2012 A.D. is the new 2000 Millennium Armageddon. Something about some silly Mayan prophesies. But those aren’t biblical and henceforth must be demonic or heretical… 
And with all that meandering I would ask everyone to get back on track with the thread.
From everything I understand, blitzkreig was only effective for the germans as long as it was just this, a short war full of lighting manouvre, bypassing strong points and heading for a semi-strategic goal, for example, splitting the brits and French in a drive to the channel.
Where it failed was changing this lighting goal to a persisting goal in say the attack on the Soviets, where they could trade space for time.
By the end of the war, say 1944, the Germans had very much changed their force into a force that was pretty much defensive in nature, King Tigers and such like not being conducive to lighting anything. Also by this time all the Allies had caught up with the type of combined arms efforts that the Germans had practically pioneered in the beginning and pretty much surpassed them. Certainly the UK Air/ground coordination had in itself gone beyond what the Germans had achieved initially.
So, while I dont think that it was a myth, it only worked in a limited sense when they were the only force capable of it and were working towards a limited non-persistent type of conflict.
I agree with most everything you say FF.
But as a question to the whole, would it be off target to say that the Blitzkrieg idea was a bit of an exaggeration and that the Germans used infantry and artillery tactics that weren’t that radically different from say their British or French adversaries? I think I’ve read that the Battle for France was largely just that towards the end, infantry supported by artillery in its last phases as the panzers were tired and worn out and French defenders in the Bocage and Norman hedgerows actually bottled-up the Heer just prior to the Armistice --not unlike the Germans would do to the American Army in 1944…
LOL! German officers were good. I hear this argument a lot but it is meaningless if you lose anyway. The only battle that matters is the last battle. I don’t care if the German individual soldier was better and more disciplined than others - this is hilarious and false comfort. Does that mean the German “should have won”? That they ‘deserved’ to win? Of course not. In fact, it might be argued convincingly that the resourcefulness of the Germans lengthened the agony of Germany in its death throes, costing even more lives, since they had no chance of winning against the powers arrayed against them. In this case, the Germans stabbed themselves in the back and it had nothing to do with the Jews. As Patton was fond of saying, “You’ve got to help the other guy die for his country” and he did this admirably even if he was a blowhard in nearly every other way.
It should be said that, according to Beevor in Berlin, the German Army was broken at the end and although they did manage to inflict a lot of casualties on the Soviet juggernaut, they still suffered a collapse of sorts. Many German soldiers realized that further fighting was futile and the only thing that really kept many resisting was empty promises and lies by the callous, inhuman Nazi “golden eagles” and the fact that no one wanted to be captured by the Soviets, nor let German civilians fall into their hands. There were still many desertions and soldiers abandoning the line in the face of overwhelming odds and the inevitable. And many made a huge effort to go as far west as possible, preferably to the American sector…
I haven’t read all the previous exchange, so forgive me if the comment above was about a specific point I missed. But I would say the tactics of the French WERE radically different than those of the Germans: French doctrine was geared for defense, not offense, in everything from grand strategy (e.g., Maginot Line) down to squad tactics.
Reminds me of Americans in Vietnam.
When you analyze what happened in history, its common practice to identify the things they did right as opposed to the things they did wrong.
The Blitzkrieg idea was not fiction.
We have the same idea now. Back at the first of Desert Storm they were going to do a convention invasion of Iraq beaches. That was the plan till Dick Cheney got a hold of a guy name Boyd. That is Col. John Boyd, retired. And the ‘Hail Mary’ attack was used as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
That above gives you an idea of the OODA loop, his invention (well not really an invention, but the concept was really how the Blitz worked.)
The Blitzkrieg is more than just a combination of aircraft, artillery, and armored mobile troops. It’s a tempo. It’s a speed of operation that the enemy cannot keep up with. It’s blinding and deafening your opponent so they cannot ‘Observe’. It’s confusing them by the rapid pace they cannot keep up with or effectively combat and thus cannot ‘Orientate’. It’s an obscuring and splitting of objectives to keep them from ‘Deciding’. And a rapid attack at specific points to keep them from ‘Action’.
And that spells OODA. You have an OODA loop, and so does your opponent. Your strategy is to slow down his OODA while you speed yours up. Slow it down by blinding their observers, all except what you want them to see. By jamming their communications (but not all, just the communications YOU want to jam!) Slow it down by letting them move only where you want them to move.
