Everybody knows the term Blitzkrieg, which comes from the Nazi German war strategy used to conquer most of Europe during World War 2.

When I was younger, I thought of a Blitzkrieg attack as just an overwhelming attack by superior forces. I voraciously read about Nazi war machines, and because of the famed German Panzers like the Tiger, the Panther, I certainly correlated these super tanks with what a Blitz would be like.

Later, when I was in Air Force ROTC, I was tasked with giving a presentation on Blitzkrieg warfare, so I ended up reading in detail about what exactly it was.

Blitzkrieg was not exactly what I thought.

The most popular Panzer among German Generals were the MkIII and MkIV versions, which were not superior to French Char B1 bis tanks of the French Army. In fact Tigers and Panthers were probably never as numerous as the German army would have liked, and they were Gas hogs and difficult to maintain.

The essense of Blitzkrieg is mobility, and even today the modern German Bundeswehr continues to use the term "Beweglichkeit" in land war strategy. What does this mean? Mobility? Certainly it means that two sides don't dig trenches and bombard each other while occasionally sending out human wave attacks when they think the enemy has been softened up, but in what way is mobility applied? The introduction of the tank in WW1 brought a sort of rolling bunker onto the battle field. It was thought that this mobile strongpoint could be used to support a typical advancing attack on the enemy front.

The discovery that the tank could do more than just this was made in those early WW1 battles, and laid the foundation for Blitzkrieg warfare. It was not the Germans who first discovered this usage pattern, however. It was the English...

...to be continued