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...so I was reading West and East (great smooth read, love it to death. they should write more early-WWII stuff) and there was this line in it where this German was thinking about how the Nazis were trying to spin the war: that the Schlieffen Plan had at least worked better with them in charge than it had with the Kaiser.

And that kind of got this thought rolling around in my head: blitzkrieg, in all it's mental glory, is only thought of as such a brilliant amazing awe-inspiring strategy because it yielded such brilliant amazing awe-inspiring results.

It clobbered Poland in less than a month. It zinged the Low Countries like the only thing slowing down the Wehrmacht were the hairpin turns in Holland. It beat France.

But in West and East, that hasn't happened. There is no amazing strategic victory. You can't point at Wehrmacht soldiers on the English Channel and say, "See? That's what blitzkrieg can do for you. That's what combined arms warfare is about."
Because it's not doing that much. It's a sharp sword that's being split into daggers and thrown willy-nilly around Europe.

But it's obvious that the tactical doctrine is still there: The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-1939 by Michael Citino talks about how the idea of what everyone knows as "blitzkrieg" was in people's heads by 1932-33 and being instilled by the mid-30s.


So...what will the world take away from the German way of making war in a world where the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe didn't have any amazing successes to point to?
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