The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

the elite, crack units the rest of the world seemed to think they were. In the
entire army, there were only ten panzer and six fully mechanized divisions.
These mere sixteen divisions were the modern, fully equipped units of the
German army. The other 141 were really rather old-fashioned, lacking
mechanization and dependent on horses, carts and the oldest means of
transport in the world – the soldier’s two feet he stood on – to get from A to
B. In the spearhead that would thrust through the Ardennes, there were only
ten such modernized divisions: in Panzer Group Kleist, Guderian had three
panzer divisions, General Reinhardt’s corps two panzer and one
mechanized (i.e. mainly lorried infantry), while von Wietersheim’s corps
had two mechanized divisions. Since there were not enough roads through
the Ardennes for all three corps to advance at once, Panzer Corps von
Wietersheim would be following behind the spearhead in any case. The
remaining two panzer divisions in Army Group A were those of Panzer
Corps Hoth, which included Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division.
And yes, they were modern and well equipped, but the majority of their
panzers were hardly the latest in cutting-edge tank design. Only Panzer Mks
III and IV had decent-sized guns and there were only 627 of them. The
remaining 1,812 were Mk Is, which had machine guns only, Mk IIs, which
had a rather feeble 20 mm gun, and Czech 35s and 38s, which also had
below-par firepower. In contrast, the Allies could call on some 4,204 tanks,
almost double the amount in the German army. Of these, a significant
number were bigger, better armed and better armoured than anything the
Germans had.
Of the rest of the German army, only a quarter were active duty troops
that could be used in the first wave of the offensive – that is, regular
peacetime units reinforced with reservists, such as Siegfried Knappe’s 87th
Division. The second wave consisted of mostly younger fully trained
reservists. After that were those reservists who had only been cursorily
trained. Then there were the Landwehr units – territorials – who were
mostly older, veterans of the Great War and barely trained at all since 1918.
This meant that only half of all German soldiers had had more than a
few weeks’ training, while more than a quarter were over forty. Nazi
propaganda had kept this rather startling reality close to its chest.
Consequently, just ten German panzer and mechanized divisions –
around 140,000 men – were being expected to do the lion’s share of the
main thrust, and drive a wedge through around 2.5 million French and