Tanks Break Through!

Contents

Panzerjäger ("armor-hunters" or "tank-hunters") were an anti-tank division that operated anti-tank artillery and made exclusive use of tank destroyers, also named Panzerjäger. Berndt's book about his time with the Panzerjäger is divided into chapters: The Company; A cold chapter [The brutal winter 1939-40]; Five weeks at the Westwall; It begins!; 5:35 am; Bunker cannons on the Albert Canal; Battle for the Gette; Breaking through the Dyle.(The Dyle Plan or D Plan was the failed plan of the French Army to defeat a German invasion through Belgium. The Dyle river is an 86 km long river from Houtain-le-Val through Flemish Brabant and Antwerp and the thwarted objective was to halt the German army along the line of the river.); From Waterloo to Tournai; The battle for the Scheldt and Lys; The Ypres Battering Ram; Victory in Flanders; Gone with the Wind [The Allied evacuation at Dunkirk]; March to the Somme; Storm troops on the Weygand Line; The March on Paris; Panzer leap across the Marne and the Seine; We surround the Maginot Line; Through Burgundy to the Swiss border; Through Lyon to the Alps; Mountain climb before Grenoble; Return home.

Style

Unlike sober military writers, for example Ernst Jünger and his Storm of Steel, with dour descriptions of battle, Berndt has a sense of humor. Here is his account of an enemy attack on his company at the Dyle: “'Thunder and lightning! They’ve got the third company by the throat,' exclaims the adjutant. I’m again at our observation post. Two cannons are shooting simultaneously, their shots fifty meters apart. The first shot lands 10 meters from our leftmost gun, which is under a group of trees. The next shot 10 meters to the left, another 10 meters to the right, the fourth 10 meters behind. It’s like knife-throwing in the circus. Our gun is framed in. A second round follows, identical to the first. Our gun crew has dug in. They can’t see anything. The enemy shoots into a ravine 100 meters behind our gun. Our ammunition trucks are there. The enemy could hit the jackpot. They don’t. They come uncomfortably close. Our entire house, our observation post, is shaken to the foundation. Enemy fire resumes. Will they hit us again? Out of the house; no, they’re shooting at our gun, without results. What a marvel."
At other times Berndt’s description of devastation is poignant, such as a scene he encountered in Ath, a Flemish town: "Seven French tanks, Renaults, stood near the highway. A few were burned up. The charred bodies of the crews hung weirdly from the side openings, as though the dead French were trying to get out. In a side street we found a half-burned wedding coach. A top hat lay on the seat, a white glove on the floor. A piece of bridal veil was caught in the right hand door, along with blood. What happened here? What drama played out?"
Of course, being forced to live off the French countryside has its compensations: "Our supplies can’t keep up with us, yet we live quite well off the land. Water was polluted, water pipes destroyed, the few wells almost dry. The question, what do we drink? is important. Fate leads us past the wine and champagne town Chablis, as well as Burgundy, Beaune, Pommard, the most famous places for red burgundy wine. Castles and villages have been abandoned by their inhabitants; but the company lives well, especially in the wine cellars. It’s true we have an occasional case of drunkenness. The honor of the German soldier is at stake when he stands before a bottle of 1831 St Emilion. He bows artfully to the high altar and slurps the delicious contents. As Goethe wrote in Faust, 'A genuine German man may not want to suffer the French, but he gladly drinks their wine.'”

Propaganda Content

Berndt’s version of events, while professional and well informed, can hardly be taken at face value. Berndt was an ardent Nazi, who murdered a downed, captured allied pilot on D-Day in the open street. He occasionally distorts the text for propaganda purposes. For example, Berndt insists repeatedly that British troops looted and plundered. When they clear out of one town, according to Berndt, they have trashed the place in a manner so deplorable that words cannot describe the awful mess they leave behind. This assertion is virtually impossible to believe. No English, Dutch, Belgian or French history of the war substantiates Berndt’s blatantly false claims. Indeed, throughout the book Berndt never misses an opportunity to denigrate the British. French soldiers come off no better in Berndt’s narrative. He portrays them as thieving, cowardly, willing to hide behind women and children to save their own skins. He describes the culmination of an attack near Paris: "Who told the civilian refugees to join fleeing soldiers? Or were they forced? Did French soldiers on the run want to hide behind women and children? Were they counting on German gallantry, proverbial German sentimentality? According to the survivors, the answer is yes, they were. This bloodbath of women, the elderly, children, did not spare the people who provoked it. We would have had to shoot even if we had known what unseemly game was being played by irresponsible cowards with the lives of their fellow citizens and neighbors."

Berndt describes apparent methamphetamine use

"Our drivers’ accomplishments were manifold. Often they sat at the steering wheel for 36 hours in an armored half-track, in heat reaching 50° C [122° F]," Berndt comments. The Third Reich tolerated narcotics: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamine, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops' resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940. Red, white and blue tubes of methamphetamine pills, sold under the trade name Pervitin, caught the attention of Otto Friedrich Ranke, a doctor at the Academy of Military Medicine in Berlin, who oversaw the logistics of ferrying millions of pills to troops. Hopped-up soldiers sprinted tirelessly through the Ardennes at the onset of war in 1940, a performance that left Winston Churchill “dumbfounded,” as he wrote in his memoirs. Methamphetamine use by German Tank (Panzer) crews led to Pervitin being known as Panzerschokolade ("Tank-Chocolates"). A German general bragged that his men had stayed awake for 17 straight days with Pervitin.

Author

Alfred-Ingemar Berndt (born 22 April 1905 in Bromberg (West Prussia); died 28 March 1945 at Veszprém, Hungary) was a German journalist, writer and close collaborator of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Berndt was first head of the Propaganda Ministry Offices in Paris, and is regarded as propagandistic creator of the "Desert Fox" myth attached to the German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.