The Strategic and Tactical Implications of The War That Came Early...

The thing to understand about blitzkrieg is that success or failure is very much a matter of the terrain, the ratio of firepower to the length of the front and the amount of space the country using it has to cover before they get to vital things that their enemy has to defend. Poland was easy for the Germans. They had it nearly surrounded once they moved troops into Czechoslovakia and the Soviets sided with them. The terrain was mostly open, with few fixed Polish defenses. The Poles didn't have enough divisions to cover the front with enough power to stop breakthroughs, didn't have enough reserves to deal with the breakthroughs once they happened, and foolishly heeded Allied advice to delay mobilization, which meant that when the war started they weren't fully mobilized and had far fewer men in their fighting positions than they should (about a quarter of Polish troops were actually mobilized and moved where they needed to be, though a higher proportion were mobilized--ie armed and formed into units but necessarily at the portion of the defensive lines where the brass wanted them). So, Poland was easy.

France could have and should have been hard for the Germans. The geography and the French defenses (Maginot line) channels invaders into a limited space, and the French could put a lot of divisions with a lot of firepower into that limited space. The French made two mistakes that defeated them. First, they got greedy. The French view of the war in the west visualized two stages: an initial war of fast movement as the Allies and the Germans raced to grab as much of the low countries as they could, followed by a slow, grinding set of offensives--not really a replay of World War I, but in many ways similar in terms of tempo. The French put all of the divisions that would have been their best answer to the blitzkrieg (their 3 DLMs--a kind of light armored division) and most of their 'active' divisions into the race to grab as much of the low countries as possible. That's understandable. The French figured that what they didn't grab early they would pay for with blood later. So they pushed deeper into the low countries than it was save to push. Second, and related, they moved seven of their best, most mobile divisions out of central reserve (about half of their reserve) and sent them in a dash all the way through Belgium. Those divisions would have been useful where they ended up if Germany had put their main effort to the north instead of just a feint there. In other words, the Germans out-generalled the French. They ended up matching their best divisions against the worst French divisions--a bunch of poorly-trained, out of shape, thirty-something year old reservists for the most part. Blitzkrieg may or may not have worked against the cream of the French army. It would have been interesting to see how the panzers would have done if they had gone up against all three of the French DLMs working as a unit, or even against French active divisions with time to dig in and register their artillery.

The eastern front was long enough that whoever had a predominance in mobile forces was usually doing to find some weak spot, but the distances to crucial areas that the enemy had to defend was so great that there was simply no way to win the war without a multi-year campaign.
 
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