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maneuver orders of battle. Such exercises highlighted the Reichswehr’s limited achievements in motorization. They also offered opportunities to consider problems as they arose—and foreign observers noted the Germans seemed well able to correct mistakes involving motor vehicles. In 1924, the motor troops were made responsible for monitoring developments in tank war and preparing appropriate training manuals.
    Motorization received a further institutional boost when, in 1926, Colonel Alfred von Vollard- Bockelberg took over as branch Inspector General. He expanded and transformed the branch officers’ course from a focus on technical details of maintenance to a program incorporating, and then emphasizing, tactical studies. It would eventually become the Armored Forces School. In 1929, an improvised motorized “reconnaissance and security battalion,” drawn primarily from the 6th Motor Battalion, took the field for maneuvers. In 1930, the 3rd Motor Battalion was completely reorganized as a fighting formation, including mock-up tanks and antitank guns as well as the more orthodox mix of trucks, cars, and motorcycles. By then a new armored personnel carrier was coming on line, based on a four-wheel civilian truck, with a cupola-mounted machine gun enabling it to double as an armored car. And Bockelberg gave the branch a new name. Henceforth it was titled Motorized Combat Troops.

IV
    IN JANUARY 1918, as part of the preparation for the great offensive, Ludendorff ’s headquarters issued the Guide for the Employment of Armored Vehicle Assault Units . It described their main mission as supporting the infantry by destroying obstacles, neutralizing fire bases and machine-gun positions, and defeating counterattacks. Because tanks by themselves could not hold ground, the document emphasized the closest possible cooperation with infantry. Tank crews were expected to participate directly in the fighting, either by dismounting and acting as assault troops, or by setting up machine-gun positions to help consolidate gains. In fact the tanks and infantry had, for practical purposes, no opportunity to train together—a problem exacerbated by the continued assignment of tank units to the motor transport service. In action, the tanks’ tendency to seek open ground and easy going clashed fundamentally with the infantry’s doctrine of seeking vulnerable spots. Nothing happened to change the infantry’s collective mind that tanks were most effective against inexperienced or demoralized opponents.
    The widespread and successful Allied use of tanks in the war’s final months made a few believers. In the first months after the armistice, before the Republic’s military structure was finally determined, critics suggested the German army had seriously underestimated the tanks’ value. After Versailles made the question moot in practical terms, theoretical interest continued.
    Much of this was conventional, repeating wartime arguments that tanks were most effective in creating confusion and panic, in the pattern of antiquity’s war elephants. Positive theory on the use of tanks closely followed contemporary French concepts in projecting a first wave of heavy tanks acting more or less independently, followed by a second wave of lighter vehicles maintaining close contact with the infantry. But in contrast to the French, who saw tanks as the backbone of an attack, the Reichswehr’s infantry training manual of 1921 warned against the infantry laming its offensive spirit by becoming too dependent on armor.
    These positions were in good part shaped by the tanks’ existing technical limitations. In particular they were considered too slow and too unreliable to play a central role in the fast-paced offensive operations central to Reichswehr tactics. At the same time, German military thinkers and writers, Seeckt included, recognized that even with their current shortcomings, tanks had a future. The trailblazer here was Ernst Volckheim. He had been