History 100- Professor Pastor
The Blitzkrieg in World War II
By: Kevin Barnas
The First World War was a long slowly paced war, consisting of mostly trench war in which artillery and machine guns were the main weapons of choice, this made mobile ground warfare almost impossible, suicidal, for both infantry and Cavalry. The rapid rate of fire, from the machine guns and destructive rate for artillery totally neutralized the element of troops moving around easily, at least for the easy targets such as the infantry and Cavalry. Nevertheless the main tactic during the early and middle stages of the First Word War was for the men in the trenches to try and rush and over come the enemies’ trenches. But during the war, two new revolutionary weapons were invented and saw combat use immediately, the armored tank, and the combat aircraft. Prior to this infantry and Cavalry, both were almost invulnerable to machine gun and artillery fire. In addition to that, their growth potential as powerful motorized vehicles was about to revolutionize warfare as World War Two will show us.
After the First World War, France and Poland, two of the more powerful countries at this time, remained conservatively stuck in the previous war. France spent its defense budget on building a mighty line of super-trenches, the Maginot line, with huge fortifications, underground bunkers and tunnels, and heavy but totally stationary artillery.[1] The Polish army's main mobile force remained the obsolete Cavalry. Both spent much too little budget and thought on their air forces.1
The German military, which was under severe post-war limitations, was forced to develop new tactics, tactics that would blow others away. These tactics only made sense to involve using tanks and aircraft for mobile ground warfare. It also learned from other countries and improved on other countries tactics and ideas. The most influential was Basil Liddell-Hart, which openly published their new...