Blitzkrieg

8 Key excerpts on "Blitzkrieg"

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  Tank

  Heavy Metal at War

  • Philip Kaplan(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Skyhorse

    (Publisher)

  Blitzkrieg The European war will be an industrial war of aircraft, tanks and movement. —Dwight D. Eisenhower, while an aide to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines.

  You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.—Winston Churchill, in response to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler of 29 September 1938

  No one is certain about the exact origin of the word Blitzkrieg (lightning war). As defined by the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language it means: A swift, sudden military offensive, usually by combined air and mobile land forces. Credit for coining it has gone variously to Time magazine, Adolf Hitler, Sir Basil Liddell-Hart and others. Whatever the origin, historians generally agree that the concept itself is Prussian.

  “In the year, 1929, I became convinced that tanks working on their own or in conjunction with infantry could never achieve decisive importance. My historical studies, the exercises carried out in England and our own experiments with mock-ups had persuaded me that tanks would never be able to produce their full effect until the other weapons on whose support they must invariably rely were brought up to their standard of speed and cross-country performance. In such a formation of all arms, the tanks must play the primary role, the other weapons being subordinated to the requirements of the armor. It would be wrong to include tanks in infantry divisions: what was needed were armored divisions which would include all the supporting arms needed to allow the tanks to fight with full effect.”

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  Blitzkrieg

  From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk

  • Len Deighton(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • William Collins

    (Publisher)

  To what extent the Red Army’s brutal participation brought the final collapse of Polish resistance must remain a matter of conjecture, but most of the other interpretations of what had happened were wrong. The tank had been a failure in the First World War, and in 1939 the Germans used mostly thinly armoured, lightweight models. There were no great tank battles, no sizable tank concentrations, and certainly no tank armies. The German encirclement, accomplished with mobile forces, was a direct development of traditional German military theories, as was the simultaneous Kesselschlacht of the frontier regions.

  The word ‘Blitzkrieg’ has been attributed to Hitler, Time magazine, and Liddell Hart. Guderian’s chief of staff, General Nehring, is sure that the word is not of German origin.* Whatever its etymology, the ideas behind the word are certainly German. Lightning-fast war had been an essential part of Prussian military thinking since long before Bismarck. It arose from the fear that if Prussia engaged one enemy in a lengthy war, other enemies would have joined in. A fast decision avoided this danger. In more modern times, supply lines threatened by the naval forces of France and Britain and Germany’s lack of raw materials made long wars even more hazardous.

  In addition to this strategic idea, ‘Blitzkrieg’ became a convenient way to refer to the tactical methods used. The American Heritage Dictionary defines ‘Blitzkrieg’ as ‘a swift, sudden military offensive, usually by combined air and land forces’. The word has also become a catchall term with which to refer to the large body of material – much of it contradictory – produced between the wars by theorists and prophets. It is the nature of such writing that it always claims strategic rather than tactical importance.

  In this book I have used ‘Blitzkrieg’ according to the above dictionary definition, giving special attention to the military methods evolved by Heinz Guderian and used by his forces in May 1940.

  The mistaken idea that the Blitzkrieg concept was of British origin was given new credence by German generals when the war was over and their views were made available by Basil Liddell Hart. Liddell Hart, one of the finest military theorists of our time, remained always a historian, and whenever possible he expressed his ideas by means of historical example. His most famous book, The Strategy of Indirect Approach, originally had the title The Decisive Wars of History

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  Rolling Thunder

  A Century of Tank Warfare

  • Philip Kaplan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  Schlieffen, and his successor Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, gradually trained the German Army in what they called the “war of manoeuvre”, and by the early months of WWI German Army units were mostly outfighting the Allies in their early encounters. But in 1914 when that war began, the German Army was not mechanized and was unable to move long distances rapidly. Thus, it was unable to achieve truly decisive victories and had to reluctantly settle into trench warfare.

  The problem of the trench stalemate was finally addressed by the German officer corps in the spring of 1918 when they elected to apply Schlieffen’s operating principles to the smaller army units as well as the large ones. They chose to decentrailize command and at the same time increase the firepower of the infantry. They wanted to create a lot of platoon-sized units that could act independently in combat, with freedom to engage as they thought most appropriate in the situation.

  “The European war will be an industrial war of aircraft, tanks and movement.”— Dwight D. Eisenhower, while he was an aide to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines

  The term Blitzkrieg was actually coined by western journalists during the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and its meaning has usually been linked with a series of rapid, decisive brief battles intended to knock out or destroy the enemy force before it can fully mobilize and react. Functionally, it has been generally accepted to be a coordinated military effort by tanks and other armoured vehicles, mobilized infantry, artillery, and aircraft to quickly establish overwhelming combat superiority and break through the enemy lines. An additional element that the Germans brought to the concept was psychological. The employment of terror lending further chaos, confusion and enhancing the fear of the sudden attack was exemplified in the use of the noise-making sirens fitted to the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers the Germans used in support of their armoured and infantry forces.

