Blitzkrieg

• 1. Introduction

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  Blitzkrieg lit up the front pages of Western newspapers in September 1939, when journalists scrambling to describe the German assault on Poland landed on a single electrifying word: lightning war. Time magazine called it "a war of quick penetration and obliteration." Yet the generals who supposedly invented it called it something far less flattering. Adolf Hitler, the leader who championed the strategy above all others, privately dismissed the word as "ein ganz blödsinniges Wort" - a completely idiotic word. He later denied ever using it at all.

  That contradiction sits at the heart of one of history's most debated military concepts. Blitzkrieg swept through France in six weeks, a campaign that shocked a continent that had expected four years of trench warfare as in the last war. It produced nearly 3.5 million Soviet prisoners in the summer of 1941 alone. And yet senior German officers including Kurt Student and Franz Halder disputed whether it was a military concept at all. Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg called what others labeled blitzkrieg nothing more than "ad hoc solutions that simply popped out of the prevailing situation."

  So what actually happened on those battlefields? Was blitzkrieg a revolutionary doctrine, a propaganda myth, or simply a journalist's shorthand for something the Germans themselves never fully defined? The answers cut through the campaigns of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union and reach all the way back to the Prussian military theorists of the nineteenth century.

• 2. A Word Without a Author

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  The term blitzkrieg first appeared in print in 1935, in the German military periodical Deutsche Wehr, and recent research at the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt in Potsdam found it in only two military articles from the entire 1930s. Neither article described a new tactical doctrine. The first, from 1935, dealt primarily with food and supply logistics in wartime and used blitzkrieg to mean a swift strategic knockout - the same goal Germany had pursued in 1914 and failed to achieve.

  The second article, from 1938, described a swift strategic knockout as attractive but difficult to achieve on land under modern conditions, especially against fortifications like the Maginot Line. The author vaguely suggested that a massive strategic air attack might offer better prospects, but did not explore the idea. Fritz Sternberg, a Jewish Marxist political economist who had fled Nazi Germany, also used the term in his 1938 Paris book Die Deutsche Kriegsstärke, published in London as Germany and a Lightning War. Sternberg argued that Germany could not sustain a long war economically, but might win a quick one. He offered no detailed tactical prescription.

  In English and other languages the term had been in circulation since the 1920s. Ferdinand Otto Miksche used it in the magazine Army Quarterly and then gave it a formal definition in his 1941 book Blitzkrieg. The German popular press only embraced the word nine months after the invasion of Poland, following the fall of France in 1940. Heinz Guderian, whose armored ideas shaped German tank doctrine more than any other officer, later described blitzkrieg as a word coined by the Allies: "as a result of the successes of our rapid campaigns our enemies coined the word Blitzkrieg." By early January 1942, with German fortunes reversing in the Soviet Union, Hitler dismissed it as "Italian phraseology."

• 3. Deep Roots in Prussian Doctrine

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  German strategic thinking in 1914 drew from three nineteenth-century theorists: Carl von Clausewitz, born the 1st of June 1780 and died the 16th of November 1831; Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, born the 26th of October 1800; and Alfred von Schlieffen, born the 28th of February 1833. All three advocated maneuver, mass, and envelopment to force a decisive battle, what German doctrine called a Vernichtungsschlacht, a battle of annihilation.

  The First World War broke those ambitions on the Western Front's trenches, but the Eastern Front told a different story. There, German and Russian armies fought a war of maneuver across thousands of miles. That experience gave German commanders something unavailable to their trench-bound Western Allied counterparts: direct knowledge of mobile warfare at scale. After the armistice, committees of veteran staff officers within the Truppenamt, the covert continuation of the dissolved German General Staff, evaluated 57 issues of the war and revised German operational theory. Their work produced doctrinal publications including H. Dv. 487, known as Das Fug, published between 1921 and 1923, and Truppenführung, published between 1933 and 1934.

  The commander in chief Hans von Seeckt drove much of this postwar rethinking. He argued that the German Army had placed excessive emphasis on encirclement and should prioritize speed instead. Seeckt also developed Auftragstaktik, a command philosophy in which officers expressed goals to subordinates and delegated the means of achieving them. The governing principle was that the higher the authority, the more general the orders; lower echelons filled in the details. That delegation of authority accelerated the tempo of operations in ways that would prove decisive in the early campaigns of the Second World War.

• 4. Guderian, Rommel, and the Armored Idea

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  Heinz Guderian wrote in his 1950 memoir Panzer Leader that in 1929 he became convinced that tanks working alone or alongside infantry could never achieve decisive results. His historical studies and exercises in England persuaded him that tanks required all supporting arms to be raised to their standard of speed and cross-country performance. Within such a combined formation, tanks had to play the primary role, with every other weapon subordinated to the requirements of armor.

  Guderian also insisted in 1933 to the German high command that every tank in the armored force must carry a radio. At the start of the Second World War, only the German Army had achieved that standard, with all tanks radio-equipped. That proved critical in early tank battles, where German commanders exploited the organizational advantage that radio communication gave them over Allied forces. All Allied armies later copied the innovation.

  Hitler read Guderian's 1937 book Achtung - Panzer! and upon watching armored exercises at Kummersdorf remarked, "That is what I want - and that is what I will have." Yet the officer who embodied blitzkrieg's most aggressive execution was Erwin Rommel. David A. Grossman observed that by the Twelfth Battle of Isonzo in October-November 1917, while conducting a light-infantry operation, Rommel had already perfected the maneuver-warfare principles he would apply against France in 1940. During the Battle of France, Rommel disobeyed orders from General Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist and forged ahead faster than anyone had expected, effectively inventing the new archetype of blitzkrieg by leading his division far ahead of flanking units. General Hermann Hoth submitted an official report in July 1940 declaring that Rommel had "explored new paths in the command of Panzer divisions."

