Blitzkrieg__an_Evolutionary_or_Revolutionary_Doctrine

The doctrine that came to be known the world-over as Blitzkrieg, did not develop in a vacuum, nor was it some radical departure from Prussian-German military thought. In its simplest construct, Blitzkrieg involves the utilization of mobile forces for the purpose of achieving a break-through, which would then exploited through a rapid penetration into the enemy’s rear areas. This concept was not revolutionary in and of itself, as maneuvering behind the enemy and taking him in the rear or via a flanking attack has a proud tradition in Prussian-German military history going back to the Great Elector himself. Was Blitzkrieg more evolutionary rather than revolutionary' What are the optimal conditions for a Blitzkrieg campaign' What is Blitzkrieg' Some time must be spent on this word Blitzkrieg. When was it first used' Unfortunately, the history of the term is not easy to pin-down. Some historians have ascribed the coining of the term to Hitler, while Hitler ascribed it to the Italians; others, including John Keegan and Matthew C. Cooper ascribe the term to American journalists with Time magazine, and there are still a variety of other claimants owed to truly atrotious mistranslations of German to English. Fanning was only able to locate two instances of its use in Germany before September 1939: an article which appeared in the Militär-Wochenblatt and a speech given by General Georg Thomas, who was effectively the Chief Quartermaster of the Wehrmacht. Fanning maintains that usage of the word prior to September 1939 was purely confined to the conceptualization of the “knockout blow” against the enemy’s fielded military center of gravity. Though the terms—“blitzkrieg”, Überfallskrieg or attaque bruquée—were different, they all described “a sudden, rapid strike against an enemy;” a strike which would, “in a matter of hours or days” shatter the enemy’s will to resist, morale and compel his suing for peace in hopes of still having some bargaining power. Yet, it must also be remembered that much of what “blitzkrieg” conveyed before the outbreak of hostilities was not being written about by military professionals or historians. The journalists utilizing the term were using in the context of a single, surprise, knockout blow and, Neville Chamberlain was able to maintain—utlizing this very limited, psycho-military definition of blitzkrieg as a “knockout blow”—that “there was no chance for a surprise ‘Blitzkrieg’ for Britain’s military had been “preparing for a long time.” The Christian Century had even predicted that Blitzkrieg had been still-born, for the assault on Poland gave the British and French time to prepare to ensure that a German “sneak attack” would never materialize. What these writers collectively failed to grasp is the fact that there are different levels to warfare and each level is capable of having its own element of surprise. Yes, after the declaration of war upon Germany by the French and British, Germany’s ability to launch a “sneak attack” in the sense that the Western powers were still at peace with the Third Reich was no longer applicable. However, this does not rule-out that the element of surprise could still be maintained and exploited on the tactical and operational levels. Chamberlain was proven wrong, for Case Yellow was an operational knock-out blow which eviscerated the highly-mobile British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and trapped the best units of the Anglo-French forces within a huge cauldron encompassing Belgium and the Channel Coast. The BEF and the French were unprepared to face the principal axis of the German assault, the speed with which the Panzers of Army Group A would advance and the uncertainty and disorder this would cause for their own military forces to mount an effective defense. This operational knock-out blow had the strategic effect of reducing Vichy France to a German satellite and ejecting the BEF from the continent. Two definitions have been chosen: from Barry Posen and Robert Citino. Posen defines Blitzkrieg as: The Blitzkrieg stressed mobility and speed over firepower, although in the form of the tank, the dive bomber, and high-velocity antitank or antiaircraft gun it aimed for great firepower at decisive points. Blitzkrieg welcomed encounter battles. It employed concentrated air power offensively and defensively, to prepare the way for advancing armor. Like German doctrine after World War I, Blitzkrieg stressed infiltration tactics and flanking movements for both infantry and armor. As in the classic pre-World War I doctrine, the new doctrine sought single and double envelopments, it aimed as much at the disorientation and dislocation of the enemy command system as it did at the annihilation of enemy forces. This was to be achieved by deep penetrations into the rear area of an enemy army. It was believed that if dislocation could be achieved, the battle of annihilation might be avoided, or at least easier. Citino defines Blitzkrieg as: . . . a German phenomenon based on the traditions of German military history. As a doctrine of employing mechanized units (including air units) on a grand scale to defeat, pursue, and destroy sizable enemy forces within a two-to-four week span of time. Divisions, corps, and armies would use their armored spearhead to create opportunities for warfare at the operational level, in order to achieve the maneuver onto the enemy’s flank and rear, leading to the envelopment and destruction of his entire military force. Forces maneuver to place themselves in an advantageous position to wear down the enemy, at the greatest possible speed in other words destroy him, and to do it with as little loss as possible. The commonalities in these two definitions stress maneuver, speed, envelopment and destruction of enemy forces in a decisive fashion. Blitzkrieg stresses combined-arms warfare to achieve penetrations into the enemy rear for the purpose of achieving a grand Kesselschlacht. Posen’s definition is far wider than Citino’s who attaches two curious qualifications: the Blitzkrieg would have a one to two week duration, and that the “entire military force” of the enemy would be destroyed. Posen’s definition is far more realistic than Citino’s, who, by adding these qualifications, appears to be talking more of an ideal Blitzkrieg, as opposed to one that was actually practiced by the Wehrmacht, which never succeeded in destroying the entire military establishment of a rival. Luttwack provides descriptions of Blitzkrieg on the tactical and operational levels in which he reveals the tactical-level vulnerabilities and vast potential for failure and contrasts this with the success of Blitzkrieg upon the operational level. Luttwack’s contention that a “narrow breach in the front” is highly vulnerable to envelopment and that instead of “marching to victory” the assaulting combined-arms battlegroup could be “advancing to its own destruction” because its logistical tail would be highly vulnerable to disruption, which would have rapidly robbed the division of both ammunition and the ability to maneuver as its fuel reserves ran out. Due to the narrowness of the breakthrough, enemy forces to its immediate left and right would be available to simply pinch the gap closed, thereby trapping the enemy spear-head in an envelopment. It must always be remembered that divisions are parts of corps, corps are parts of armies and armies are parts of army groups. The operational employment of an entire panzer corps or Panzergruppe would enable for multiple penetrations along the front, which would serve to confront the enemy with multiple foci of advance, thereby causing him to have to divide his attention to several different sectors of the front simultaneously, which means reserves would have to be doled-out to multiple sectors simply to maintain a contiguous front, or an organized withdrawal would have to be ordered to fulfill the same purpose. Either way, the focus of the enemy’s efforts would be on the defense, of using reserves defensively to either fill gaps in the current front or to establish a new defensive line at which withdrawing units would have sufficient protection to reorganize. The defender would not commit his operational reserves without knowing where the enemy’s operational center of gravity is focused, to ensure that a counter-offensive would actually have any effect at all and raise the potential for inflicting some of the psychological angst the defender is experiencing upon the attacker. Psychologically, this would lead to confusion in the enemy headquarters, which, while being subjected to air and or artillery attacks, would be attempting to conduct an organized withdrawal coordinated with neighboring units, while at the same time attempting to get the best picture of enemy strength, location and intentions, which would be far from easy under the chaotic circumstances of the combined-arms assault. These factors are what lead to the “disorientation and dislocation of the enemy command system” that Posen references and the “grand scale” mentioned by Citino. Situating Blitzkrieg Within German Military History Throughout its existence Prussia-Germany has had to wage wars that are “short and lively” due to the political unit’s precarious position in Central Europe. Bordered by France in the West, Austria in the South and Poland or Russia to the East, a military well-suited to quick, mobile operations was a prerequisite to the survival of the State as an independent political unit, since it did not have the necessary manpower reserves to win a war of attrition against a coalition of its neighbors. These wars had to result in a decisive victory which would keep the enemy from choosing to launch a new offensive and to keep any other neighbors from getting involved in the conflict. Bewegungskrieg (“maneuver doctrine” or “war of maneuver” or “the war of movement”) thusly served both an offensive and a defensive purpose: destroying the blatant threat in a rapid campaign and due to the rapidity of the onset and conclusion of offensive operations, actively discouraging other neighboring powers from getting involved, lest they suffer the same fate, especially given that Prussian (or German) forces would have been fully mobilized and ready for action. Blitzkrieg did not evolve from out of nothingness. Guderian’s originality comes from his fully embracing the potential of the new weapons which debuted in World War One: the tank and the aircraft. He did not develop a whole new doctrine from whole cloth, rather, he took existing Prussian-German doctrine, which had always been focused upon mobility, and revealed how tanks and aircraft could aid in regaining operational mobility upon the twentieth-century battlefield. Certainly, his work was radical, yet just how revolutionary was it' In terms of military tradition, Blitzkrieg is Bewegungkrieg, simply with the new weapons previously eluded to being utilized to achieve their full operational potential for the purpose of aiding and promoting the break-through of the enemy front. Blitzkrieg was merely updating existing doctrine, not seeking to supplant it. The radicalness comes from a wish to invest heavily in new equipment that had a particularly so-so record in the First World War, largely due to it being first-generation, new and untested equipment and thereby totally displacing the cavalry, which had had a proud tradition of service in European armies going back centuries. Frederick the Great In 1927,then-Major