  Early references to the term Blitzkrieg are relatively rare and do not occur in handbooks of German Army or Air Force doctrine. German press uses of the term were rare and did not occur before 1939. A few early references exist relating to German efforts to break the stalemate and win a quick victory in the First World War, but were not specifically related to the use of armoured or mechanized forces or aircraft. It was used in the context of Germany needing to develop self-sufficiency in food and other areas in the event of her becoming involved in a wide, protracted war. A 1938 article appeared on the matter of Germany developing the capability to launch a rapid strategic knockout blow, but acknowledges the difficulty of accomplishing such a result in a land attack in modern circumstances, especially relative to the problems posed by fortification systems such as the Maginot Line unless considerable surprise is achieved. There is also a reference in a book by Fritz Sternberg, Die Deutsche Kriegsstärke (German War Strength), published in 1939, and an English edition published in 1938 called Germany and a Lightning War

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  Operation Valhalla

  Writings on War, Weapons, and Media

  • Friedrich Kittler, Ilinca Iurascu, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Michael Wutz(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  The goal was to resuscitate the desired Beweg-ungskrieg , or war of movement. Instead of large frontal assaults by rifle- armed soldiers advancing through barbed wire toward enemy parapets and machine-gun nests, small, flexible, and highly mobile units equipped with a diversity of weapons would break through at specified points and fan out behind enemy lines. In the false peace between 1919 and 1939, when peace referred to periods of history in which Europeans took a break from killing each other in larger numbers, the German Army, eager to avoid another unwinnable Stellungskrieg, motorized and upgraded these tactics. What worked with men on a tactical level could work faster and even more de-cisively on an operational level with tanks. This was all the more urgent because due to the significant reduction of the German Army in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles it became even more necessary to compensate for the lack of men, mat é riel, and resources by means of speed and tech-nological superiority. 32 INTRODUCTION Blitzkrieg, then, is the operational redeployment of a tactical innova-tion responding to a strategic imperative. More to the point, it was the name given to the operational implementations of tactical innovations in the campaigns against Poland and France, though it was a designation the German Army neither invented nor adopted. The rapid German victory in the West has added to the flashy mystique of the term as well as to the questionable perception, shared by Kittler, that it all went off exactly as conceived. Germany, so the story goes, planned its lightning wars with all the meticulous care it devotes to its manufacture of its cars, beer, and ideal-ist philosophy. The Kipling admirer Kittler offers a Just So Blitzkrieg Story that revolves around one of the Wehrmacht’s best-known senior generals and postwar self-promoters, Heinz Guderian.

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  War, Violence and the Modern Condition

  • Bernd Hüppauf(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  A few examples of the current actual and metaphorical use of Blitzkrieg in that sense may suffice. During a program on German TV concerning prob-lems of new radical movements in Germany, the reporter interviewed young members of different so-called right-wing movements. Among them a young 29 Quoted in Messenger: The Art of Blitzkrieg, p. 80. 30 Cf. Irving: Die Tragödie der deutschen Luftwaffe, p. 72: Feldmarschall Milch only reported Goebbel's remark; Milch himself was said to have had jews among his ancestors. 132 Codes of War and Violence girl of about 20, Uschi, named as her hobbies: combative sports, skinheads, Germany, music — and as her nickname Blitzkrieg. The reporter, visibly astonished, couldn't do much with this and passed by. 31 At a big manifestation in the summer of 1994 on Berlin Alexanderplatz Käthe Reichel, famous actrice in the Brecht tradition, referred to the disaster of German unification in the cultural area in Blitzkrieg-terms: Alle Eroberer, ob sie nun mit Waffen, blendenden Glasperlen, Geld oder Waren in die Länder kamen, haben immer zuerst die Kultur des eroberten Landes erschla-gen. Und wenn es jetzt eines beweises in Deutschland braucht, daß hier seit No-vember ein Krieg stattgefunden hat, ein deutscher Blitzkrieg, dann ist das der Um-gang der Sieger und ihrer bezahlten Vollstrecker mit der Kultur dieses Landes. 32 In October 1990 the London Guardian published in its weekend edition an ar-ticle by Günter Grass under the headline: The Business Blitzkrieg. Grass explained to his English readers his well-known critical position on the Ger-man unification process and its universal significance. He mentioned that the media after the monetary union in July 1990 used the term Blitzkrieg in a hugely euphoric manner: The way in which the D-Mark has been held up as an article of faith is frightening, as if thoughtlessness could be compensated for by money [...].

