Rather than a completely new form of warfare, the strategy Germany followed in May and June 1940 had much in common with the strategy it employed at the outset of World War I, when strategists like Alfred von Schlieffen determined Germany should aim to defeat its enemies quickly and decisively, as it was ill-suited to win a long and drawn-out conflict against larger, better-prepared forces.īut unlike in 1914-18, German forces fighting in 1939-40 had the benefit of new military technology developed or improved in the 1920s and 1930s, including tanks, motor vehicles, aircraft and radios. But in reality, though the word “blitzkrieg” had been used in German military writings before World War II to describe a short conflict, as opposed to a drawn-out war of attrition, it was never officially adopted as a military doctrine. In the stunned aftermath of France’s fall, both Nazi propaganda and Western media attributed Germany’s success to the revolutionary new form of warfare known as blitzkrieg. Was Blitzkrieg Truly a New Form of Warfare? But the strategy proved less successful against the highly organized and well-armed Soviet defenses, and by 1943 Germany had been forced into a defensive war on all fronts. In 1941, German forces again employed blitzkrieg tactics in their invasion of the Soviet Union, expecting a short campaign like the one they had enjoyed in Western Europe the previous spring. By the end of June, the French army had collapsed, and the nation sued for peace with Germany. With close air support from the Luftwaffe (German air force) and the benefit of radio communications to aid in coordinating strategy, the Germans blazed through northern France and toward the English Channel, bombing London and other cities while pushing the British Expeditionary Force into a pocket around Dunkirk. In May 1940 came Germany’s invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and France, during which the the Wehrmacht (German army) used the combined force of tanks, mobile infantry and artillery troops to drive through the Ardennes Forest and quickly penetrated the Allied defenses. Then in April 1940, Germany invaded neutral Norway, seizing the capital, Oslo, and the country’s main ports with a series of surprise attacks. German forces employed some tactics associated with blitzkrieg in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the invasion of Poland in 1939, including combined air-ground attacks and the use of Panzer tank divisions to quickly crush the poorly equipped Polish troops. WATCH VIDEO: The Battle of Britain Uses in World War II After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and made clear his intention to rearm the nation, he encouraged younger commanders like Heinz Guderian, who argued for the importance of both tanks and aircraft in this mobile approach to warfare. This focus on mobile warfare was partly a response to Germany’s relatively limited military resources and manpower, following the strictures imposed on it by the Treaty of Versailles. In the wake of their defeat in World War I, German military leaders determined that a lack of mobile, maneuverable forces and flexible tactics had led that conflict to bog down in the deadly attrition of trench warfare.Īs a result, while France focused its efforts between the wars on building up its defensive border, known as the Maginot Line, the Germans decided to prepare for a shorter conflict won through military maneuvers, rather than in the trenches. Clausewitz proposed the “concentration principle,” the idea that concentrating forces against an enemy, and making a single blow against a carefully chosen target (the Schwerpunkt, or “center of gravity”) was more effective than dispersing those forces. Blitzkrieg-which means “lightning war” in German-had its roots in earlier military strategy, including the influential work of the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz.
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