(ii) From an order issued by the German G.H.Q., similar to many others issued during the war:
“The Higher Command is continually hearing that men who are classified as ‘fit for garrison duty’ are of the opinion that there is no need for them to fight and that officers hesitate to demand that they should do so. This totally erroneous assumption must be definitely and rigorously stamped out. Men in the field who are classified as fit for garrison or labour duties, but who can carry a rifle, must fight.”
Such was the German tactical policy: masses of men rather than efficiency of weapons, quantity of flesh rather than quality of steel.
The policy of drafting into first-line formations men who could only just carry a rifle began in 1915. Since this date it was the constant complaint of the German regimental officer that he was obliged “to carry” in his unit an ever-increasing number of useless men—men who, for physical or moral reasons, were unfit to fight, who never intended to fight, and who never did fight.
The best men went to the machine-gun units and to the assault troops. In many cases the remainder of the infantry were of little fighting value, though many of these men might otherwise have been usefully employed in a war, which if not one of matériel, was at least one in which economic factors such as man-power played an important part.
By abiding by this policy of “cannon-fodder” the German Higher Command was able to look at an order of battle totalling some 250 divisions—on paper a terrific muscular force. Being pledged to a policy of employing masses of men for fighting, the Germans were not in a position to find labour for the construction of additional weapons such as tanks. It now seems clear that this policy, at least as far as tanks were concerned, was regretted before the end of the war, as the following extracts and quotations will show:
In July 1918 General Ludendorff wrote: “In all the open-warfare questions in the course of their great defensive between the Marne and the Vesle, the French were only able to obtain one initial tactical success due to surprise, namely, that of July 18, 1918. It is to the tanks that the enemy owes his success.” A similar remark was made in an order of the LIst Corps on July 23, 1918: “As soon as the tanks are destroyed the whole attack fails.”
The tank victory at the battle of Amiens brought forth a rich crop of appreciative comments from the Germans. Ludendorff on August 11 wrote:
“Staff officers sent from G.H.Q. report that the reasons for the defeat of the Second Army are as follows: ‘The fact that the troops were surprised by the massed attack of tanks, and lost their heads when the tanks suddenly appeared behind them, having broken through under cover of natural and artificial fog ... the fact that the artillery allotted to reserve infantry units ... was wholly insufficient to establish fresh resistance ... against the enemy who had broken through and against his tanks.’”