And you speed YOUR OODA loop up. Better communication, faster communication, faster decision making, more mobile troops, speed, speed, and more speed.
It’s nothing new. Napoleon Bonaparte did the same thing when he got his soldiers to march twice as fast as the other side did!
But the Blitz, because of the revolutions in armor and communcations, made it so much more effective.
The Blitz was real and many a field army was totaly confused on how to fight it.
Deaf
While i agree with FF in sence- the Wehrmacht had radically changed the strategy to defence one and Blitzkrieg in its initial role has been finally denied. Though the Battle of Hungary in dec-feb 1945 has proved that GErmans still look at the maneuvreable mobile warfare by the panzer striking forces as a basic tactic of war.The same was in Ardenns. The quick unexpective Panzer ram was a universal force that should open the enemy defence.
So , i think it’s wrong to say that Blitzkrieg was abandoned - to the contrast it has been seriously developed and adopted by the ALL fighting sides with great success.
As for GErmans hard determination to fight the Soviets to the last man- the Bevour himself wrote that the some of germans commander were obsessed by false dream - “Peace in west and fight in East”.Some diehard Nazis actualy believed they shall join to Allies to fight the “common bolshevic threat”
It was widely spread among all sort of colloborators kinda Valsov’s ROA , SS-cossacs and others…
Blitzkrieg (or OODA, or other labels of any era) are simply convenient buzzwords applied to the restatement in a contemporary context of some basic military principles.
The Germans didn’t invent those principles any more than anyone else did in the past few thousand years of warfare.
The elements of blitzkrieg were probably ‘invented’ by some tribal leader and his associates before recorded history began.
Its features but not its elements have differed as weaponry and other aspects of war, such as transport and communications, have changed and improved.
But it always starts with the ancient primary battlefield principles of gaining and maintaining the initiative, which works the same with all armies at all levels at all times, and building on everything that is necessary to do that before and during the battle. And after for armies of sustained conquest.
Alexander the Great used those principles successfully more than two millennia before Clausewitz stated them. In his book Generalship of Alexander the Great (1958) J.F.C. Fuller compared Alexander’s achievements with "the five strategical principles of Clausewitz, and points out that “the value of utmost energy, concentration at the decisive point, rapidity of movement, surprise and pursuit were as clearly apparent to Alexander as they were to Clausewitz.” He also illustrates Alexander’s understanding of other strategical and tactical factors such as the element of surprise, the principles of maintaining the aim, the offensive and the economy of force, and the establishment of secure bases and secure communications.”. " http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~madsb/home/war/alex/
Caesar later used these basic principles very successfully against Pompey in 49 BC, and against others in Gaul later.
The Germans used them with tanks and combined arms and forces in the famous ‘Blitzkrieg’ in WWII.
What is forgotten is that the Japanese used them with equal success with, among other things, bicycles a couple of years later in a blitzkrieg in Malaya which was as stunning a defeat of the defenders as was the German ‘blitzkrieg’ defeat in France: http://www.ibiblio.net/hyperwar/PTO/RisingSun/BicycleBlitz/index.html
It’s all about adapting your forces, weapons and tactics to the task you face.
If it works you’re a winner, which is why it is applied retrospectively to a campaign. If you don’t win nobody remembers that you tried a ‘blitzkrieg’ and that there is no reason to believe that a ‘blitzkrieg’ is some unique tactic superior to any others.
Because most of all it depends upon your enemy being weak where you are strong and being unable to resist your thrusts.
It’s like leading a waltz: it looks good only if your partner is taking backward steps to all your forward steps. Otherwise you just look like you’re stumbling, or that your partner is kneeing you in the balls.
You are right!
Just think of Attila the Hun, who conquered as much or more territory as those you mention by doing just that : rapid, unpredictable advance with superior forces. And if you care to read on the subject, you’ll see that he was a far better planner and strategist than the little corporal… Don’t forget that his empire lasted for centuries…
The chinese people are now very proud of the emperor’s city on tienanmen square, which was built by the Huns, by Atila or his successor I don’t remember…
I hate to break it to the experts here, but the Maginot line was never attacked frontally by the Germans for the simple reason that it would have cost them too many lives. The run-out of the Maginot line up to the Belgian border was a much less formidable affair and that is where the Germans sensibly struck. A good argument could be made that had the French not decided to be so parsimonious and had they built the same density of fortifications all the way to the Atlantic, that the Germans might have thought more than twice about doing it at all. We Americans love to dump on the French and most of it is undeserved and inaccurate.
