The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 2

armaments primarily for the purpose of plugging breaches and conserving a continuous

front, although, if the opportunity arose, they could also be put onto the offensive. Shortly

after Adolf Hitler took over power in Germany in 1933, Sir Winston Churchill is said to have

remarked: Thank God for the French Army .

The Morrow of Defeat.

The re-arming and expansion of the German Army was done in relative secrecy. The treaty of Versailles signed on 28 th June 1919 forced Germany to disarm, to make territorial

concessions – among them the Rhineland that was occupied until 1930 and then declared

demilitarised − and to pay reparations that brought the German economy to its knees in the

following years. Years of anarchy and turmoil reduced the hope of a democracy – the

Weimar Republic − to a pipe dream. Extreme political views, on the left as well as on the

right, found their audiences. The late 1920s and 30s saw the rise of the

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) –

abbreviated NSDAP. As its party leader, Adolf Hitler turned adequate electoral support,

augmented by deception and anti-Semitism and anti-Marxism slogans, into absolute

governing power.

The military restrictions imposed by the treaty of Versailles were meant to strip Germany

of the capability ever to wage war again. The post war German armed forces – the

Reichswehr – were allowed to have no more than 100,000 men, the equivalent of roughly

ten divisions. Given the increasing importance of air power, Germany was forbidden to

establish an air force. Naval strength was reduced to a limited number of battleships,

cruisers, destroyers, and torpedo boats. Submarines – one of the most potent weapon

systems in World War I against the British – were forbidden altogether.

In violation of the treaty of Versailles (and the Locarno Treaties signed in 1925), the German Army entered the Rhineland on 7 th March 1936. The aggressiveness of that move

by Adolf Hitler followed a range of diplomatic manoeuvres by the Allied powers, but they only

reinforced Hitler’s view that such violations of international law would remain unpunished.

His resolve to impose his Fascist view on other countries led to a rapid expansion of Army

divisions – from 39 in 1937 to 98 in 1939 for the invasion of Poland.

Whereas the French were bound by the trauma of Verdun and fixated on static warfare

by means of fortifications – a recipe that had indeed brought French victory, although at a

terrible price − the German defeat in 1918 revived a concept of warfare that had already emerged in the trenches of World War I, Bewegungskrieg (war of manoeuvre). 2 This concept

focussed on the speed and flexibility of units’ manoeuvrability, to make the enemy react to

2 I am not using the word Blitzkrieg (Lightning warfare), as it was a concept that emerged and was widely used in the later years of World War II.

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