Heinz Guderian wrote about Prussian operations during the winter of 1678-79, which he labeled a “complete success” and attributes the success not to successful battlefield victories, which he indicates were “either indecisive or entirely unfavorable,” but to the “moral effect of the relentless pursuit,” which thereby placed enormous strain upon the enemy’s lines of communication and the “tremendous speed of the . . . advance convinced the exhausted Swedes that only the fastest possible retreat could save them from destruction.” Frederick William’s troops had covered 540 kilometers from January 18th thru February 2nd and did so “despite bad roads, snow, and ice.” The icy weather made river crossings easy, since the “sleds of infantry and artillery sleighs . . . could both advance rapidly and preserve their strength. [Italics mine] The drive brought Bewegungskrieg directly to the enemy.” Averaging 36 kilometers per day would be a fine rate of advance for a modern operational unit; for an army in the 17th-century such an incredible rate of advance would have been downright miraculous and it is no wonder that the Swedes were compelled to retreat as rapidly as possible in the face of such an advance. Yet, Guderian noted that the advancing columns tended to disperse and spread-out along the roads, which limited the ability to bring concentrated fire to bear on the decisive point. Frederick the Great “usually saw one path to victory, and that was fixing the enemy army in place, maneuvering near or . . . around it to” gain a “favorable position for the attack, and then smashing it with an overwhelming blow from an unexpected direction.” Furthermore, “[t]he King was also more consistently willing than any of his contemporaries to seek decisions through offensive operations.” Frederick “loved soldiers and uniforms and guns.” The army was his “obsession,” and he trained and drilled his men meticulously. This meant that Frederick’s army was capable of loading and shooting faster, change formations more rapidly and more cohesively and engage tactical maneuvers with relative ease. Frederick once wrote that his infantry were capable of “forming up more rapidly than any other troops on earth.” This emphasis on drill lead to increased efficiency on the battlefield that was unmatched by any potential adversary and the ability to bring increased rates of firepower to bear upon the enemy due to Frederick’s army being able to fire four to five rimes per minute, while their adversaries may only, at best, have been able to achieve only half that. Yet, training and drilling are only going to get an army so far, as conducting actual operations is a different matter from marching to and fro about the parade grounds. During the Silesian Wars, Frederick’s army had been consistently outmaneuvered by the opposing force and the learning curve for both king and army was steep. At the Battle of Mollwitz (1741), a victory had been achieved, but it was indecisive. The indecisive nature of this battle had left Frederick wanting, for he wanted decisive victories and this meant an emphasis on speed and mobility. Frederick downsized his cavalry arm in regards to the height of the troops and the size of their mounts to increase the speed, and thereby the striking power, of his cavalry. The artillery, too, was to stress nimbleness via the use of lighter three-pounder guns; two would be attached to each infantry regiment in order to provide additional firepower “at the point of contact.” Frederick came to eschew the linear tactics of the day in favor of the “oblique attack,” in which combat power would be concentrated along a single wing and used to take the enemy in the flank or engage his weakest point. Essentially, Frederick was advocating turning one wing of his army into a “hammer” with which to strike the enemy and the other would be the “anvil” and sandwiched between hammer and anvil would be the enemy army. During the Seven Years War, Frederick made effective use of operating along “interior lines,” due to his French, Russian and Austrian foes being arrayed in a semi-circle around Prussia. The difficulties of conducting coalition warfare at a time before modern communications meant that a larger force, much more so one that had some members speaking French, some others German and still others Russian or Swedish, along with their own distinctive military cultures meant that the chances of Frederick facing a coordinated offensive were remote, so Frederick was able to march against and engage them in turn. He was able to remain close to his lines of supply, while the enemy—especially the French and Russians—were quite distant from theirs and would have required a far greater degree of living off of the land, which would ultimately grow exhausted, thereby forcing a retreat or rash offensive decisions. In 1757, Frederick wished to knock Austria out of the war and embarked upon a campaign to seize all of Bohemia. He had deployed his 115,000 men into four columns that were spread out over 210 kilometers; surprisingly “[c]oordination problems on the march were few” and the entirety of the Prussian force arrived at Prague, fought the Austrians outside the city, drove the survivors back into the city and laid siege to Prague. At Prague, the terrain was poorly suited to large-scale operational maneuvers with its marshes, drained ponds and silt. This meant that the maneuvers were conducted more slowly than Frederick would have preferred and the Austrians had sufficient time to properly analyze and react to his actions. The Austrians were able to redeploy and strengthen the endangered flank. While the Austrians retreated into the city, casualties for either side had not been light: 24,000 Austrians and 18,000 Prussians were killed. Frederick then received word of an approaching relief force and chose to take his force out to attack it at Kolin. At Kolin, Frederick’s greatest problem appears to have been a lack of adequate reserves coupled with poor reconnaissance. Prussian “attacks were irresistible and cut great gaps in the Austrian ranks opposite them.” Yet, deprived of reserves due to the losses at Prague, Frederick was incapable of exploiting this potential tactical break-through and Austria had adequate reserves to plug gaps in the line as soon as they formed. Frederick’s lack of reserves meant that the Austrians were free to react to his movements without undue stress being placed upon their own forces. The French and Imperial forces advanced through Thuringia, making use of the best road network in Europe which would expedite their advance and clearly identify them as the greatest danger to Prussia. Frederick’s army has covered the 170 miles from Dresden to Erfurt in 13 days. With the painful lessons of Prague and Kolin still in his mind, Frederick seems to have chosen to become somewhat sneakier, since his army was still numerically-weak and he could not afford to engage in another frontal assault into a well-prepared position ala Kolin. Up to this point, all of Frederick’s maneuvering had been tactical or grand tactical in nature; now, whether by design to preserve his force as much as possible or via some momentary inspiration or intuition, Frederick chose to engage in his maneuvering beyond the view of the enemy. Enemy forces cannot engage what they cannot see, and Frederick’s troops were able to maneuver with minimal or no harassment. Frederick the Great was now thinking operationally. At Rossbach, The Franco-Imperial forces chose to break camp and seek Frederick out, but their intelligence was imperfect as to his location. Their decision to abandon their prepared camp meant that Frederick would not have to worry about launching another frontal assault and likely sustain casualties his army could ill-afford. The Franco-Imperial army took its time to break camp and begin to deploy, yet Frederick believed the Allies were in fact retreating, not moving to engage him. He had received reports of enemy cavalry movements, but dismissed them as nothing more than prudent reconnaissance measures to would most likely have served the purpose of gauging how strong of a rear-guard should be left behind, but when a patrol “clearly identified infantry formations on the march” Frederick knew that the allied force was not in retreat; he chose to hit the Allies on the march, achieve complete tactical and operational surprise and destroy them before they would have a chance to fully deploy. The Allies still believed the Prussian army to be in retreat; as such, there forces would be deployed more to support a pursuit, and would not be ready to fight from any sort of prepared or carefully-chosen positions. Complete surprise having been achieved due to utilizing the terrain as cover, Seydlitz’s cavalry slammed into the Allied cavalry; the enemy cavalry retreated in disarray and panic, Seydlitz’s forces hot on their heels. The Franco-Imperial cavalry even retreated through their own lines of infantry, thereby disrupting their formations and serving to confuse the infantry’s ability to discern friend from foe. The Prussian infantry was not far behind their cavalry and added to the chaotic situation facing the Franco-Imperial infantry, with the more forward units fully or partially deployed for battle and the units coming up still in march formation. Prussian infantry, cavalry and cannon savaged the unprepared enemy columns inflicting casualties of 10,000 dead for the loss of a mere 169 of their own with 379 wounded. The maneuver that Frederick conducted at Leuthern involved a cavalry feint towards Borne, while the entirety of the rest of his army wheeled to the south and then the south-east, covered the whole time behind mountains, in order to attack the unprepared enemy left wing, while elements of the enemy force advanced towards Borne, but with every step they took they were that much farther from being capable of providing aid to their left wing when the Prussian infantry launched their assault. This now meant that the entire Austrian battle-line was hopelessly out of position and had to redeploy ninety degrees to the south, something that would have been difficult enough to do without having to conduct a portion of it under enemy fire. This meant that Austrian forces would not have been ready to be committed as a cohesive force, since the Prussian momentum had to be stopped; the piece-meal commitment of Austrian forces meant they were marching to their doom. Prussian losses numbered 6,000 and the Austrians lost 12,000 with an additional 15,000 taken prisoner. At Zorndorf, Frederick attempted to prosecute Bewegungskrieg against the Russians, who had finally made their presence known operationally by invading East Prussia. The terrain at Zorndorf would not be friendly to Bewegungskrieg, due to “numerous hillocks and depressions, along with three gullies running north-west to south-east” and three from the west which were all “ten to fifteen meters below the plain.” The commander of the Russian force, Fermor, learned of Frederick’s maneuvering to come up on his right-rear, and Fermor had no interest in having a repeat of Leuthen on his hands, so as soon as it was learned that the Prussians were in the area, he ordered his troops to alter their position so Frederick’s maneuver was effectively nullified, since instead of coming up on the right-rear on the Russian army, he was coming up on it frontally, which is what Frederick’s maneuver was supposed to avoid. Frederick launched a frontal assault, but the contours of the