Blitzkrieg

This is how William Shirer described blitzkrieg as the German forces overwhelmed the Poles:

‘the sudden surprise attack; the fighter planes and bombers roaring overhead, reconnoitering, attacking, spreading flames and terror; the Stukas screaming as they dove; the tanks, whole divisions of them, breaking through and thrusting forward thirty or forty miles in a day; self-propelled, rapid-firing heavy guns rolling forty miles an hour down even the rutty Polish roads; the incredible speed of even the infantry, of the whole vast army of a million and a half men on motorised wheels, directed and co-ordinated through a maze of electronic communications consisting of intricate radio, telephone and telegraphic networks. This was a monstrous mechanised juggernaut such as the earth had never seen.’^[1]

It was not something you would want to be on the receiving end of, but more of that later.

Blitzkrieg was born, bit by bit, in WW1, from 1917 onwards. The technology was there, if only just – tanks and planes – but the means of getting the best out of it wasn’t.

A break-through in tactics (away from bombardments and the mass frontal attack) came at Cambrai in the Battle of Passchendaele when, on the first day of the attack in November, 1917 more than 400 tanks were deployed. They pushed through all three German lines and punched a hole in the German front some six or seven kilometres wide and some eight kilometres deep. All at little initial cost, though the cavalry were torn to pieces by German machine guns and the infantry couldn’t keep pace. And without support they couldn’t seize the advantage they had gained. Many of the tanks also broke down whilst others were “ditched” (stuck in ditches, shell holes or trenches). But the tank had still shown what it could do.

We then move to the Ludendorff Offensive in 1918. Ludendorff had carefully planned the attack and had prepared thoroughly. He had turned a third of his cavalry into foot soldiers and had created and trained special “Storm Battalions” to advance quickly and find the weakest points in the enemy’s line before sending in the mass of his troops. There would be no preliminary bombardment and the troops were brought up to the line secretly at night. No tank, but no bombardment either. Surprise and speed would be the key with the “Storm Battalions” attacking were the enemy was weakest, not where they were strongest which had been the strategy since the war began in 1914.

And then, when the Entente forces with the Americans counter-attacked along a twenty-seven mile front, though the offensive began with a 2,000 gun artillery bombardment (the norm in WW1), it then used both tanks and planes in a co-ordinated manner to support the infantry.

Blitzkrieg  got its name from the German word for ‘lightening war’ because it was the Germans, being the aggressive power, who used it first. But the lessons from WW1 had been taken on board by the British and French as well as the Germans. Of course, the technology had improved: planes and tanks were faster yet with a greater range and more punch, greater reliability too. But the right tactics would also be necessary if the technology was to be used to full effect.

Neil Stewart describes blitzkrieg as the co-ordinated use of ‘surprise, speed and movement’[2], striking where the enemy was weakest, and his description can’t be bettered. There you have blitzkrieg!

It was designed to cause confusion and panic more than death. Smashing enemy defences, forcing them back whilst destroying their command centres and lines of communication. Massed tanks supported by armoured cars and lorries to deliver the infantry, fighter planes to wreak havoc and bomber planes to attack the enemy’s defence positions and the command centres and lines of communication. The Stuka dive bomber came to symbolize blitzkrieg. They attacked almost vertically, machine guns blazing, their sirens screaming (the ‘Jericho trumpets) in order to maximize panic, before dropping their bombs on tanks and artillery. Though the sirens were effective, inflicting panic which left the enemy almost frozen in fear, the bombs dropped at low heights for increased accuracy (the Germans referred to them as ‘flying artillery’) and the raking machine gun fire is what did the damage.

Of course blitzkrieg required the support of a more conventional army, delivered as close as it could get by rail and then relying on good old fashioned marching (and horses). Their role was to consolidate and hold.

That Blitzkrieg proved a major success is something of an understatement: Poland crushed in four weeks, Norway and Denmark defeated in eight weeks, Holland and Belgium overrun in five days, France defeated (and British forces evacuated) in six weeks, Yugoslavia crushed in eleven days and Greece defeated (and British forces again evacuated) in three weeks.

