Blitzkrieg

The word appeared occasionally in German military writing before the war, but it was Western journalists who popularised it during the Polish campaign of 1939, and German propaganda took it up after the victory over France in 1940. It described a concentrated thrust by armoured and motorised divisions, backed by aircraft, that breaks through the front at one point and encircles the enemy in depth.

The Wehrmacht never adopted Blitzkrieg as doctrine, and historians, Karl-Heinz Frieser above all, have shown that victory in France owed more to a bold plan, the initiative of commanders and Allied mistakes. In the September Campaign the Germans won chiefly through overwhelming superiority and by outflanking Poland from three sides. In the East the lightning war broke down before Moscow in December 1941.