battlefield made the launching of a coordinated assault impossible, and this meant that the schwehrpunct on the Prussian left was lacking in sufficient strength to mount a decisive assault, then a Russian cavalry attack took the Prussians completely by surprise, causing the Prussians “to throw off all discipline” and flee. Fortunately for the Prussians, the terrain of the battlefield caused this Russian counterattack to become as uncoordinated as the Prussian attack had become and the Russians made themselves vulnerable to a riposte delivered by Frederick’s reserve cavalry, which blunted their advance. The results of the battle were 22,000 Russian dead, and the Prussians had sustained losses similar to the Austrians at Leuthen. Frederick had had every intention of “Leuthen-ing” the Russians, and his approach march had marched a ring around the Russian force, but instead of revisiting Leuthen, he was reliving the nightmare of Kolin. “He had fought, literally down to the last man and shell, leaving the field soaked in blood” and had very little to show for it, for his intention was to destroy the Russian army he had faced, not only demolishing half of it. This was because he had lost strategic surprise due to enemy reconnaissance being aware of his movements and Fermor knew what he was attempting to do and took the appropriate countermeasures; to apply a scene from Patton to this situation: Fermor had read Frederick’s book and knew how to turn the tables on him and take appropriate counter-measures to turn what Frederick perceived as bold operational maneuver that would ensure his victory to the restoration of the operational status quo. Helmuth von Moltke Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder) became Chief of the Prussian General Staff in 1857, a position he held until 1888. At this time, the Industrial Revolution had matured to a point where the weapons of war had become so much more lethal over a greater distance, that the linear tactics of Frederick and Napoleon were being overtaken by technology with innovations such as the Minié Ball, which greatly improved upon the amount of time it took to load a musket due to the ammunition being a lot easier to insert, the development of the percussion cap and it also allowed rifles and muskets to have an effective range quintuple of their Napoleonic versions. The rifle and breach-loading artillery improved accuracy and rate of fire, respectively. Mass armies also meant that there would be all the more personnel to field these more lethal, accurate weapons. At Rossbach (1757), Frederick has an army of 22,000 men, and Austrian casualties at Könniggrätz (1866) alone would number twice that of Frederick’s entire army. Command and control of these monstrous armies would pose a problem, as it had for Napoleon in 1812 with an army of similar strength and the French emperor was “at his best” with armies numbering fewer than 85,000. The telegraph and telephone were also of limited utility due to their need for a “static system of poles and wires” which would make the telegraph all but useless in a mobile campaign. While the mass army was a large force, the difficulty of command and control would grow in direct proportion to the size of the force, so it would have difficulties doing anything “much more than marching straight ahead and crashing into whatever happened to be in front of it.” The end result of this would be a bloody slaughter, made all the more bloodier by the technological revolution taking place in terms of ammunition and fire-arms. Moltke’s art of war was rooted in Frederickian tradition as he wrote that “modern conduct of war is marked by the striving for a great and rapid decision.” He goes on to cite factors that push for this “rapid termination of the war: the struggle of the armies; the difficulty of provisioning them; the cost of being mobilized; the interruption of commerce, trade, business and agriculture.” Moltke was speaking of achieving a decisive decision as soon as possible to minimize prolonged disruptions to the national economy, the national budget at thereby the civilian population. He also saw to the adoption of the breech-loading Dreyse Needle Gun in 1858, which, in the hands of a well-trained infantryman could get off ten shots per minute—an innovation which would greatly increase the power of the Prussian army. Moltke was also closely involved with the development of the railroad in Prussia to ensure that there were rail-lines going to all potential deployment points along the borders. German military art not only stressed speed, mobility and always seeking to attack—it also fully embraced the latest technology of the period and developed and implemented the militarization of this technology to the utmost to gain the most tactical, operational or strategic utility out of the technology. Through the use of superior technology, hopefully the “rapid decision” Moltke spoke of could be reached that much more rapidly and that this would allow the Prussian Army the ability to maneuver around, envelop and annihilate its enemies. Moltke stressed careful, preparatory staff work, and broadened the scope of the General Staff to reflect this through the establishment of new sections to cover mobilization, geographical and statistical analysis and military history. In the age of the mass army, plans could no longer be developed on-the-fly as Frederick had done; rather they required careful timing and coordination to ensure that the proper numbers and types of troops would arrive by train at the proper time and that their necessary provisions and ammunition would either be attached to the same locomotive or timed to arrive as close as possible to the disembarkation of the troops. This meant that Moltke had numerous plans drawn-up for all sorts of contingencies. Moltke sought to fight cauldron battles (Kesselschlachten) and to do this the mass army was useless due to its poor ability to maneuver, but if the mass army were split into distinct armies or army groups, mobility could be restored so that these armies would “march separately but fight jointly.” Once one army had engaged and tied-down the enemy, the other separate parts would be directed to march to the other’s aid and envelop the enemy. Moltke was not developing a new way of Prussian war-making, rather, he was updating Frederickian war-making to take into account the military developments that came out of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of the fielding of citizen mass-armies that would pose problems of supply and command and control, so Moltke sought to manage this serious problem by only bringing the mass army together when it was time to fight allowed for the mass army to maneuver as separate armies on the operational level, thereby providing the Prussian military with considerable flexibility. This differed from Napoleonic thinking which stressed concentration “as early as possible,” which had the effect of robbing Moltke’s adversaries of mobility. The problem for the Austrians in 1866 and the French in 1870-71 was that Moltke had taken the Napoleonic playbook and modified it, which provided the innovation on the operational level that provided him with the decisive edge in both maneuver and battle. The importance of planning cannot be stressed enough, for the internal-combustion engine had yet to be developed and this meant that the logistical network was only partially industrialized. The railroad could only move goods from Point A to Point B—it could not increase the speed with which supplies and weapons were loaded into the rail-cars, nor could it devise the most optimum manner in which to pack them, nor was it capable of transporting the items in question from storage within the depot to the station. All of these activities were still largely dependent upon humans and horses for doing the work of getting the items necessary for modern war onto the trains in the first place. Logistics came to the fore with the mass army: from July 24 to August 3 1,200 trains passed over nine trunk lines carrying 350,000 troops, 87,000 horses and 8,400 wagons and artillery pieces. Yet, supply problems were quite egregious: after the Battle of Sedan, the Prussian Second Army was subsisting on captured enemy supplies, even though the railroads assigned to it had rail-cars sitting idle laden with 16,830 tons of provisions, which would have been sufficient provisions to support the army for nearly a month. The army’s Route Inspectorate began the campaign with a 2,000-wagon reserve in July, but by mid-October that number had dwindled to a mere twenty. By the time the Germans reached Paris and successfully invested it, they were 200 miles from their rail-heads and there was only one operational rail-line since the French had sabotaged all the others as they withdrew. Fortunately for von Moltke, the French Army of the Second Empire was irresolute, poorly armed and poorly lead. At Sedan, he achieved a Kesselschlachen, but, while ultimately successful, the envelopment did not hit the French like a wave—the envelopment was “progressive” and the flanks were “extended by degrees” until the jaws of the encirclement were closed shut, according to von Schleiffen. Bewegungskrieg and World War One It could be argued that Germany waged two distinct wars during the First World War: Stellungskrieg—“warfare of position”—in the West and Bewegungskrieg in the East. While the Western Front came to be characterized by the ubiquitous lines of trenches, barbed-wire and suicidal frontal assaults against these prepared positions which would merely lead to a repeat of Frederick’s debacle at Kolin, only leading to the infliction of tens of thousands of casualties per side. The trenches, wire, machine gun and modern artillery had all come together “to rob the front of any vestige of mobility” on the Western Front, yet, on the eastern front, Bewegungskrieg “began and did not stop.” Due to the wide expanses on the eastern front, that would only continue to widen the further the German Army penetrated into Russia, it was not possible to have deployed adequate forces in sufficient depth due to the fact that the western front of the First World War was a relatively narrow stretch of territory, for which both sides had adequate numbers of troops to man every inch of the lines of trenches and adequate machine guns and artillery to harden the positions against attack. This enabled the Germans and Austro-Hungarians and the Russians to attempt “vast and daring maneuvers” very much in keeping with the spirit of the slugging match the Wehrmacht and Red Army would engage in from 1941-45. Yet, the poor state of infrastructure the more east one went from Germany meant that rapid movements would not be possible, therefore Tannenberg would not be the “magic bullet” that would end the campaign in the east. The Battle of Tannenberg of 1914 was the only series of operations during the war that had any commonality between the war that the German General Staff had been planning for and the one it wound up having to fight. The German 8th Army utilized the “excellent” East Prussian rail system to stymie the advance of two Russian armies by out-maneuvering the two slower, less-coordinated Russian armies, encircling and defeating one at Tannenberg and defeat the second one two weeks later at Mansurian Lakes. The victory at Tannenberg marked the “only complete Kesselschlacht victory of World War One.” The Russian 1st and 2nd Armies were to locate the main German force (Prittwitz’s 8th Army) and