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Blitzkrieg. Eine Strategie macht Geschichte
The story of Hitler's "lightning war" against her European neighbours during the early stages of World War II
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1976
About the author
Charles Messenger
97 books13 followersCharles Rynd Milles Messenger was a British Army officer and writer. He served for many years in the Royal Tank Regiment (19 years as a Regular, 13 years as a Territorial) before becoming a military historian and defense analyst after his retirement from active service. In addition to having published more than forty books during his long career, he also carried out several historical analyses for the Ministry Of Defence and was a writer and/or adviser for several TV documentary series.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 9, 2017
The story of Blitzkrieg that most books about Blitzkrieg don't tell. They are too eager to get to the armoured jousting at Kursk and the Tiger scare amidst the hedges of France. Charles Messenger, regular officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, by contrast devotes half his pages to the question: how exactly did we get from the blundering beasts of Cambrai to the galloping giants of Normandy?
His survey of the development of the land ironclad both in theory and hardware during the 1920's and 1930's concentrates upon the main antagonists of the next war: Great Britain, the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union and France. Poland, Italy and Japan get on average a sentence each per chapter, but disappear completely during the events of 1939-1944.
A certain amount of traditional anglocentric Fuller vs. Liddell Hart dispute is to be expected, but it serves different purposes. Foremost the dual end of Blitzkrieg: a double envelopment of the antagonist army towards a Cannae-style annihilation, or more indirectly, a breakthrough to disrupt his command and communications infrastructure? Triandafillov's "Deep Operations" tried to combine both in a carefully staged process. Secondly, the connection with combined arms warfare. The Italian Douet, whose theories are popularly capsuled as "the bomber always gets through!", joins the fray here. Was the airforce to pursue an independent strategy, focusing on destroying the enemy armaments industry? Should it rather work in tandem with the tanks? What role does a fighter plane in either scenario? To what extent should the accompanying mass infantry be motorized to keep up with what would certainly be an elite tank force?
Thirdly and most importantly, you learn to sympathize more with the interwar "Donkeys" which restricted the tank to an infantry support role. Nobody was certain enough (with the exception of the overzealous Fuller, whose influence waned proportionally as the 30's progressed) what form tank and airplane would take to convince others. Strategic bombing was in its infancy in 1918 and 'straffing' ranked low on the fighter pilot's priorities list, devoted as they were to overall air superiority for artillery spotting.
The slow technological development of the tank itself reinforced inherent caution. Unlike lorries for mobile infantry, this expensive behemoth had no civilian applications, so by itself held no promise for the next army contract. It remained for a long time a most cumbersome all-terrain vehicle, incapable of matching the speed of horse cavalry off the road. Combined arms including the hoof was less old-fashioned than it seems to us, all the more so since light anti-tank guns and heavy MG's gave the mounted troops a rejuvenation not seen since carbines joined the blank weapons. The Polish squadrons would demonstrate as much against German armoured cars.
"Tankettes", open two-man tracked vehicles armed with MG's, were a swifter answer but hopelessly inadequate by the time hostilities broke out.
Messenger's generic battle narrative is not without merit - especially for sideshows such as the Winter War or the Balkans - but he stays on the subject most of the time. Poland taught the Germans the need for mobile repair shops; the toll of the Polish terrain on their park was so great that incorporated Czech tanks were not a luxury. The attack on the Low Countries and France saw airborne operations added to the exemplary tactical teamwork of Panzer Division and Luftwaffe, while the British had barely any armoured formations to take the field with and the French kept theirs too far in reserve - alltough De Gaulle showed what a Char B could do if it's crew stood its ground. You would expect Messenger to use 'bad tank country' as the main reason why Dunkirk became possible, but he prefers still to blame Goerings pride, which only served to disprove Douet.
Bombers could not defeat an army by themselves and the Luftwaffe had never bothered to implement a strategic construction program, which wasn't a problem until the Russian industry began to spew T-34's faster than the German pincers could destroy them. Overextension is pretty much The Word on the planes of the western Soviet Union, with never enough planes and tanks to go around to execute Hitler's constantly shifting attack plans. The wooded, marshy terrain of the Baltics and the mountainous outskirts of the Caucasus left the work to the bulk of the Wehrmacht - foot infantry and horse-drawn transport. The Soviet High Command eventually learned (anew) from the Patriotic War of 1812 to trade space for time rather than to stand and fight to the last. This overextended not only the supply lines, with the fuel and spare parts for Germany's threedimensional mailed fist, but also the feasible amount of frontage the infantry could cover, even within a system of strongpoints combined with mobile patrols. Once Stalingrad deprived the manpower pool of 300.000 men in urban warfare where tanks and mobility counted for nothing, the initiative was lost forever. Kursk was a pre-emptive strike to weaken the inevitable Soviet attack on the thin Feltgrau line, but their opponents could afford to slug like a boxer, again and again and again. Maybe this simplifies the evolution of Soviet operational art, but they knew their strengths in numbers suited total war, both in men as in metal.
The Anglo-American side of the story is characterized by a just approach. The "open warfare" the AEF brought to Europe a generation earlier supported by both a tactical airforce which took brute force to the max with carpet bombing as a strategic airforce which took the fight to the hinterland. Unfortunately the bocage landscape, the ruins of Caen and the supply bottleneck kept the roaming tracks on a leash. Messenger, interestingly, credits Hitler's Fortress order towards Cherbourg etc. for aggravating the shortage of fuel that plagued Third Army - which performed some of the most impressive feats of long range armoured advance feeding off other' armies allotments and captured stocks.
