PzBfw III Ausf. E / Panzerbefehlswagen

Ziegler goes to Town

When the Germans discover those Poles aren't as useless as expected

Adolf Hitler was not a man who lied about his intentions. In Mein Kampf, written in 1925, he was already very clear: he wanted to take the lands to the east of Germany, exterminate the "sub-humans" living there, and move in his Chosen People: the beautiful, blue-eyed aryan Germans. The slavic, animal-like creatures currently living there did not have a right to exist, and neither did their countries. Now, in our twenty-first century, safe European homes, my words may seem rather crude or sarcastic, so let me put it in his: "Have no pity and act with brutality. The stronger man is right. Genghis Khan slaughtered millions of women and children with a happy heart. History sees him only as the founder of a strong country. I do not care what weak European people will say about me." I have no idea what the inside of the guy's head felt like, and I'd rather not be there, but when dictators say they're going to do horrible things, you better take them seriously. (Lenin, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, Putin... maybe add Trump.)

When German tanks crossed the Polish border nine days later, the killing of civilians started right away - as Hitler had planned. What did not go according to plan, was his army's performance. The Wehrmacht of 1939 looked formidable in the Wochenschau newsreels. In reality, it was an organisation that had expanded from 100,000 men to over a million in six years, held together by improvisation and borrowed time. Two thirds of its divisions marched on foot. Its logistics ran on horses - over 300,000 of them. Fuel shortages were chronic. Radio communication between units was unreliable. The armoured spearhead that would later Blitzkrieg into France, was built largely around VW Golf-sized training tanks with tiny guns. Besides, the Polish army was not the rabble that German propaganda said it was. It was outnumbered and caught in an impossible strategic position: its mobilisation incomplete, a frontline too long, and their western allies were hiding behind the Maginot Line. But the Poles fought. On the first day of the war, a single Polish cavalry brigade equipped with antitank guns (and NOT charging on horses!) stopped Panzer-Regiment 35 at Mokra, destroying 14 tanks and killing 15 men. Three weeks later, encircled Polish forces launched a major counterattack across the Bzura river that briefly threatened to unravel the entire German southern flank. Poland lost because it was alone, not because Germany was unstoppable. Nowhere was the gap between German ambition and German capability more visible than in a western suburb of Warsaw called Ochota, on the morning of 9 September 1939 - as we will see.

Before the Storm

The order of the day had ended with three words: "Auf nach Warschau!" Nobody had slept much. Feldwebel Ziegler had been with Panzer-Regiment 35 long enough to know that orders ending with exclamation marks usually meant someone upstairs had made a decision, usually without looking at a map. He didn't say this out loud. You didn't, not the night before attacking a large city.

It was still dark when the engines started. The regiment had formed up along the road that led from Rawa to Warsaw, in the suburb of Ochota. Tank behind tank, tightly closed together. Behind them, riflemen and engineers waited for the order to attack. The artillery had been silent for hours. You could hear the soft wind blowing, even the birds still slept. Well, they would be awake very soon. "Unaccustomedly quiet", Schäufler, the signals officer in the brigade command vehicle two hundred meters back, would write in his diary that night. "Not a rifle round was fired. The only thing that stirred was an occasional reconnaissance aircraft in the clear skies."

Feldwebel Ziegler was not in his usual tank. This one was a command vehicle, built on a Panzer III chassis, one of the handful in the regiment. It belonged to Hauptmann Mast, who had become quite ill. These things happened. He, as Stabs-Feldwebel, inherited the vehicle - still somewhat smelly from Mast's incident. While it looked like a real tank, it had an extra antenna and a fake gun instead of the usual 3,7 cm KwK 36. This made him slightly nervous; most of his comrades rode Panzer I's and II's - small, weak, but at least they could shoot. Now, Ziegler was the regiment's ears and voice in this part of Ochota, as long as the antenna was intact. Suddenly, Leutnant Esser's voice came over the radio, calm and professional. Two platoons, his and Ziegler's, would push up ulica Grójecka, the main road, cross the railway line and push into the city center. There, they would inform frightened but probably obstinate Polish officials that their city now belonged to the Reich - and that resistance would have consequences.

Grójecka

At 0700 hours, the 1st Battalion moved out.

The first houses of Warsaw came up fast. Machine guns were barking, hand grenades exploding with a dull thud, artillery rounds slinging rocks against the armor. One radio message after another passed through the command vehicle - often confused, all of them urgent. Ziegler kept his eyes on the road ahead - ulica Grójecka, straight and long, leading into the heart of Ochota. It did not stay straight for long. The barricade appeared where Grójecka met Opaczewska - turned-over streetcars, furniture trucks, rubble, whatever the inhabitants had been able to drag into the road during the night. From beyond the roadblock, from the four-story apartment buildings on both sides, fire of all sorts came at the tanks. From basement openings, from rooftop ventilation shafts, from windows. The Poles were everywhere, but nowhere to be seen.