destroy it in a Moltkean operation that was designed for one army to find the Germans and achieve a position whereby the Germans would position themselves to be arrayed against this force frontally, while the other army would Hindenberg from behind and destroy the German 8th Army; then they would advance on Königsberg, just as the Russians did twice during the Seven Year’s War. Shortly after the Russians began their campaign, the Russian 1st Army was moving slower than anticipated, as the roads, if they are to be called such, “were little more than sandy tracks through dense pine forests.” The forests forced the Russians to use the poor road network all the more and it shouldn’t be any surprise that these paths “collapsed under the weight of men, horses and wagons.” The movement of the two Russian armies was further hampered by their overreliance upon cavalry, due to each horse requiring twelve pounds of grain per day whether or not they were seeing any action. Additionally, the Russians were transmitting all their orders via telegraph in the clear, a glaring, incompetent breach of operational security. The new commander of 8th Army, Paul von Hindinberg, being able to read the Russians’ mail, knew that the Russian 2nd Army was dawdling, since there was a “constant” stream of messages from the Stavka “telling him to hurry.” Due to the slow pace of the Russian advance, Hindenberg had plenty of time to properly bring his forces together for the decisive battle, while the German 1st Cavalry Division was assigned to harass the Russian 1st Army, which was advancing ever so slowly, due to having been attacked several times previously. Deprived of any sort of flank protection, the 2nd Russian Army under Samsonev was easy pickings for the 8th Army and it was surrounded and destroyed: 90,000 Russian soldiers surrendered to the Germans. A fresh Russian offensive across the Vistula in Autumn 1914 had unnerved the Germans. Hindenberg, newly-promoted to to command of all German forces in the eastern theater, sought a typically offensive solution to the problem of defending Silesia: “[w]e had to find the way to his exposed, or merely slightly protected flank.” This meant thrusting towards the gap that had developed between the Russian 1st and (reconstituted) 2nd Armies from a northerly direction, since they had previously beaten off an attack from the south. The logistical wizardry of this operation is truly spectacular, as the entire German 9th Army (composed of 18 divisions) was moved by rail over a five day period from the south to the north, leaving only a weak covering force of “untried units.” In order to protect their now weakened southern flank, the Germans had destroyed many of the rail lines and bridges as they fell back in the face of the Russian counter-offensive. Both sides at Lodz were working to encircle the other. When the 2nd Army’s position was growing increasingly precarious, Grand Duke Nichols directed 1st Army to provide three divisions to be sent to on the march to aid 2nd Army, and 5th Army countermarched to attack the German 25th Corps, which now found itself, instead of working to encircle the Russian 2nd Army found itself encircled by the Russian 5th and the three divisions provided by the Russian 1st. The 25th Corps broke out of its encirclement by organizing itself into “a huge, concentrated phalanx” that launched an attack in a “totally unexpected direction to the northeast” and slammed into a “barely deployed” corps, overran it, broke out of the encirclement and wheeled back to the safety of friendly lines and took up its former place in the line. The men of the corps had marched and engaged the enemy for nine days without rest. Neither the Germans nor the Russians were able to achieve a decisive victory due to the difficulties inherent in wielding effective command and control over mass armies: 250,000 men in the case of the Germans and 600,000 in the case of the Russians. The Legacy of Versailles In several respects, the Treaty of Versailles forced the new Reichswehr to innovate for the Treaty placed serious restrictions upon the military such as seriously limiting its strength and equipment, therefore the Reichswehr had to get the most out of what it did possess and engage in covert efforts to circumvent the Treaty. The new Truppenamt (Troop Office), the newly-formed replacement for the outlawed General Staff, set about studying what had went wrong in the prior conflict; out of this soul-searching came works such as Rommel’s Attacks and Guderian’s Achtung! Panzer, though both were published in the mid-thirties when the Weimar Republic and Truppenamt had ceased to exist, replaced by the Third Reich and the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, Army High Command), respectively. The Truppenamt’s analysis of the First World War up to the First Battle of the Marne “did not challenge the Schleiffen view that total victory had been possible” and “it assumed that technical failure, not faulty strategy or doctrine, was the chief cause of the initial defeat” and that the failure seemed due to failures to “interfere with French mobilization,” redeployment and inappreciation given to armies whose primary means of movement is by the foot or hoof have limits of speed upon them for conducting encirclement maneuvers. Doesn’t this admission indicate a doctrinal failure in the belief that foot-infantry and horse-cavalry would be regularly capable of encircling an enemy mass army' Due to the prohibition of Germany fielding a mass army, this lead the Truppenamt to “place emphasis on speed and maneuver” and served as a catalyst which attracted German planners towards mobile operations. General Hans von Seeckt wished to emphasize several future demands: increased mobility via “the fullest possible use” of the internal-combustion engine that would aid with mobility of combat units and to improve the logistical efficiency and rapid mobilization. He was unimpressed with the so-called “lessons of World War One” such as “the invulnerability of entrenched infantry, the futility of infantry assault, the omnipresence of the machine gun.” He had personally borne witness to the 2nd Guards division seize fifty-three enemy positions during the 1915 Gorlice campaign “through the skillful use” of bringing adequate firepower to bear and movement. Seeckt held to the belief that mass armies were “anachronistic” and that while these armies had increased in size, they had suffered a corresponding decrease in effectiveness. The army he saw as embodying the future only had to be large enough only to deter and, if necessary, fight-off a surprise attack; its strength would be focused upon mobility due to a large body of cavalry, light machine guns and a “full complement of motorized and/or mechanized units.” This mobility would allow for battles of annhialation, while French doctrine was thinking of future warfare “in terms of static positions . . . and stalemate.” In a 1928 article, Seeckt wrote that “destruction of the enemy army . . . is still the highest goal of war.” It isn’t that attacking entrenched infantry was impossible, rather, what was impossible was launching assaults frontally upon a prepared position against defenders who wielded considerable firepower—a mistake from which Frederick learned from, then repeated with similarly bloody results and his successors in the First World War attacking repeatedly with nothing to show for it save a mountain of corpses, due to moving the schwehrpunct from the military-plane and attempting to translate it to the psychological, which explains Falkenhayn’s rationale for the Battle of Verdun, which only succeeded in bleeding both the French and German armies with the Germans having nothing to show for it. Similar casualties for both sides is not a victory, it is merely a restoration of the status quo as both armies are still at the same ratio of personnel after the battle as before. Von Seeckt convened “57 subcommittees and countless sub-committees totaling some 400 officers” with each committee being responsible for drafting “a concise study, the purpose of which was to answer four fundamental questions” which were “1. What new situations arose in the war that had not been considered before the war' 2. How effective were our pre-war views in dealing with the above situations' 3. What new guidelines have been developed from the use of new weaponry in the war' 4. Which new problems put forward by the war have yet been found'” Seeckt was not willing to dismiss the cavalry as an anachronism, but he did recognize that its role would be far more limited than it had been. The age of the tactical cavalry-charge was over, but he still believed that cavalry was still capable of effective maneuver, and that the development of aircraft and armored vehicles would serve as an adjunct of the cavalry, to provide additional reconnaissance and support capabilities. In other words, the purpose of the tank was merely to support the cavalry, not to act independently and replace the cavalry in the shock and pursuit roles. While it is correct for Seeckt to have stressed cooperation between all arms, he was not quite able to fully embrace the potential of the new weapons for the full transformative impact they could have upon the battlefield. All Hans von Seekt managed to do was plant the seeds of the idea of Blitzkrieg, but it would fall to others to water the seed, care for the sapling and help it grow into a mighty tree. From 1921-23, Seeckt reviewed and issued an “almost dizzying succession” of tactical manuals which included a manual on combined-arms warfare, field fortifications, one for the infantry, one for the artillery, the rifle squad, the signal service and the machine gun section. Seeckt was more interested in stressing combined-arms as the keys to victory over mechanization. He stressed the initiative of individual commanders and was not seeking to bind them within a rigid doctrine. The Stosstrupp tactics of 1918 were formally incorporated into Reichswehr doctrine; the attack was to advance as a torrent of “independent but interconnected teams”, relying on firepower and the concealing power of the natural terrain for protection, with the objective of seeking out the flanks of the enemy and penetrating into his positions, thereby “fusing past wisdom with present knowledge, and thus readying the German Army for its future rebirth.” Lessons From World War One: Rommel and Guderian The German General Staff was planning for what came to be known as the First World War as Bewegungskrieg, as exemplified by the deep operational penetrations called for in the strategic plan designed by General Count Alfred von Schleiffen. Yet, while the General Staff was aiming for feats of operational daring that would have made Napoleon envious, they failed to take into account the pace of technological change that had taken place in the world since 1893, particularly of the considerable firepower that the machine gun gave to infantry. In the initial combat engagements they write about, Guderian and Rommel both mention the heavy casualties German forces sustained due to heavy enemy fire at both Haelen and Bleid. Even before the agony of the trenches came into being, with wave after wave of men being ordered “over the top,” the machine gun had proven its ability to inhibit rapid maneuver upon the modern battlefield. Haelen also laid bare the uselessness of cavalry in the face of accurate, high-volume and concentrated small-arms fire; the four German cavalry regiments