Blitzkrieg (German, "lightning war") is a method of warfare whereby an attacking force spearheaded by a dense concentration of armoured and motorised or mechanised infantry formations with close air support, breaks through the opponent's line of defence by short, fast, powerful attacks and then dislocates the defenders, using speed and surprise to encircle them, which was made possible due to excessive use of Pervitin. Through the employment of combined arms in manoeuvre warfare, blitzkrieg attempts to unbalance the enemy by making it difficult for it to respond to the continuously changing front and defeating it in a decisive Vernichtungsschlacht ("battle of annihilation"). During the interwar period, aircraft and tank technologies matured and were combined with systematic application of the traditional German tactic of Bewegungskrieg ("maneuver warfare"), deep penetrations and the bypassing of enemy strong points to encircle and destroy enemy forces in a Kesselschlacht ("cauldron battle"). During the Invasion of Poland, Western journalists adopted the term blitzkrieg to describe this form of armoured warfare. The term had appeared in 1935, in a German military periodical Deutsche Wehr ("German Defense"), in connection to quick or lightning warfare. German manoeuvre operations were successful in the campaigns of 1939–1941 and by 1940 the term blitzkrieg was extensively used in Western media. Blitzkrieg operations capitalized on surprise penetrations (e.g., the penetration of the Ardennes forest region), general enemy unreadiness and their inability to match the pace of the German attack. During the Battle of France, the French made attempts to re-form defensive lines along rivers but were frustrated when German forces arrived first and pressed on. Despite its ubiquity in German and British journalism during World War II, Blitzkrieg was practically never used as official military terminology of the Wehrmacht during the war. Some senior officers, including Kurt Student, Franz Halder and Johann Adolf von Kielmansegg, even disputed the idea that it was a military concept. Kielmansegg asserted that what many regarded as blitzkrieg was nothing more than "ad hoc solutions that simply popped out of the prevailing situation". Student described it as ideas that "naturally emerged from the existing circumstances" as a response to operational challenges. The Wehrmacht never officially adopted it as a concept or doctrine. In 2005, Karl-Heinz Frieser summarized blitzkrieg as simply the result of German commanders using the latest technology in the most beneficial way according to traditional military principles and employing "the right units in the right place at the right time". Modern historians now understand blitzkrieg as the outcome of the rejuvenation of the traditional German military principles, methods and doctrines of the 19th century with the latest weapon systems of the interwar period. Despite blitzkrieg never being an official or formal doctrine, many modern historians use it casually to describe the style of manoeuvre warfare practiced by Germany during the early part of the war. In the context of the thinking of Heinz Guderian on mobile combined arms formations, blitzkrieg can be a synonym for modern manoeuvre warfare on the operational level.

Read full article on Wikipedia · CC-BY-SA