Germany, Ukraine and Ways of Warfare: The Hand of History

The latest unedifying feature of the war in Ukraine has been the tussle over the dispatch of further armaments by Western allies. In recent weeks, as Russia continued its build-up of troops on the eastern front in anticipation of launching an anniversary assault later this month, Ukraine’s European and US allies looked to be deadlocked over the provision of tanks.

In mid-January, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy was reported to be seeking upwards of 300 tanks, not only to defend against a renewed Russian invasion but also to go on the offensive to reclaim the territory in the east and south that Russia is stubbornly holding. To an extent the request for tanks is a compromise: the war in Ukraine has hardly been one of mobility and manoeuvre with the grinding to a halt of the Russian fighting columns in the initial months of the war well remembered as both surprising but also crucial to Ukraine’s successful first move resistance.

Both armchair and in-theatre generals have been clear that dominant airpower offers Ukraine the most effective route to liberation and for that reason Russia made it clear early in the conflict that NATO air support, either directly or indirectly, would be an additional, and possibly nuclear, casus belli. The March 2022 plan for Poland to give Ukraine 28 of its Soviet-made MIG-29 aircraft, provided that the US backfilled Poland with newer fighters, was quashed by the Pentagon almost as soon as it hit the airwaves. The armoured tank, affording protection, significant firepower and mobility, has emerged, therefore, as the second option to alter the military realities on the ground and, for now at least, Russia has not leveraged upwards the risk for NATO in sending a supply to Ukraine.

British advance

Not for the first time in this war Britain was quick with its offer of around 14 Challenger 2 tanks, though it was notable that there are some within the Army establishment who are nervous at the depletion of Britain’s stock. The comments by the Chief of the General Staff (the Head of the Army), Sir Patrick Sanders, that sending resource to Ukraine would render Britain’s army temporarily weaker was at one level a statement of fact and at another a lexical howitzer across the Defence Secretary’s desk over army funding.

Other European countries quickly followed Britain’s lead: Finland and Poland committed over a dozen of their Leopard 2 tanks while France agreed to send a cohort of armoured vehicles.  The offer of the Polish tanks, though, quickly ran into the quagmire of European politics and more particularly the leaden hand of 20th century history. The Leopard 2 is German-made and thus delivery of the Polish tanks would require Germany’s re-export agreement about which the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was chary to the point of indecision.  Part of his reluctance undoubtedly stemmed from Scholz’s own history in Germany’s Social Democratic Party in which he minted his political star in the early 1980 as the Deputy Leader of the party’s youth wing, the Young Socialists; deeply committed to a pacifist agenda, Scholz was known to have been the author of a series of anti-NATO articles and tracts on behalf of the Young Socialists.

Political friend and foe would likely have forgiven Scholz, interpreting his then views as youthful political ‘naivety’ and thus the suspicion must be that his personal political journey was less the source of his indecision than the shadow of 20th century German history: the export approval of German tanks would have prompted memory of the Second World War. It was not, though, simply the fact of Nazi Germany’s responsibility for this war but rather that it would revive images of German tanks rolling across the plains of Europe.  It was not, for example, lost on Russian propagandists that Scholz’s indecision played out in late January, in the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad, 2 February 1943, one of the bloodiest single battle engagements of the World War. The image of the German or German-made tanks moving across Europe, even if to the service of a country the West remains united on as the violated party in the conflict, lay in the identified national practice of war. 

Warfare and national identity

The brutality of the 1940s German Blitzkrieg (essentially surprise and overwhelming force concentration through armoured columns accompanied by air superiority) and its intent of establishing superiority at the opponent’s schwerpunkt (centre of gravity) was driven by the armoured tank: Poland, (the then) Czechoslovakia and France are but three European countries which fell victim to what become identified as the German national practice of warfare.

An identified way of warfare, how a nation routinely fights its wars and battles, can define national identity, can frame national characteristics and most significantly can become national memory for all countries. Scholz only managed to overcome his reluctance to agree the Polish tanks, and also to send a German Company of Leopard 2s, by seeking American political and military cover through President Biden’s commitment of a cache of 31 M1 Abrams tanks. US participation on a greater size and scale was considered to ameliorate the prominence of the German commitment to the tank transfer.

Several weeks on from the request, President Zelenskyy secured his tanks, albeit not the number he argued is required. Not for the first time in this 21st century European war, the episode demonstrated the shaping legacy of history: here the power and reach of an identified, and crucially remembered, 20th century German national way of warfare had first to be addressed before allied support to Ukraine could continue to flow.    

Professor McLay’s inaugural lecture, Amphibious Adventures: 400 Years of British Warfare, takes place on Wednesday 15 February, 5.30pm at the University of Derby’s Kedleston Road site.

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