that participated in the operation had lost 24 officers, 468 men and 843 horses. Guderian ascribes these high losses to flawed German cavalry doctrine which stressed that cavalry primarily fight from horse-back and that the authors of German cavalry doctrine were “hankering after the great cavalry battles of the past,” and in so doing, “brush[ed] aside all intervening [technological] developments.” Guderian goes on to quote von Schleiffen, and the Chief of the General Staff effectively wrote-off cavalry as belonging to a bygone era. Guderian was also critical of the High Command’s failure to make adequate use of aerial reconnaissance and how command of aerial resources was placed with army and corps headquarters, which lead to the receipt of only a sporadic and incomplete view as to the disposition of the enemy. At Bleid, Rommel and his platoon faced a “heavy fog” that limited visibility to “fifty to eighty yards.” While Rommel certainly did lead his men with care through the fog, his mind was clearly focused upon the establishment and maintenance of contact with the enemy for the purposes of the attack. In this battle, Rommel demonstrated a quality that would be with him throughout his whole military career: “a readiness to act, rather than to wait, to attack at once and in person rather than make a prudent plan and form up appropriate forces.” Certainly, these instincts could serve a platoon commander very well, but what about a divisional, corps or army commander' Such qualities in an operational –level commander could lead to great problems upon the battlefield, such as, most notably, being out of contact with one’s staff, due to the commander always riding with the most forward leading elements of a division or personally “rounding up every can of [gasoline]” that he could locate and personally ferrying them out to an artillery unit that had been rendered immobile and incapable of participating in an assault. Yet, this notion of continually attacking and pursuing the enemy had a proud tradition in German military culture, for it “was the Prussian way” and the “Prussian officer was expected to attack,” for “Frederick the Great has stated on numerous occasions, the Prussian army always attack[s].” As Rommel learned, fog can hamper an attacker and support a defender, for the fog blinds the attacker and provides a natural means of concealment to the defender, who doesn’t need to be able to lay-down accurate fire in order to pin-down and suppress the attacker. In an urban environment, fog will greatly aid a dug-in enemy in this regard, as every dwelling has the potential to be turned into a fortress. Rommel planned to counter this ability of the enemy’s by burning straw to compel enemy troops to come out of hiding. It should come as no surprise that Lieutenant Rommel chose to seize this troublesome farmhouse in a pincers-attack, so that the defenders would be encircled to be bring about their capitulation or annhialation. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote that the lowest realization of warfare is to attack the cities of the enemy. In his observations on the action at Bleid, Rommel is in agreement and states that attacks on urban areas “should be avoided whenever possible” due to the inevitably high rate of casualties for the attacker. His principal means of neutralizing a village would be to concentrate upon the use of machine guns, mortars and other small-arms to pin-down and suppress the defenders; the purpose of this would be to draw the enemy out of his prepared positions so that he could be successfully engaged “outside the village or town” for “[o]nce contact with the enemy has been made, movement is generally paralyzed by hostile fire.” Rommel’s tactical solution to the problem was first, to avoid an engagement in the vicinity of the urban area if at all possible; if battle must be given, the commitment of direct and indirect fire support must be sufficient to ensure the freedom of movement of the attacking infantry. For both Guderian and Rommel the issue was one of freeing the infantry to be able to maneuver as reasonably as possible upon the modern battlefield. Guderian was seeking a technical solution to this fundamental problem, while Rommel was seeking to identify tactical solutions: using the weapons at-hand far more wisely then they had been used in the Great War. But both of them were focused upon regaining Bewegungskrieg, thereby outright rejecting the notion that positional warfare, complete with its lines of trenches, barbed-wire and machine guns, had made maneuver all but impossible. “Defense was mechanized; attack was not.” The tools of the mature Industrial Revolution—the railroad and the internal combustion engine—had greatly improved the speed within which reserves could be moved about sectors of a given front to provide reinforcements at decisive points; the points at which major offensives were going to be launched become obvious due to artillery bombardments that could stretch on for days or even, weeks. Both of these facts strengthened the power of the defense by making enemy intentions blatantly obvious to the defender. In order to overcome these problems, an attacker needed to be able to have its front-line forces capable of moving as rapidly, if not more so, than the capabilities of the enemy’s transportation infrastructure to support the deployment and employment of reserves. If an attacker’s forces were capable of moving faster than the defender could react, hopefully the initiative would not slip from the attacker’s grasp, thereby enabling him to dictate the ebb and flow of the conduct and tempo of operations. Only through the use of superior mobility and firepower could the attacker hope to stop or disrupt the timely arrival of enemy reserves, and thereby cause any hope of an enemy counter-offensive at the operational level to be still-born. Yet, “at the time of the [First World] [W]ar engine-powered offensive weapons were in their infancy “ and were not capable of being used to their maximum potential to turn the war of attrition along the Western Front to a war of maneuver. In Attacks, Rommel is consistently mentioning the need for firepower at the platoon and battalion level, yet he only confines his calls to ensuring sufficient numbers of machine guns, mortars and other infantry weapons are readily available to be able to suppress the enemy. But this is because his work is not theoretical in nature, for Rommel wrote Attacks partially as a memoir and partially to impart doctrinal advice to German infantry officers in the present based upon his experiences. Unlike Guderian, Rommel was not calling for the creation of a new branch of the service and doctrine to solve the Stellungkrieg problem. This is not to insinuate that Erwin Rommel was unimaginative, for one was not promoted to Generalfeldmarschal in the German Army without being able to think outside of the box. Therefore, it is unsurprising that Rommel makes no mention of the potential of the airplane or of the tank, rather he was simply interested in providing the infantry with more firepower, not in making this additional firepower highly mobile via gasoline-powered machinery, but that doesn’t mean that Rommel was not quick to recognize the potential of the tank. In regards to command, control and communications (C3) both Rommel and Guderian are cognizant of its importance. Rommel writes for the need for adequate C3 on several occasions, as does Guderian. Rommel’s concerns are predominantly confined to preventing friendly-fire, mainly from friendly artillery not being aware of the positions of friendly infantry and unknowingly opening fire on them, which is exactly where the focus of a junior infantry officer should be regarding liason with the artillery. Guderian treats C3 in a far more sustained fashion due to the fact that his work is concerned with far more than providing improved infantry tactics for the next war. Guderian stresses C3 right from the start by laying out the division of labor required for a tank crew: the driver is responsible for both driving the tank and performance of basic maintenance and repairs and of close cooperation with the gunner to ensure that the ride is smooth to allow for the easiest ability of achieving a targeting solution. In a two-man Panzer, the gunner was also the commander of the vehicle. The tank commander coordinates the activities of the entire crew, works the signals and radio equipment and ensures that his individual tank is properly coordinated with the company his vehicle is subordinated to in the chain-of-command. In laying-out a hypothetical assault, Guderian stresses communication between a combined-arms battlegroup practically immediately when discussing the threat posed by mines and how combat engineers would need to be capable of accompanying the first assault wave and of keeping pace with them to ensure mine-fields are neutralized as expeditiously as possible. Naturally, sufficiently miniaturized radios are a prerequisite for the necessary coordination between the combat engineers and the other arms of the battlegroup to ensure that all efforts, including direct and indirect aerial or artillery support, is as closely coordinated as possible in order to reduce friendly fire and achieve maximum combat efficiency. The key assets of a Panzer division are its tanks and other vehicles, thusly, they must be protected; in order to do so, enemy anti-tank guns must be neutralized and Guderian suggests several tactical solutions: a tank firing upon the enemy emplacement from behind cover or launching a mass armor assault and seize the guns by a coup de main, suppression of the positions via artillery or machine gun fire, or by utilizing smoke to obscure the gunner’s field of vision. These tactics are not mutually exclusive and can be pursued simultaneously, as they should be to maximize the suppression of any potential counter-attack and to sew feelings of powerlessness in the minds of the enemy. Breaking through a defensive line is one thing, but breaking the will of the enemy to fight is something altogether different, and, in the long run, far more significant since equipment losses, provided one’s industrial base and raw-material base remains intact, can always be made good on, but how does one regain the will to fight' A materially-weak army can always regain its strength, but a psychologically-crippled one that has lost the will to fight and is no longer capable of offering resistance to an aggressor has been vanquished. Since new defensive lines could always be reconstituted further back, it is important for the momentum of the advance to be maintained, so as to prevent even the preliminary work on such a defensive position from beginning. Leading elements must be strong and robust enough to maintain the pursuit and keep up the pressure upon the retreating enemy. It would be the duty of the advancing breakthrough force to destroy the enemy artillery and engage enemy armor before they could be used to counter-attack. The success of the breakthrough hinges upon preventing enemy armored reserves from being brought into action upon the point of breakthrough; if this is not accomplished, “the breakthrough has failed.” With the destruction of enemy reserve anti-tank and tank units, the way would be clear for the combined-arms kampfgruppe to continue further into enemy territory, thereby widening and deepening the bulge in the enemy’s front with the intention of seeking-out enemy assembly areas and headquarters. If