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  Voices from the Luftwaffe

  • Bob Carruthers(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Pen & Sword Aviation

    (Publisher)

  THE Blitzkrieg ERA 1939-1941

  T he Blitzkrieg that exploded across Germany’s border with Poland on 1st September 1939 was a new kind of warfare, more destructive, more terrifying, more shocking in its speed and power than any brand of fighting previously known. Overnight, other armies were made to look antiquated now that the forces of Nazi Germany had demonstrated for the first time what armour, tanks and aircraft could do when they acted in concert. The meaning of Blitzkrieg - lightning war - was fully justified. As the hapless Poles soon discovered, Blitzkrieg struck hard, it struck fast and it struck decisively.

  The attack on Poland was the point at which the appeasement policy previously followed by Britain and France finally broke down. They had allowed the forces of Nazi Germany to march into the Rhineland in 1936. They had protested, but did nothing, in 1938 when Adolf Hitler announced the Anschluss: this union of Austria and Germany had been forbidden under the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. They had given in when Hitler demanded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, ostensibly to protect the rights of the German minority there. They failed to react when, contrary to his word, Hitler absorbed the rest of Czechoslovakia into the German Reich in March 1939. At that juncture, Poland was the next obvious target on Hitler’s list of territorial demands and Britain and France promised the Poles their support if they were attacked.

  Two days after Hitler’s forces invaded Poland and refused all demands to withdraw, Britain and France, together with Australia and New Zealand, declared war. By then, the Germans were well on their way to an easy victory and despite the promises, the Poles were left to fight on their own. The British, the French and the world could only watch as the German armoured columns sliced through Poland, backed by the Luftwaffe which plastered Polish airfields and destroyed runways, hangars and fuel stores. Railways and communication lines were systematically disrupted.

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  In Pursuit of Military Excellence

  The Evolution of Operational Theory

  • Shimon Naveh(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  91

  The first success of the Blitzkrieg method derived from an unusual lack of operational competence and clear tactical and technological inferiority on the Polish side. Moreover, a whole series of specific geostrategic conditions encouraged the German mechanization to exploit the potential of the Blitzkrieg method in a total manner. Hence, the ultimate strategic effect achieved by the Wehrmacht could be justly interpreted as annihilation. During the Balkan campaign, the limited dimensions of the forces involved and the mountainous nature of the terrain allowed the Germans to exercise their tactical supremacy through a chain of brigade- and division-sized Blitzkrieg battles.92

  In the North African and Russian theatres, in spite of the differences in magnitude and ferocity of the struggle, one can observe the prevalence of a synonymous regularity of a dialectical nature. The initial tactical excellence of the Germans led, with the development of the campaigns, to a serious exposure of their operational weaknesses and ignorance. The greater their tactical successes and the deeper their penetration into the adversary's territory, the flimsier their operational position became. The German inclination to grab the largest possible number of enemy troops into the cauldrons created by the deep penetrating armoured blows overstretched their resources, split the mechanized formations from the infantry, and severed the succession of operations, thus bringing complete exhaustion upon themselves.93 The initial successes in Poland, France and the Balkans induced a state of euphoria among the German strategic and operational leaders and convinced them that their operational method was coherent and invincible. This state of mind led them to make a simplistic analogy between the conditions they had confronted in the west and those awaiting them in the Russian theatre.94

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  He 111 Kampfgeschwader on the Russian Front

  • John Weal, John Weal(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Osprey Publishing

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R O N E 6 W hen German forces invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 an entirely new form of warfare was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world – Blitzkrieg. The Wehrmacht’s tactics of combining highly mobile, mechanised movement on the ground with close support from the air effectively defeated the Poles in the space of just 18 days. Eight months were to pass before Hitler launched his next major Blitzkrieg campaign. But the Western Allies had failed to heed the lessons of Poland. Theirs was still very much a Great War mentality, their minds dominated by static defences and fixed fields of fire. They frittered away the eight months’ grace offered by the ‘Phoney War’, with the French Army hunkered down behind its Maginot Line and the British Expeditionary Force occupied mainly in pouring concrete and digging trenches. The invasion of France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940 was thus a virtual re-run of the events in Poland the previous autumn, as the Wehrmacht’s armoured spearheads, superbly covered from the air, rampaged seemingly at will deep into the enemy’s heartland. Dutch forces surrendered after just five days. The Belgians laid down their arms two weeks later. And exactly four weeks after that a ceasefire signalled the defeat of France. It would be another full year, 22 June 1941, before Hitler was ready to embark on his most ambitious Blitzkrieg of all, codenamed Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union. By then, however, one of the major weapons of the earlier Blitzkrieg campaigns no longer featured quite so prominently on the Luftwaffe’s order of battle. Despite being described as ‘one of the most outstanding warplanes of the mid-1930s’, and having formed the backbone of the Luftwaffe’s bomber arm during the first 12 months of the war, by 1941 Heinkel’s elegant He 111 was steadily being replaced in frontline service by the more modern Junkers Ju 88.

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