Figure 1.--Here a Wehrmacht unit are headed to the front on rail cars, probably in 1941. Mote the flowers on the truck. The Wehrmacht found it difficult to operate at any distance from rail heads. German armies beginning with the Prussian armies of the 17th centuries were renowned for their offensive commitment and mobility. Bloitzkrieg warfare was simply adapting German tactics to modern weaponry. Hiitler's Wehrmacht was, however, not fully prepared to pursue Blitzkrieg. It was not a fully mechanized army. It was dependent on rail transport for both deployment and logistics. This weakness was not immediately apparent in the short campaigns fought on relatively narrow battlefields. This changed with Barbarossa (June 1941) when the Wehrmacht had to fight on a huge battlefield. Worse still, Hitler declared war on the United States which not only had the capacity to field a large fully mechanized army, but to also help mechanize its allies.

World War I began as a war of movement, but after the Miracle on the Marne became a war of attrition as the Aliies and Germans built a parallel system of trenches from the Swiss border to the English Channel. New weapons such as the machine gun, poison gas, tanks, and airplanes appeared, but the war was largely an infantry war, decided by the suoerior resources of the Allies and the arrival of the American infantry. The horrors of trench warfare caused military planners to focus on new weapons to restore mobility and to avoid a future war resulting in mass losses of foot soldiers. It was the Allies that developed tanks and won the World War I air war. It was the Germans, however, that after the War gave the greatest attention to developing new weapns, especially the tanks and air planes that would dominate the World War II battlefield. Other countries also worked on these weapons, but the NAZIs after seizing power (1933) launched upon a massive military spending program that left them with the world's most poweful air force. German commanders also conceived of an inovative method of effectively employing the new weapons, a combined arms tactic which has come to be known as Blitzkrieg. The NAZIs seemed to have believed that racial superiority meant that Germany would be able to create the most poweful weapons. I am not sure Hitler believed this, but his strategy was to divide potential enemies and striking before his targets were prepared for war. Unfortunately his failure to defeat Britain and the Soviet Union meant that major industrial powers had the time to develop weapms that could match the Germans and the industrial power to produce them in quanties beyond the capability of Germany, But it was not just tanks that were needed for mobilr warfare, it was other tracked vehicles and the prosaic truck. Blitzkrieg not only involved panzers to pierce the enemy front line. Tanks were vulnerable. They needed infantry soldiers to protect them as well as to exploit the gaps opened in the enemy line. And the infantry as well as the needed supplies had to move as rapidly as panzers. The Wehrmacht, however, was not fully motorized. It did not have the trucks needed to fill the logiistical demand of Blitzkrieg. This weakness was not immediately apparent in the short early campaigns conducted on relatively small areas. This chnged dramatically with the onvasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941).

Created: 4:50 AM 10/8/2009
Last updated: 4:50 AM 10/8/2009