this exploitation phase does not occur “the battle will end as it usually ended in the [First] World War, with a bloody and costly breakthrough that often left the attacker . . . in a salient with vulnerable flanks” that would prove to be disastrous tactical situation. This is why “the entire depth of the enemy defense” has to be brought under “simultaneous attack” in order to inhibit the ability of the enemy to identify the schwehrpunct of the attacker, by overloading his headquarters with reports of units coming under varying intensities of air, artillery or ground attack along the whole front or a large portion of it, since in order to mount a successful counter-attack, the enemy commander needs to have an adequate picture of the main point of enemy attack and the disposition of his own forces in order to be aware of what forces can be brought to bear upon the principal focus of the enemy attack. Blitzkrieg sought “an attack of such stunning range and rapidity as to confound every attempt at resistance.” In order for envelopments to take place and for Schleiffen’s dream of a modern Cannae to be achieved several factors were of critical importance: mobility, concentration and surprise since it was extremely important to envelop the enemy “before [he] realized what was happening or do anything to prevent it.” Fortunately, Prussia-Germany has always excelled at mobility and concentration and, if a Prussian-German army were to attack a foe from an unexpected sector or direction, surprise is achieved, as this paper has argued and the historical record has revealed. Blitzkrieg in Practice: Case Yellow In his characteristic impatience, Adolf Hitler wished to see operations against France kick-off as soon as possible after the defeat of Poland. On October 22, 1939, Hitler specified a start date for operations against France to commence on November 12. The initial plan, and the plan that Germany would have gone to war with in Western Europe if that start date hadn’t been moved back for a variety of reasons would not have resulted in a decisive victory, for the plan “lacked organizational depth” and possessed inadequate reserves. Hitler was informed that the most likely prognosis for the plan was failure due to “overwhelming opposition” from Allied forces, for German striking-power would have collided head-on with the most mobile elements of the Allied militaries due to the German schwehrpunct being focused upon central Belgium, and the Allied Dyle-Plan stipulated the deployment of the most mobile elements of the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force in the same sector; the result being a frontal assault and, should the initial break-through effort fail, Stellungkrieg and a repeat of 1914-18 in Flanders. The key to avoiding this needless clash was to proceed with a bold operational stroke which would outmaneuver the most mobile portions of the Allied forces without them even realizing they were being outflanked until it was too late to react. German forces were qualitatively inferior to the Allies in virtually every respect: the Germans were outnumbered nearly 2:1 in heavy artillery, the Allies possessed about 1,000 more tanks than the Germans and the Allied air forces outnumbered the Luftwaffe by nearly 1,000 aircraft. Clearly, the Germans had to avoid a battle of attrition, and they did so brilliantly, albeit with much resistance from the more conservative elements of the officer corps. Manstein ultimately prevailed it getting the schwehrpunct moved south opposite the Ardennes Forest in Luxembourg, due to his belief that Allied forces could have withdrawn to the River Somme and established a strong defensive position, therefore Manstein saw it as essential to decide the campaign in Belgium and that meant having a strong, mobile force capable of severing the lines of communication of enemy forces in Belgium by striking through the Ardennes, driving onto the River Meuse and from there to the French channel ports. Manstein maintained that the current plans would have only meant a series of frontal attacks, which would have slowed down the pace of the attack, and possibly have ultimately robbed it of all forward momentum. It would be common sense for the Allies to expect the schwehrpunct of the German attack to come through Belgium, since the Maginot Line prohibited any contemplation of an assault across the Rhine as had occurred in the Franco-Prussian War. Case Yellow could be termed as the prototypical Blitzkrieg campaign because it destroyed the offensive portion of the Allied armies in a massive Kesselschlacht and totally paralyzed the ability of the Allied command to properly react to the situation. The French were hit along a region of frontage—the Ardennes—that they believed to be impassable; as such, the troops that were in that sector were both insufficient in number and unprepared psychologically to bear the full brunt of the Panzers of Army Group A and stand much of a chance of blunting the advance. While the mechanized, combustion-engine propelled means by which this victory was accomplished were new, the doctrinal principles to which the tanks and aircraft were subordinated to were time-tested over the centuries in a series of wars. In this campaign, Guderian and Rommel were both participants, the former as a corps commander and the latter in command of the 7th Panzer Division. While Guderian favored mass, Rommel f used his forces “as if they were commando elements” and favored “slash-and-thrust tactics.” The difference is striking, as Guderian would be looking at things mainly from an operational perspective, while Rommel, attached to Hermann Hoth’s Panzer corps was viewing the situation through a more tactical lens, since by viewing his force as commando elements, this placed stress upon the individual small units, not the mass of the division. Ultimately, 7th Panzer became known as the “Ghost Division” because no one—not the Allies and not the German High Command—knew where it was because Rommel was incommunicato due to always being in the vanguard of his division, usually with the leading company. He was therefore not working to ensure that his division was advancing in a coordinated fashion with its neighbors or its own units, thereby opening up the dangerous potential for a riposte that could have run the chance of cutting-off his lines of communication and mauling his strewn-out division. Fortunately for Rommel, French dithering, indecisiveness and general ineptitude in the person of Genralissimo Maurice Gamelin and the vast majority of Gamelin’s subordinates kept such a danger from materializing. As has been previously indicated, Rommel believed in always having weapons at the ready and preferably having them firing towards the enemy as soon as they were in range, since he was steadfastly rooted to the offensive. Rommel had written that he had “found again and again that in encounter actions, the day goes to the side that is the first to plaster its opponent with fire” and that “machine-guns must be kept at the ready to open fire the instant an enemy shot is heard” and if the exact position of the enemy is not known, “fire simply must be sprayed over enemy-held territory.” This will help to reduce friendly casualties. Given the military tradition Rommel was a part of, such sentiments should hardy be surprising. This action allowed 7th Panzer to make an unopposed crossing of the Semois River, as the French commander concluded he would be out-gunned by the oncoming Germans. Then it was onto the Meuse. In the north, the Belgian Plane would bear witness to the first major tank-on-tank battle in history, as Erich Hoepner’s Panzer corps sought to secure Gembleaux and for this operation, Hoepner had at his disposal the Third and Fourth Panzer Divisions, which were “some of the best units” in terms of both training and equipment in the Panzerwaffe. The primary threat to them would come from a French cavalry corps reinforced with two armored divisions. Yet the 8th Corps of the Luftwaffe would stand ready to support the two Panzer divisions with considerable firepower provided by hundreds of fighters and dive-bombers. The French commander, Prioux, could only count on a small number of the 140 fighter aircraft of the Armee de l’air. The German advance was held up for 5.5 hours due to receiving orders that had diverted portions of the corps to aid in the taking of Liege, “poor march discipline and, in particular by repeated enemy bombing.” Despite all of this, the 3rd Panzer Division made it across the Meuse. Before 4th Panzer could get across the river, the 3rd had to do so; it was fortunate that the French did not choose to counter-attack during this night, for 3rd Panzer would have been highly vulnerable to counter-attack being split into two separate parts by the Meuse. While the French Air Force was busily pounding away at Hoeppner’s corps, word was apparently not passed on to Prioux as to the location of the Germans. 4th Panzer advanced towards Hannut and the division ran out of fuel and had to request an air-drop for the combat elements capable of action, as much of the logistical “tail” of the division still had yet to get across the Meuse in sufficient strength. With Guderian, Rheinhardt and Hoth’s corps crossing the Meuse in the Sedan sector, the air forces Prioux had at his disposal were stripped from his cavalry corps. Limited French forces were committed in order to hold back 4th Panzer’s combat forces, instead of launching a decisive attack to destroy the Germans. Hoepner was facing French forces of unknown strength, yet still chose to proceed with the assault towards Gembloux on May 13. Gunsberg chalks this up to “arrogance” on Hoepner’s part, when the more apt description should be German military tradition, rather than arrogance as Hoepner would depend upon “our own superior leadership and battle strength.” While the 4th Panzer regrouped and resupplied and the 3rd moved up it would fall to the Luftwaffe and corps artillery. Then an attack with both Panzer divisions proceeded with a concentrated German force. Case Yellow also marked considerable improvisation. Due to the commitment of German airborne forces in the Netherlands and Belgium, especially to seize the bridges over the Albert Canal, these forces were not available to aid the Panzers of Army Group A in securing crossing points for the rivers ahead of their area of responsibility, since the advance of Guderian’s Panzers was being slowed by numerous traffic jams. Reichsmarshal Göring showed considerably unusual creativity in providing Guderian with help for this problem: one hundred Fiesler Storch’s, which would be capable of carrying two men each to aid in securing endangered crossing points where Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance and ground-based reconnaissance showed the presence of enemy forces that could fortify the crossing points or destroy them. This enterprising use of air transport capacity allowed 400 German troops to arrive at positions just in time to block the lead units of the French 9th Army, thereby presenting the French with the very problem those French forces would have been able to inflict upon Guderian’s forces had the French gotten to those positions first. German forces even created ad-hoc “road closed” signs to further confuse and discourage the French. The fact that Guderian and Reinhardt’s armor was able to advance as quickly as it did through the Ardennes was due to another feet of logistical improvisation: General Kurt Zietzler, who