I don’t want to kick anyone off this site for having a different opinion, but where does this bible talk fit into a discussion of blitzkrieg?
[Cough, cough] The German army was a conscript army [cough].
Calm down, Viking. Komrade Obama? Maybe Der Fuhrer Bush will save you? Geez! Isn’t this thread about blitzkrieg?
Not from the get-go.
Perhaps not. The Nazi regime inherited an artificially small, elite army in the Reichswehr–many of whose corporals could have been officers in many other of Europe’s armies. But Germany had introduced conscription early on, probably by 1934 IIRC. So I think it’s pretty clear that they were indeed an involunteer army from the get-go…
In regards to the point earlier about the French Army being a massed, conscript army–this was true–to an extent. It’s forgotten however that the French, for various reasons mainly having to do with the republican virtues of liberty, fraternity, equality–and the fear of Vichy-like military prick governments–had long since adopted a “peoples’ army” concept in which a relatively small cadre force garrisoned the Maginot Line and maintained a training nucleus for an elaborate, extraneous system of reservists that was to expand only periodically for training and on the eve of war.
The numbers given on most pages indicate a very large French force, but most fail to mention or elaborate on the fact that this army was largely raised just before hostilities were launched in Poland in August of 1939 and many of the units were ill trained, lacked a sense of longstanding professionalism, a coherent modern doctrine, and cohesiveness that the large standing Heer had long enjoyed since its reorganization under the Reichswehr–where only the best and brightest need apply. This continued as the force expanded under the Nazi regime into a conscript army that enjoyed a modern, “think-outside-the-box” mentality (for want of a better term ), longstanding revolutionary (or maybe evolutionary) doctrines, intricate war gaming testing and confirming the viability of the tank as a focus of the battle, and thoroughly modern equipment with an emphasis on command and control in a combined arms battle. A mentality that manifested itself into simple things such as mounting wireless radio sets in every tank, and the delegation of authority to local commanders who were in the thick of battle and thus far more in tune with the fluid, unfolding chaos that is the proverbial ‘fog of war’ than the armchair commander sitting in his isolated headquarters. That is what made them virtually invulnerable in the early part of the war as the Wehrmacht resembled something of a chiseled, agile boxer making quick-work of a flabby buffoon of a gargantuan, but awkward, amateur street fighter flaying away as he was methodically disassembled…
Regards, and Merry Christmas…
Yes the Germans didn’t invent the principles of such as OODA, but they used them while their adversaries FORGOT THEM.
And thus history repeats itself. In time we will forget the concepts such as OODA and some other nation will, using the technology of the time, do a blitz again.
So yes the Blitz was real, but real cause we forgot the lessons of history.
Deaf
Wouldn’t be so sure about that, Deaf.
Most European armies are slowly changing their doctrine to a highly mobile light army, and start to discard the skills of tank battles and heavy or immobile weaponry.
This is simply based on their confidence that war won’t come back home to them, and that all they’ll need will be Expeditionary Forces.
Germany alone is slowly leaving it’s tank fleet to rot, while they start to focus on Paratroopers, Mountain troopers and other highly mobile units.
So it is more likely that the Western world could be overrun with heavy machinery and high numbers of heavy armor than that it would let itself get outmaneuvered and shocked by a Combined Arms attack.
While this threat is obviously rather low, it is, in my eyes, the biggest flaw in the defense doctrine of the Western European nations.
But then again, in the case of Total War, they have nukes, and the world will probably go down the Shitter anyway… :mrgreen:
Maybe it’s not so much a case of forgetting such things but that the advantage is usually with the attacker in a blitzkrieg type attack.
It’s a lot easier to be a highly mobile force running a blitzkrieg type assault at the defender’s weak points than it is to be the defender trying to move and mass forces at the points of attack without knowing the attacker’s true intentions.
The Germans suffered exactly that problem in the crucial early days after D Day in marshalling their own forces, notably mobile armour, to defend.
Plus the defender has the problem of transporting men and materiel to meet the thrust at points where the attacker has already concentrated his men and materiel.
The defender is pretty much bound to be responding to the attacker’s initiative rather than dictating the initiative to the attacker.
And the problem is compounded hugely when the defender has based his defence on concentrations of men and materiel in static defensive positions, as happened with France at the start of WWII, and lacks the tactics and resources to respond quickly and flexibly to the attacker’s thrusts.