Panzerkampfwagen II

The Panzer II was never meant to matter. It was ordered in 1935 as a stopgap — something to fill the new Panzer divisions and train their crews while the tanks Germany actually wanted, the Panzer III and Panzer IV, were still being argued over and tooled up. It was small, cheap and quick to build, and nobody expected it to fight a war.

It fought two. By the time the Panzer III and IV existed in useful numbers, the Panzer II had already been the most numerous tank in the divisions that overran Poland and France — an interim design that became, more or less by accident, the machine on which the blitzkrieg rode.

There was not much to it: 8.9 tonnes, three men, and a Maybach HL62 six-cylinder petrol engine giving 140 PS — enough for 39.5 km/h on a road and 190 km before it needed fuel. Its armour ran from 5 to 15 mm: proof against rifle fire and shell splinters, and against very little else.

Its gun was a 2 cm KwK 30 L/55 — an autocannon, in effect, with 180 rounds aboard and a coaxial MG 34 beside it. Against infantry, trucks, guns and other light tanks it was entirely adequate. Against anything with real armour it was a noise-maker. This was the machine that made up the largest single part of the force that conquered Western Europe.

The arithmetic of May 1940 is the most instructive fact about the German victory in the West. The Wehrmacht went into France and the Low Countries with roughly 2,439 tanks. Of those, 955 were Panzer IIs — the single most numerous type — and another 523 were the even feebler Panzer I, which had no cannon at all, only machine guns.

So more than half the panzer force that destroyed the French army in six weeks was made up of light tanks. The good ones — Panzer III and Panzer IV together — numbered just 627, barely a quarter of the total. And the French had more tanks than the Germans, many of them, like the Char B1 bis and the SOMUA S35, individually far better than anything in a Panzer division.

The Panzer II is therefore the standing refutation of the idea that the blitzkrieg was won by superior machines. It was not. It was won by method: by concentrating the tanks into divisions instead of parcelling them out along the infantry front; by putting a radio in every tank, so a formation could be handled like a hand rather than swung like a fist; by giving the commander nothing to do but command; and by tying the whole thing to aircraft and motorised infantry that moved at the same speed.

The French tanks that were better on paper fought as individuals — often with the commander loading and firing his own gun — spread thin along a front instead of massed at a point. A Panzer II could not have beaten a Char B1 in a straight fight, and it never had to. It arrived where the enemy wasn’t, in company with fifty others, with someone on the radio already telling it where to go next.

It went east in June 1941 still in numbers, and there the bargain finally came due. Against the T-34 and the KV-1, a 20 mm gun and 15 mm of armour were not a compromise — they were an irrelevance. The Panzer II could still scout, screen and shoot at infantry, and on a battlefield containing Soviet medium armour that was the end of its usefulness.

It had already been overtaken at home: the Panzer III and IV supplanted it as the divisions’ backbone through 1940–41, and by the end of 1942 it had largely been withdrawn from front-line service. Some soldiered on with the Afrika Korps and in reconnaissance units, but as a fighting tank its war was over after three years — the same three years in which it had helped conquer most of a continent.

And then it became useful all over again — not as a tank, but as a chassis. A hull that could not carry enough armour to survive could perfectly well carry a gun too big for its own turret, and German industry, which never threw anything away, put it to work. The Marder II mounted a 7.5 cm PaK 40 anti-tank gun behind an open shield: 576 were built between June 1942 and June 1943, plus 75 tanks converted.

The Wespe did the same with a 10.5 cm field howitzer — 676 built by FAMO between February 1943 and June 1944 — and turned out to be one of the finest self-propelled artillery pieces of the war. A late reconnaissance version, the Luchs, added another 100. Counted together, close to 1,300 fighting vehicles were built on the Panzer II’s chassis after it had stopped being a tank — against the 1,856 built as tanks in the first place.

The Panzer II is the least glamorous tank in the German inventory and one of the most historically important, precisely because it was so ordinary. It was obsolescent when the war began, everyone involved knew it, and it conquered Poland, the Low Countries and France anyway — because in 1940 what mattered was not the tank, but what the tank was part of.

The Panzer II therefore measures the weight of doctrine against the weight of armour. The same vehicle that formed the largest part of the force which destroyed the French army in six weeks was obsolete within eighteen months of meeting the T-34, and it had changed very little in between: what changed was the enemy, and whether the German method still had an answer for him. Its 20 mm gun was an adequate weapon in 1940 and an irrelevance in 1941, without a single modification.

• Peter Chamberlain & Hilary L. Doyle, Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Panzer Tracts No. 2: Panzerkampfwagen II.
• Bryan Perrett, German Light Panzers 1932–42 (Osprey, New Vanguard).