have changed had commanders like Guderian or Rommel actually obeyed all the orders given to them in the above or other instances during the Battle of France instead of taking their own initiative to pursue the objectives as they saw them and press the attack. More chaos during the march through the Ardennes, less successful or speedy crossings at Sedan, or less of the ground-covering, panic-inducing mad-dashes across northeast France that were carried out during the offensive even as the High Command or their superiors ordered stops all come to mind as items which might have influenced the final result of the battle and might have allowed for an Allied regroup and counter-attack (as De Gaulle famously attempted midway through the invasion only to be stymied by lack of organization, time, or support).
It would seem that a goodly number of German commanders, at least those whose actions are documented in readily-available sources, were willing to stretch, argue, or even actively ignore orders issued by their superiors during Fall Gelb if they considered doing so the proper move to achieve the objective. On a small scale, we might be able to explain this by the way armored warfare was still being developed and those closer to the bottom, like Guderian or Rommel, were more willing to adjust their thinking to fit the new model and timeline of tank-based, maneuver warfare so much different from the trench-warfare of WWI. But we also see indications that at least some German officers in the Luftwaffe and the infantry also shared a similarly insubordinate or disrespectful mindset—even for orders coming directly from Hitler—and it has been offered that the German military actively benefited from and tried to instill an institutional acceptance of subordinates challenging their superior’s assumptions and ideas. (see: “Lost Victories, or the Limits of Operational Thinking”).
[1] Brian J. Hanley, “Case Yellow and the Modern Campaign Planner,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 53 (2009): 118
[2] Antony Beevor, The Second World War, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 80-81.
[3] Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader, (Boston: De Capo Press, 2002), 89-90.
[4] Stephen Hyslop, “Blueprint for blitzkrieg: Hitler's chiefs harnessed lightning--then discovered the difficulty of making it strike twice." World War II, June 2007, 50+.
[5] Beevor, The Second World War, 87.
[6] Karl-Heinz Freiser, “Panzer Group Kleist and the Breakthrough in France, 1940,”, in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art ed. by Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, (Washington DC: Center of Military History, 2005), 175
[7] J.E and H.W. Kaufmann, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Campaigns: The Invasion and Defense of Western Europe, 1939-1940, (Conshohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1993), 221.
[8] Samuel Cook, “The German Breakthrough at Sedan,” Armor, September-October 2004, 9-10.
[9] Kenneth F. Mackenzie Jr, “Guderian: The Master Synchronizer”, Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 78, 35.
[10] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 102-104.
[11] Beevor, The Second World War, 90.
[12] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 107.
[13] Ibid., 109-110.
[14] Freiser, “Panzer Group Kleist…”, 175.
[15] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 109-110.
[16] Martin Samuels. “Erwin Rommel and German Military Doctrine, 1912-1940,” In War in History 24, no. 3 (2017): 318-323.
[17] David Fraser, Knight’s Cross A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, (Great Britain, HarperCollins, 1993), 175-176.
[18] Freiser, “Panzer Group Kleist…”, 176.
[19] Fraser, Knight’s Cross…, 179.
[20] Guderian, Panzer Leader, 112, 117