would be appointed Chief of the General Staff after Hitler’s relief of Franz Halder, devised a solution to keep all the vehicles—1,222 tanks, 545 other tracked vehicles and 39,333 trucks and cars—supplied with adequate fuel. Trucks would move ahead of the main body and drop cans of fuel and rations at the points where it was anticipated the vehicles would be running low on fuel, yet this did nothing to alleviate the fact that these 41,000 vehicles could only use four roads, it just meant there gas tanks would be filled. Reinhardt’s corps had encountered problems in its approach to the Meuse, for the axis for its advance was but a single road down which vehicles could only advance single-file. He also had to contend with far more tenacious resistance than Rommel had and the terrain placed considerable strain on his Panzers, even the medium Mark III’s and IV’s. Despite all of these logistical difficulties, the Wehrmacht pulled-off a victory because of the narrow confines of the battlefront, which allowed for the Luftwaffe to exert its tactical air-support doctrine to truly achieve operational impact and aerial supremacy over the important Ardennes region and tie-down enemy reserves and provide reconaissance just as Guderian envisioned. Additionally, the relative confines of the battle-space meant that these German supply problems, while serious, were not truly catastrophic to the outcome of the campaign. Blitzkrieg and Russia As had been demonstrated with the French campaign, logistical difficulties are the Achilles’ Heal of Blitzkrieg, and the problems would be magnified several-fold on the Eastern Front. The vast distances of the Soviet Union meant that the logistical demands placed upon the Wehrmacht would be considerable, and, unlike it France, the discrepancy of speed between the foot-infantry, the horse and the Panzers would pose much difficulty. In France, the infantry was advancing mere hours behind the infantry at most, but along the expanses of the Eastern Front, the hours of France turned into days regarding the time it would take for the infantry to catch-up to the armor. The element of surprise—no matter if the level under consideration is the strategic, operational or tactical—requires access to a modern transportation network capable of supporting the advance of the mechanized portion of the army. European Russia simply lacked these bits of modernity that Central and Western Europeans took for granted. While Army Group Center engaged in a series of dual-envelopment operations and smaller Kesselschlachen operations from the commencement of the campaign on June 22, 1941, these early successes should not come as any sort of surprise given that the Germans were starting-off from start-lines that had been well-provisioned in the months leading up to the commencement of operations, there were adequate numbers of airfields built by combat engineers to support the Luftwaffe, weather conditions were reasonable, and the Russian military had no idea of what was about to befall them. We must now make mention of someone who has been largely absent from the narrative thus far: Adolf Hitler. His needless meddling before and during the course of the campaign was to have a deleterious impact upon the course of operations. The plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union had gone through several drafts, and, while Hitler’s interjections into the French campaign, such as adopting Manstein’s “sickle-stroke” plan, were for the better, in the East they would be for the worse. Hitler doubled the number of Panzer divisions from 10 to 21, yet the number of serviceable tanks had risen only by a quarter. Hitler did want to boost production of tanks from 800 to 1,000 units per month, but he was informed that doing so would be very costly both in marks and personnel; he relented on increasing tank production, but did not countermand his decision of increasing the number of Panzer divisions, which weakened the Panzerwaffe across the board. In May 1940, the most powerful Panzer division in the Wehrmacht had 300 tanks; by June 1941, that number had slipped to 199. After 200 miles of a continuous advance, a Panzer division may have suffered 50 percent attrition in terms of its armor in the course of operations; under the prior establishment of a Panzer division, this still would have left the divisional commander with an entire regiment, yet the changes instituted by Hitler meant that this division would in fact be depleted to 25 percent of the strength of a 1939 Panzer division. The majority of the Panzer divisions had only 160 tanks in 1941. German motorized and Panzer formations were also going to face additional problems due to insufficient stocks of domestically-produced transport. Army Group Center made good progress, but then Stalin had made it a lot easier by insisting that Red Army forces take-up positions at the new Soviet-German border, thereby abandoning the Stalin line. Stalin’s desire for as far forward of a deployment as possible played right to the strengths of German doctrine. While several Russian commanders knew the invasion was coming and sought to take counter-measures, they were still “surprised by the crushing blow of the assault” against their “vulnerably deployed” army. The critical flaw in Soviet Doctrine appears to be the belief that the invader would not be fully mobilized and concentrated before the outbreak of hostilities and that this would afford the USSR the time it needed to mobilize. It was believed that a “significant” time period would elapse between the commencement of fighting and the engagement of large bodies of troops. Yet, “some Soviet military analysts” understood that Blitzkrieg depended upon the “deployment of the bulk of the armed forces for the initial assault,” which negates Soviet doctrine as to what the “Initial period” of war would look like. This explains how Army Groups North, Center and South were able to make such rapid progress against the Red Army in the initial weeks of the campaign. Components of Army Group Center waged a successive string of battles which lead to the capture of hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners in the encirclement battles at Bialystock-Minsk, Smolensk, Guderian’s participation in the Kiev encirclement after being temporarily detatched to Rundstedt’s Army Group South and Vyazma-Bryansk. Yet, the Russian army was still always capable of withdrawing deeper into the interior. Therefore, capturing the “main body” of the enemy opposite them was something that always eluded Bock’s army group. This wasn’t going to be like France where once the Germans reached and crossed a single river (the Meuse) the enemy forces to their north— the mobile forces of the enemy—were as good as in the bag due to the limited size of the theater. The Eastern Front would stretch on seemingly forever, and, looking at the map, the farther east the Wehrmacht progressed, the wider the north-south axis of the front would become, thereby diluting any schwehrpunct as the previously concentrated forces would have to naturally dilute that concentration to maintain a contiguous front. Therefore, the farther the Germans advanced, the more diluted their combat power would become, and this was especially true of Army Group Center, which didn’t have the benefit of a narrow front, friendly locals in the Baltic States, and allied support like Army Group North could enjoy, nor did it have the mighty Don River to offer natural flank protection such as Army Group South could have enjoyed after the capture of Kiev. To quote Don Rumsfeld, Army Group Center would face a “long, hard slog” that would demand Herculian efforts from its men, horses and machines. Germany’s Panzer commanders were an impatient lot, who did not wish to be sitting around idle waiting for the infantry armies to catch up to them. Guderian and Hoth wanted to maintain the momentum that their Panzer Groups had achieved and continue the pursuit of the Red Army and essentially, one could imagine, as modern-day JEB Stuarts. This would have been all well and good if they were commanders of actual cavalry units, but they had tanks, trucks and other engine-driven equipment that required gasoline to operate; unfortunately, gasoline doesn’t grow in the ground like grass, not to mention if they encountered strong enemy forces would they burn-through their stores of ammunition' A Panzer group rendered immobile by lack of fuel yet still capable of shooting at the enemy is only half as good as a Panzer group capable of full mobility, but both are infinitely superior to a Panzer group starved of both fuel and munitions, which is entirely useless. This is even before considering where the nearest airfield(s) capable of supporting JU-52 transports would have been to have the potential of forming an “air-bridge” to keep the forces of the Panzer commanders supplied. This also meant that airfields that had been captured by the advancing armor would have had to have units left behind to defend them, thereby decreasing the combat power and mobility of the Panzer divisions, something that Guderian would have found unacceptable, since it was the duty of the foot-infantry to hold ground, since they were incapable of supporting the breakthrough beyond the range of their rifles. Army Group Center contained two of the four Panzer Groups deployed for the campaign and two infantry armies. Fedor von Bock’s objective was Moscow, yet the state of the infrastructure of the Soviet Union between his jumping-off point in occupied-Poland and Moscow was far from capable of providing the necessary level of infrastructure to support his advance, as a mere three percent of Russian roads were paved. Of course, the more the campaign wore on, the more these logistical difficulties would make their presence known. The greatest doctrinal problem which Army Group Center faced was the fact that the Panzer Groups of Hoth and Guderian would naturally outpace the foot-infantry of the 4th and 9th Armies. Blitzkrieg works fine when the objectives are within the confines of the logistical capabilities of the regional transportation network, but in the sparse, under-developed and seemingly endless landscape of European Russia, the infantry will be incapable of keeping pace with the armored and motorized formations, thereby depriving them of the support they require to hold ground and provide the necessary mass which would be required to seal-off encirclements, so that the Panzers could be freed-up to continue the advance. This was further complicated by the fact that encircled Russians did not surrender, they fought tenaciously until they had run out of ammunition, therefore this lead to lengthier mopping-up operations than had been anticipated. Without a large mass of infantry, the encirclements were not as strong as they could have been, thereby allowing untold numbers of Red Army soldiers to escape to fight again. In June and July 1941, the campaign “was following a pattern whereby armored divisions lunged forward at fifty miles per day . . . while the plodding infantry labored behind . . . at twenty miles a day or less.” The three encirclement battles waged by Army Group Center had netted a total of 1,138,000 prisoners, 5,857 tanks and 12,498 artillery pieces, which is a staggering aggregate, which would have caused any other nation but the Soviet Union to collapse. Unfortunately, by the conclusion of the Kiev encirclement and Guderian’s return to Army Group Center’s operational control, the time to