Esser's platoon pushed through the barricade. Ziegler reported to HQ and followed. Beyond, the road opened slightly. Gardens on the left. A market building on the right. They were perhaps four hundred meters inside the city now, moving toward the railway line, when the gun fired. It came from a garden on the left - approximately where Grójecka meets Nieborowska, though Ziegler had no way of knowing the street name at that moment. A 75mm field gun, well dug in, excellently camouflaged. The first round hit one of the Panzer I's to Ziegler's left. The second hit another. Later, he would describe it like this: "They were just gone. One moment they were there, the next there was fire where they had been. You don't process it, not then. You just look for the gun." He had found it by then - a muzzle flash in a garden to the left, maybe two hundred meters away. He traversed the turret toward it. Then he remembered: the thing in his turret was not a gun, it just looked like one. Whatever that Polish crew was doing in their garden, they were not going to be troubled by Feldwebel Ziegler today.

The gun found him next. A round struck the Befehlswagen - it didn't penetrate, but hit enough to send everything loose inside the vehicle flying. The sound of the hit felt like being hit with a hammer, and Ziegler was out for a second.

When he came to, he saw Esser's Panzer II pushing on toward the railway line. Then it stopped. Polish defensive fire had knocked out his antenna, and Ziegler could no longer reach him. Esser was still moving, still fighting, but he could no longer lead. Ziegler could. He was the senior NCO. Mast was sick, Esser was cut off. Someone had to take charge of whatever was left and push toward the objective, and that someone, again, was him. He kicked his driver (the usual signal to get moving), ordered the remaining vehicles to follow and pushed north, up Grójecka, toward the railway line. He was in a Befehlspanzer with a headache, a fake gun and a crew of three, trying to remember what the objective was. He still pushed on.

Witaj w dżungli

Nobody had told them Warsaw would look like this. The maps - hastily printed, flown in by aircraft the night before - showed streets and blocks. But the map is not the territory. They did not show the barricades on every corner, the antitank guns in every garden, the snipers in every window. They did not show a city of a million people who had decided, collectively, that they were not going to make this easy. What was left of two platoons pushed through the railway line and into the streets beyond. The city changed character here. Wider roads, bigger buildings, less cover. The Dworzec Główny, Warsaw's main station, was somewhere ahead on the Aleje Jerozolimskie. They could see it. And they nearly made it. "All by himself in the middle of the capital," Eberbach would write later, with the economy of a man describing something he still found remarkable, "he eventually had to pull back."

Two kilometers back, Schäufler at headquarters followed the attack by radio: "Angriff kommt ins Stocken." "Zahlmäßig überlegener Feind." "Panzer durch Minen und PAK verloren." "Artillerie dringend benötigt!" The artillery did not come. The air support did not come. Two hours after the attack started, the division ordered them to return to base. Ziegler turned around and drove back through everything he had already survived once.

Conclusion

Ziegler made it back. Most of his regiment did too - on foot, in damaged vehicles, some pulled out by recovery crews under fire. Of the 91 tanks that returned to the line of departure that afternoon, only 57 were still fully combat operational. Thirty burnt-out wrecks still lined Grójecka from the outskirts to the main station when Hitler held his victory parade through Warsaw on 6 October. The organisers forgot to invite the 4th Panzer Division. Perhaps understandably; Panzer-Regiment 35 had lost 64 dead, 58 wounded, and 45 tanks beyond repair. The German army had won. It had also learned something uncomfortable: it was not the war machine it thought it was. Tanks without infantry died in cities. Training tanks could not fight field artillery. Communications broke down at the worst moments. Poland had been beaten not because Germany was unstoppable, but because Poland was alone.

OKH drew the right conclusions over the winter. Light Divisions became proper Panzer divisions. Infantry and tanks learned to work together. The inadequate 3,7 cm gun was scheduled for replacement. And Fall Gelb - the attack on France in May 1940 - was designed to avoid exactly the kind of fighting that had broken PR 35 in Ochota. The Ardennes thrust went around defended positions, not through them. It worked. France fell in six weeks. The myth of the unstoppable German war machine was born. But the Blitzkrieg that the world came to fear was not a German invention. It was a German improvisation, refined by failure, and validated by an opponent who cooperated by collapsing.

Feldwebel Ziegler's name does not appear in any victory parade. We don't know if he survived the war - the odds for a tank NCO in PR 35 were not good. Most of the regiment's surviving veterans went down with the Goya in the Baltic in April 1945. Only seven survived.

What we can say is that on the morning of 9 September 1939, he did his job. He took command when his officers couldn't. He pushed toward an objective in a vehicle with no working gun. He nearly reached Warsaw's main station, alone, in a city of a million people who were trying to kill him. And then he turned around and drove back. That is not the Blitzkrieg of the newsreels. That is what it actually looked like.

A Note on Sources

The account of Feldwebel Ziegler is based on the regimental history of Panzer-Regiment 35, as recorded by Oberst Heinrich Eberbach and compiled by Hans Schäufler in Knight's Cross Panzers (Stackpole, 2010). Eberbach's account is a primary source - he commanded the regiment and was present on 8 and 9 September 1939.

Several elements of this story are reconstructions or logical inferences, and should be read as such:

Bibliography

  1. Eberbach, H. / Schäufler, H. - Knight's Cross Panzers: The Story of Panzer Regiment 35, Stackpole Military History Series, 2010
  2. Tomaszewski, T. - Byłem szefem Sztabu Obrony Warszawy w 1939 roku, Orbis, London, 1961
  3. Kenig, M. - Obrona Warszawy. Wrzesień 1939 (extract)
  4. Wikipedia - Defense of Ochota and Wola (1939)

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