The Ardennes pass by as fleetingly as the confusion caused by operation Wacht am Rhein: besides a shortage of fuel and reserves, the SS simply were short on surprise as well. The book ends with a chapter on Israeli use of tanks in 1948 - an interesting freebie, which, in the days of 1976, would've been as relevant to the Six Day's and Yom Kippur wars as an epilogue on Desert Storm to the current war(s ) in the Middle East.
His survey of the development of the land ironclad both in theory and hardware during the 1920's and 1930's concentrates upon the main antagonists of the next war: Great Britain, the United States, Germany, the Soviet Union and France. Poland, Italy and Japan get on average a sentence each per chapter, but disappear completely during the events of 1939-1944.
A certain amount of traditional anglocentric Fuller vs. Liddell Hart dispute is to be expected, but it serves different purposes. Foremost the dual end of Blitzkrieg: a double envelopment of the antagonist army towards a Cannae-style annihilation, or more indirectly, a breakthrough to disrupt his command and communications infrastructure? Triandafillov's "Deep Operations" tried to combine both in a carefully staged process. Secondly, the connection with combined arms warfare. The Italian Douet, whose theories are popularly capsuled as "the bomber always gets through!", joins the fray here. Was the airforce to pursue an independent strategy, focusing on destroying the enemy armaments industry? Should it rather work in tandem with the tanks? What role does a fighter plane in either scenario? To what extent should the accompanying mass infantry be motorized to keep up with what would certainly be an elite tank force?
Thirdly and most importantly, you learn to sympathize more with the interwar "Donkeys" which restricted the tank to an infantry support role. Nobody was certain enough (with the exception of the overzealous Fuller, whose influence waned proportionally as the 30's progressed) what form tank and airplane would take to convince others. Strategic bombing was in its infancy in 1918 and 'straffing' ranked low on the fighter pilot's priorities list, devoted as they were to overall air superiority for artillery spotting.
The slow technological development of the tank itself reinforced inherent caution. Unlike lorries for mobile infantry, this expensive behemoth had no civilian applications, so by itself held no promise for the next army contract. It remained for a long time a most cumbersome all-terrain vehicle, incapable of matching the speed of horse cavalry off the road. Combined arms including the hoof was less old-fashioned than it seems to us, all the more so since light anti-tank guns and heavy MG's gave the mounted troops a rejuvenation not seen since carbines joined the blank weapons. The Polish squadrons would demonstrate as much against German armoured cars.
"Tankettes", open two-man tracked vehicles armed with MG's, were a swifter answer but hopelessly inadequate by the time hostilities broke out.
Messenger's generic battle narrative is not without merit - especially for sideshows such as the Winter War or the Balkans - but he stays on the subject most of the time. Poland taught the Germans the need for mobile repair shops; the toll of the Polish terrain on their park was so great that incorporated Czech tanks were not a luxury. The attack on the Low Countries and France saw airborne operations added to the exemplary tactical teamwork of Panzer Division and Luftwaffe, while the British had barely any armoured formations to take the field with and the French kept theirs too far in reserve - alltough De Gaulle showed what a Char B could do if it's crew stood its ground. You would expect Messenger to use 'bad tank country' as the main reason why Dunkirk became possible, but he prefers still to blame Goerings pride, which only served to disprove Douet.
Bombers could not defeat an army by themselves and the Luftwaffe had never bothered to implement a strategic construction program, which wasn't a problem until the Russian industry began to spew T-34's faster than the German pincers could destroy them. Overextension is pretty much The Word on the planes of the western Soviet Union, with never enough planes and tanks to go around to execute Hitler's constantly shifting attack plans. The wooded, marshy terrain of the Baltics and the mountainous outskirts of the Caucasus left the work to the bulk of the Wehrmacht - foot infantry and horse-drawn transport. The Soviet High Command eventually learned (anew) from the Patriotic War of 1812 to trade space for time rather than to stand and fight to the last. This overextended not only the supply lines, with the fuel and spare parts for Germany's threedimensional mailed fist, but also the feasible amount of frontage the infantry could cover, even within a system of strongpoints combined with mobile patrols. Once Stalingrad deprived the manpower pool of 300.000 men in urban warfare where tanks and mobility counted for nothing, the initiative was lost forever. Kursk was a pre-emptive strike to weaken the inevitable Soviet attack on the thin Feltgrau line, but their opponents could afford to slug like a boxer, again and again and again. Maybe this simplifies the evolution of Soviet operational art, but they knew their strengths in numbers suited total war, both in men as in metal.
The Anglo-American side of the story is characterized by a just approach. The "open warfare" the AEF brought to Europe a generation earlier supported by both a tactical airforce which took brute force to the max with carpet bombing as a strategic airforce which took the fight to the hinterland. Unfortunately the bocage landscape, the ruins of Caen and the supply bottleneck kept the roaming tracks on a leash. Messenger, interestingly, credits Hitler's Fortress order towards Cherbourg etc. for aggravating the shortage of fuel that plagued Third Army - which performed some of the most impressive feats of long range armoured advance feeding off other' armies allotments and captured stocks.
The Ardennes pass by as fleetingly as the confusion caused by operation Wacht am Rhein: besides a shortage of fuel and reserves, the SS simply were short on surprise as well. The book ends with a chapter on Israeli use of tanks in 1948 - an interesting freebie, which, in the days of 1976, would've been as relevant to the Six Day's and Yom Kippur wars as an epilogue on Desert Storm to the current war(s ) in the Middle East.
April 15, 2022
Dobra, ale tylko dla ludzi zainteresowanych tematem
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews