Book Review of Nigel Cawthorne’s “steel Fist, Tank Warfare 1939 – 1945″
by Nigel Cawthorne displays his outstanding knowledge of military history to the full in Steel Fist, a book, which examines the impact of the German Panzer armies during the Second World War.
Cawthorne starts his book by exploring the determination of the German army to obtain a sizeable contingent of tanks despite being banned from doing so by the Versailles Treaty. The German military believed that American, British, and French tanks had played a significant role in winning the First World War for the Allies.
Even in the 1920s the Weimar Republic allowed its military to have links with the Soviet Union and Sweden in order to gain experience of using tanks. Junior officers such as Erwin Rommel, Heinz Guderian, and Erich von Manstein would use that experience to devastating affect in the course of the Second World War. Guderian in particular thought about tactics to make the most out of the new Panzers built under the auspices of the Nazis regime.
Cawthorne succinctly explains the factors that contributed to the stunning success of the German Panzers in France, the Low Countries, and France, which made Hitler the master of Central and Western Europe. The poor tactics, low morale, and in the Polish case poor equipment of Germany’s enemies gave the Panzers and the Luftwaffe the opportunity to gain quick fire victories.
The later chapters of this book examine how the Allies learnt to fight and then destroy the German Panzers, firstly in North Africa, and then most importantly in the Soviet Union. Cawthorne contends that the British developed the most effective tactics for defeating the Panzers, whilst the Americans and the Soviets simply built more tanks than the Germans could destroy. Allied industrial capacity, the bombing of German industrial sites, and a war on two major fronts all contributed to the crushing of the Third Reich. The analysis of these events and factors is presented in a highly readable form.
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