• 5. Schwerpunkt and the Logic of the Breakthrough

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  Central to German operations was a concept called Schwerpunktprinzip, a thinking formula used throughout the German Army from the nineteenth century. Schwerpunkt has been translated as center of gravity, focal point, and point of main effort, but none of those translations captures its full weight. Every unit from the company to the supreme command identified a Schwerpunkt and concentrated support there, even at risk elsewhere. Guderian summarized it in the 1930s as Klotzen, nicht kleckern: roughly, splash, don't spill.

  Once a breakthrough was achieved, units were not to become entangled with enemy front-line forces on either side of the gap. They drove instead toward objectives deep behind the enemy's front line, using motorized mobility to paralyze the opponent's ability to react. Speed of decision was the weapon. Through superior mobility and faster decision-making cycles, mobile forces acted before opposing forces could respond. A commander would not receive an explicit order but would be told his superior's intent and his unit's role; the method of execution was his own to determine.

  The culminating phase was the Kesselschlacht, the cauldron battle, in which encircled enemy forces were destroyed in concentrated attacks. During Operation Barbarossa, encirclements in 1941 alone produced nearly 3.5 million Soviet prisoners along with massive quantities of equipment. The Jericho Trompete, a noise-making siren fitted to the Junkers Ju 87 dive bomber, added a deliberate psychological dimension, aimed at breaking enemy morale. Those sirens were largely removed after the Battle of France in 1940, once opposing forces grew accustomed to the sound; thereafter, whistles were sometimes attached to bombs instead.

• 6. The Campaigns Tested and Broken

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  German operations against Poland in September 1939 were later judged by historians Matthew Cooper and J. P. Harris to be consistent with traditional methods rather than a new doctrine. The Wehrmacht dispersed its panzer forces among three concentrations, deploying tanks mainly to support infantry and seize terrain rather than to execute deep independent thrusts. Matthew Cooper concluded that any strategic exploitation of the armored idea was "still-born" in Poland.

  The Battle of France in 1940 delivered the landmark demonstration. Panzer Group Kleist attacked through the Ardennes, a sector the French considered unsuitable for armor and left lightly defended. The Germans reached the Meuse and broke through at Sedan within three days, without waiting for the siege artillery the French assumed would be required. Panzer forces then raced to the English Channel at Abbeville, cutting off the British Expeditionary Force, the Belgian Army, and some of France's best-equipped divisions. The panzer spearhead was, as historian Robert Citino later noted, nearly unmolested yet was strung out over a hundred miles of terrain and only three to five miles wide, wholly out of contact with its follow-on infantry. Charles de Gaulle struck with the 4th Armoured Division at Montcornet on the 17th of May and at Creci-sur-Serre on the 20th of May; British armored columns counterstruck at Arras on the 21st of May. Both exposed the doctrine's structural exposure without being strong enough to exploit it decisively.

  Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 began with simultaneous attacks that nearly annihilated the Soviet Air Force on its airfields, giving the Luftwaffe total air supremacy across all battlefields within the first week. Four panzer groups outflanked and encircled disorganized Red Army units. Yet the failure to destroy the Red Army before the winter of 1941-1942 was a strategic failure that made all tactical gains irrelevant. At Kursk in July 1943, the Red Army constructed deep defensive belts after learning of German intentions through front-line reconnaissance and Ultra intercepts. German armor advanced into attrition rather than exploitation, and David Glantz stated in 1995 that blitzkrieg was defeated in summer conditions for the first time at Kursk. Operation Bagration in June-August 1944 then drove the Red Army's own combined-arms thrust 600 km in six weeks, effectively inverting the doctrine against its originators.

• 7. The Myth Unpacked

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  Most academic historians now regard blitzkrieg as a military doctrine to be a myth. Shimon Naveh wrote that the striking feature of the concept is the "complete absence of a coherent theory which should have served as the general cognitive basis for the actual conduct of operations." J. P. Harris found no evidence of a blitzkrieg mentality in German military thinking and confirmed that the Wehrmacht never used the word in field manuals; a Times newspaper reporter coined it in September 1939.

  The German Army of 1939-1940 was far from the mechanized force of popular imagination. In 1939-1940 roughly 50 percent of soldiers had only a few weeks of training. The German Army had 120,000 vehicles against the French Army's 300,000. Only ten percent of the army was motorized in 1940, and the Wehrmacht used 2.7 million horses for transport in the Second World War, nearly double the 1.4 million used in the First. Karl-Heinz Frieser concluded that the image of a German blitzkrieg army is "a figment of propaganda imagination."

  The British theorists J. F. C. Fuller and Basil Henry Liddell Hart have often been credited with inspiring blitzkrieg, but historians have found that Liddell Hart distorted facts after the war to claim his ideas had been adopted by the Wehrmacht. Kenneth Macksey found Liddell Hart's original letters to Guderian in Guderian's papers; Liddell Hart had requested Guderian give him credit for impressing him with ideas on armored warfare. When confronted about discrepancies between English and German editions of Guderian's memoirs in 1968, Liddell Hart gave what was described as a "conveniently unhelpful though strictly truthful reply." Robert M. Citino concluded that blitzkrieg "simply doesn't exist, at least not in the way we usually think it does" and that the Germans used new technologies like tanks, aircraft, and radio-controlled command to restore an old way of war, Bewegungskrieg, that they had long found valid.