be able to advance on Moscow had slipped by, due to Hitler’s diversion of Guderian to the South to capture Kiev and Hoth northwards to aid with capturing Leningrad, the Germans had simply run out of time before an especially brutal Russian Winter would make its presence known. Conclusion This paper has argued that there was very little that was revolutionary about Blitzkrieg, with the only exception being the displacement of cavalry. German military history has demonstrated a remarkable consistency in doctrine going back centuries. While weapons have certainly changed and evolved, the general strategic precepts which under-pinned the military thought of Frederick I, Frederick II, Moltke, Schleiffen, Guderian and Rommel have remained consistent; all that has changed is the age in which they live and how the political, ideological and technological have influenced the German Way of War, Bewegungskrieg. Yet there is some friction in the literature over the word Blitzkrieg. Yes, the word is Anglicized German; however, it is a word that is superior to Bewegungskrieg in terms of pronunciation and spelling, but it is also a word that has permeated throughout all of academia as a cursory JSTOR search will reveal that out of the first 100 items, 19 were not in fields related to history or political science. Seventeen out of the 19 were to be found in several different science journals and they all appear to be related to some extinction event at some point thousands of years ago; there is also a journal article from Libraries and Culture discussing the amount of damage that World War Two delivered to British libraries and one education journal article. The search revealed a total of 2,961, and if we propose a hypothesis that 19 percent of the total would be unrelated to the use of the word Blitzkrieg as utilized and understood by historians, strategists and other specialists, the hypothetical total of items written outside the disciplines of history or political science that somehow use the word Blitzkrieg would be 544. This would indicate a considerable deal of cross-polination of the word Blitzkrieg beyond specialists. This means that as much as certain specialists may not wish to use the word Blitzkrieg, it is just something everyone is going to have to tolerate since it seems to have penetrated into other disciplines, to say nothing of its use in high schools and college and university survey courses due to its ease of translation and immediacy of comprehension for the students. Works Cited Addington, Larry H. The Blitzkrieg Era and the German General Staff, 1865-1941. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971. 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"Planning for War: The Red Army and the Catastrophe of 1941." Europe-Asia Studies, Dec 1995: 1293-1326. Rommel, Erwin. Attacks. Translated by J. R. Driscoll. Provo, UT: Athena Press, 1979. —. The Rommel Papers. Edited by B. H. Liddel-Hart. New York: Da Capo, 1953. Scheiffen, Alfred von. Dienstschriften, vol. 1, Die taktisch-strategischen Aufgaben aus den Jahren 1891-1905. Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1937. Seeckt, Hans von. "Moderne Heere." In Gedanken eines Soldaten . Leipzig: von Hase und Koehler, 1935. Showalter, Dennis E. The Wars of Frederick the Great. London: Longman, 1996. Sun-Tsu. The Art of War. Translated by Ralph D. Wayer. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Weigley, Russel F. The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Wintle, Justin, ed. The Dictionary of War Quotations. New York: Free Press, 1989. -------------------------------------------- [ 1 ]. (Fanning 1997), p. 287-88 [ 2 ]. (Fanning 1997), p. 283-84 [ 3 ]. (Fanning 1997), p. 288-90 [ 4 ]. (Fanning 1997), p. 290-91 [ 5 ]. (Fanning 1997), p. 292 [ 6 ]. (Fanning 1997), p. 300 [ 7 ]. Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 86 cited in (Gukeisen 2005), p. 3 [ 8 ]. Cited in (Gukeisen 2005), p. 3 [ 9 ]. (Luttwak 2001), p. 121 [ 10 ]. (Luttwak 2001), p. 128-129 [ 11 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005) p. xiii [ 12 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005) p. xiii, see note 5 [ 13 ]. (Guderian 1927) Cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 33 [ 14 ]. Ibid, p. 33 [ 15 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 36 [ 16 ]. (Showalter 1996), p. 67 quoted in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 36 [ 17 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 37; the Frederick quote comes from (Duffy 1974), p. 88, quoted in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 37 [ 18 ]. Ibid., 37 [ 19 ]. For an account of the battle see ibid, pp. 38-47 [ 20 ]. Ibid. , p. 49 [ 21 ]. Ibid., p. 49 [ 22 ]. Ibid., pp. 50-51 [ 23 ]. Ibid., p. 67 [ 24 ]. Ibid. , p. 68-69 [ 25 ]. Ibid., p. 71 [ 26 ]. Ibid., p. 72 [ 27 ]. (Weigley 1991), p. 183 cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 73 [ 28 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 82 [ 29 ]. Ibid., p. 78 [ 30 ]. See map in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 80 [ 31 ]. (German General Staff 1903), p.222 cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 81 [ 32 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 86 [ 33 ]. Ibid., p. 87 [ 34 ]. Ibid., p. 88 [ 35 ]. (German General Staff 1904), p. 41 cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 88 [ 36 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 91 [ 37 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 92 [ 38 ]. Ibid., p. 96 [ 39 ]. Ibid., p. 96 [ 40 ]. Ibid., p. 98 [ 41 ]. Ibid., p. 99 [ 42 ]. (Addington 1971), p. 4 [ 43 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 148 [ 44 ]. Ibid., p. 148; for the source about Napoleon see (Creveld 1985), pp. 105-106 [ 45 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 148 [ 46 ]. (Hughes 1993), p. 176 cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 150 [ 47 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 151 [ 48 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 149 [ 49 ]. (Ludwig 1940), p. 803 cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 151 [ 50 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 189 [ 51 ]. (Addington 1971), pp. 9-10 [ 52 ]. (Scheiffen 1937), p. 87 cited in (Holmes 2003), p. 747 [ 53 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 223 [ 54 ]. Ibid., p. 223 [ 55 ]. (Addington 1971), p. 24 [ 56 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 224 [ 57 ]. Prittwitz had access to 17 double-track rail-lines, which would have theoretically have moved his army about the theater of operations “every single day of the campaign,” while the Russians had only six rail-lines serving the operational area for their 2nd Army. See (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 225 [ 58 ]. (Addington 1971), p. 23 [ 59 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 225 [ 60 ]. (Jones 1987), p. 300 [ 61 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 228 [ 62 ]. Ibid., p. 229 [ 63 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 229 [ 64 ]. Ibid., p., p. 230 [ 65 ]. (Hindenberg 1921), p. 153 cited in (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 232 [ 66 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 232 [ 67 ]. Ibid., p. 233 [ 68 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 234 [ 69 ]. (Addington 1971), p. 29 [ 70 ]. (Addington 1971), p. 30 [ 71 ]. (Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-39 2008), p. 9 [ 72 ]. (Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-39 2008), p. 9 [ 73 ]. (Seeckt 1935), p. 56 cited in (Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-39 2008), p. 10 [ 74 ]. (Herwig 1994), p. 269 [ 75 ]. (Corum 1992), p. 37 cited in (Gukeisen 2005), p. 10 [ 76 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 10 [ 77 ]. (Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-39 2008), pp. 11-12 [ 78 ]. Ibid., p.12 [ 79 ]. For the action at Haelen see (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995) pp. 26-31; for the action at Bleid see (Rommel, Attacks 1979) pp. 8-16 [ 80 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), pp. 30-31, 33 [ 81 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), p. 33 [ 82 ]. (Rommel, Attacks 1979), p. 8 [ 83 ]. (Fraser 1995), p. 28 [ 84 ]. (Fraser 1995), p. 234-35 [ 85 ]. (Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years War to The Third Reich 2005), p. 159 [ 86 ]. (Rommel, Attacks 1979), p. 10 [ 87 ]. (Sun-Tsu 1994), p. 177 [ 88 ]. (Rommel, Attacks 1979), p. 16 [ 89 ]. (Guderian, Panzer Leader 1996), pp. 40-41 [ 90 ]. A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War (1963) quoted in (Wintle 1989), p. 304 [ 91 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), p. 130 [ 92 ]. (Rommel, Attacks 1979), pp. 16, 25, 34-35, 40, 46, 55, 72 -73, 83-84, 106, 114, 121, 132, 154, 186, 197-98, 249-50 [ 94 ]. (Rommel, Attacks 1979), pp. 24, 35, 46, 89, 106 [ 95 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), pp. 188-98 [ 96 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), pp. 174-76 [ 97 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), pp. 178-84 [ 98 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), p. 178-79 [ 99 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), p. 179 [ 100 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), p. 179-80 [ 101 ]. (Guderian, Achtung - Panzer! 1995), p. 180 [ 102 ]. (Guderian, Panzer Leader 1996), p. 180 [ 103 ]. (Holmes 2003), p. 758 [ 104 ]. (Justrow 1933), pp. 258 cited in (Holmes 2003), p. 758 [ 105 ]. (May 2000), p. 218 [ 106 ]. See (May 2000), pp. 228-231 for a series of maps which show how the plans evolved [ 107 ]. (Cooper 1990), p. 196 [ 108 ]. ibid., p. 196 [ 109 ]. See ibid., p. 297 for a map [ 110 ]. (Freiser 1996), pp. 44-45, 57 cited in (Jersak 2000), p. 567 [ 111 ]. (Manstein 1994), p. 101 [ 112 ]. Ibid., p. 101 [ 113 ]. (May 2000), p. 422 [ 114 ]. (Rommel, The Rommel Papers 1953), p. 7 [ 115 ]. (May 2000), p. 423 [ 116 ]. (Gunsburg 1992), p. 210 [ 117 ]. (Gunsburg 1992), p. 213, 211 [ 118 ]. (Gunsburg 1992), p. 216 [ 119 ]. (Gunsburg 1992), p. 216 [ 120 ]. Ibid., p. 221 [ 121 ]. Ibid., p. 227 [ 122 ]. (May 2000), p. 421 [ 123 ]. (May 2000), p. 418 [ 124 ]. (May 2000), p. 424-25 [ 125 ]. (Cooper 1990), p. 276 [ 126 ]. (Perrett 1983), p. 124 [ 127 ]. (Cooper 1990), p. 276 [ 128 ]. (Cooper 1990), p. 276 mentions how “[c]aptured foreign transport entirely equipped one panzer division” and noting that the army had a shortage of tires and motor oil; with General Eduard Wagner, the Chief Quartermaster of OKW, making further dire predictions: fuel reserves would be exhausted by Autumn. See also (Murray 2001), p. 113 on which he states that over half of the front-line Wehrmacht divisions to take part in Barbarossa were either using foreign equipment of some sort or other or suffering from shortages. [ 129 ]. (Roberts 1995), p. 1293 [ 130 ]. Ibid., p. 1301 [ 131 ]. Ibid., p. 1309 [ 132 ]. Surrendered on 3 July, yielding 290,000 prisoners, 2,585 tanks and 1,449 guns. See (Perrett 1983), p. 131 [ 133 ]. Surrendered August 8, yielding 185,000 prisoners, 2,030 tanks and 1,918 guns. See (Perrett 1983), p. 132 [ 134 ]. Surrendered September 26, yielding 665,000 prisoners, 900 tanks and 3,719 guns. See (Perrett 1983), p. 133 [ 135 ]. Surrendered October 20, yielding 663,000 prisoners, 1,242 tanks and 5,412 guns. See (Perrett 1983), p. 134 [ 136 ]. (Cooper 1990), p. 277 [ 137 ]. (Keegan 1989), p. 187 [ 138 ]. Performed on December 18, 2010