It wasn’t all down to blitzkrieg. The Germans were well trained and morale was high. They were often up against weaker forces, Poland for example, and in France against an army with a defensive mentality and with its over-reliance on the Maginot Line.

If we take a brief look at the Polish campaign (which is where we began), Hitler hit Poland without a declaration of war but with just about everything he had. He had left Germany’s Western Front without planes or tanks and with only three days’ ammunition. German planes took out Polish airfields and other strategic targets (though most of its air force escaped to Rumania) before supporting the advancing German Army. Such was the force of the German blitzkrieg (which began on September 1^st, 1939) that the Poles were quickly pushed back and the campaign was over in less than three weeks, and had really been decided by the end of the first week. The Germans suffered just 8,000-11,000 dead and another 27,000-30,000 wounded. In total, the Poles lost 70,000 men killed, 133,000 wounded and 700,000 taken prisoner.

If we then look at the attack on France, the main thrust, using the bulk of their armoured divisions, was undertaken by Army Group A in the Ardennes, where France simply did not think such an attack could be made. Indeed it was the German command of the logistics that was so impressive as lengthy columns of vehicles, tanks and marching (and cycling) troops poured through, all under air cover. Any vehicle, tanks included, that broke down and threatened the flow of this army through the Ardennes, was quickly shunted off the road to be repaired without interrupting the relentless onward march into France.

German High Command had thought it would take ten days to reach the Meuse, General Guderian (the army’s chief tank expert and the mastermind behind the attack) had thought four days. It took just two and the river was crossed using rubber dinghies on May 15^th, their tanks got across the next day. The French had been taken totally by surprise and within a week the Germans had advanced more than three hundred kilometres. A major factor was the air superiority the Germans quickly established. By May 20^th, the Germans had reached the Channel coast and the British and French forces were cut off from their supply lines.

So, two gold stars for blitzkrieg! And we could complement Neil Stewart’s definition by adding that courage (even if it was the courage of a gambler) was evident in both the assault on Poland which left the German’s almost defenceless in the west, and in the assault on France as they pushed through the Ardennes which most military strategists (Germans included) thought impossible. But then Hitler made his great mistake: he attacked the Soviet Union using the same tactic.

The logistics for the assault on the Soviet Union were considerable: it was a thousand kilometres from the German frontier to Moscow and two thousand kilometres to the oil of the Caucasus, and over poor roads. But this was to be conquered by blitzkrieg in a single campaign. General Thomas, in charge of the army’s High Command’s War Economy and Armaments Office, estimated that there were only two months’ supply of fuel hence the urgency to reach the oilfields. That the Soviet Union didn’t fall in a single campaign meant that the German communication lines were so over-stretched as to make supplying its army extremely difficult. And no matter how well dug-in the Germans might have been, with the Russian winter (a winter in which temperatures regularly fall below -20C), and with no winter clothing provided for its troops, and no anti-freeze for their armoured forces, their army was soon in deep trouble. And even though it survived the winter, holding their positions deep into Soviet territory, the German economy was not geared for a prolonged war. And don’t forget that, to the West, Britain had not been defeated.

What is more, the Russians then showed that they had learnt from the Germans, learnt so well that they could beat them at their own game: blitzkrieg. At Stalingrad they had shown that they could plan a major offensive and hide it from the enemy. They could co-ordinate ground and air forces and maximize the effect of armoured units: heavily armed, hard hitting, motorised tank armies. This was supported by artillery and infantry to mop up what enemy was left and to hold what was gained. The air force command was centralised too and its forces concentrated wherever it was needed with control centres set up to ensure it was being used to maximum effect. They out-blitzkrieged the Germans!

So the war was won and lost by Germany, by blitzkrieg. Not entirely, that would be a gross simplification of a war fought on many fronts, including at home in the factories, but blitzkrieg was a significant factor at both ends of the war.

[1] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 625

[2] Neil Stewart, The Changing Nature of Warfare, p. 105