Blitzkrieg

From Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium

Blitzkrieg, German for "lightning war", principally refers to the combined arms tactics used by the German military in the Polish campaign of 1939, the campaign into France and the Low Countries in 1940, and the early phases of the attack on the Soviet Union. In common usage, it has become a generic term for any fast-moving military operation using apparently high technology. The term was not widely used in German literature, and actually became popularized by an article in the American Time magazine.^[1]

In the specific usage, it referred to the action of relatively small groups of tanks, vehicle-carried infantry, some mobile artillery, and aircraft in close air support. Its execution also depended on extensive radio communications from headquarters to advancing units, although communications were fairly primitive by modern standards. Some of the limitations included the lack of tight coordination and compatible communications between ground and air forces.

Much of the German military of the time moved on foot, or by horse-drawn transit. The role of the air-armor teams was to break holes in the enemy lines, and move quickly into the rear areas, disrupting command, communications, and logistics. Conventional military would hold the flanks of the breakthroughs.

In many respects, the individual techniques were not new, but had not been put together in a coherent whole. In the First World War, for example, there were two striking examples of the use of high technology to break through defense lines, but the high command involved had not planned to rush mobile forces through the gap and cause chaos in the rear. These two examples were the first large-scale use of chemical weapons, by the Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres (22nd April to 25 May 1915), and the first use of massed tanks, by the British at the Battle of Cambrai ((20 November to 3 December 1917). One can look back to the Battle of the Crater, on July 30, 1864 during the American Civil War, to see an even earlier failure of imagination, and unreadiness to exploit a breakthrough.

While it is not clear to the extent to which foreign authors contributed to the German interpretation, writers, between the World Wars, who discussed related mobile, tank-heavy operations include Basil Liddell-Hart and J.F.C. Fuller (U.K.), Charles de Gaulle(France), and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (Soviet Union).

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