Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (2 page)

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Introduction

This book tells the story of Germany’s panzer armies in action during the Nazi-Soviet War from 1941-45. To a large extent the Wehrmacht’s successes through 1942, and frequently beyond, rested on the shoulders of a new weapon, the Panzerwaffe (armor branch) and a new technique, the blitzkrieg (the name later given to mechanized maneuver air-ground warfare) employed to achieve tactical, operational and often strategic goals. Especially during the first years of the war, large panzer formations represented the highest development of the military arts on all three levels.

In the First World War, tanks did not achieve their intended decisive effect mainly due to the small number and unreliability of the machines. More importantly, military leadership lacked a suitable doctrine for their employment: the ideas that came to be called the blitzkrieg were always more critical than the actual vehicles. During the interwar period, the militaries of major nations attempted to develop tanks and accompanying techniques in order to prevent a repetition of disastrous trench warfare of the First World War. British, French, Italian and American armies could do neither, although British theorists did give much thought to the matter. The Red Army invented some excellent tanks and periodically developed advanced doctrine, but internal politics prevented the creation of a workable, stable principle for their employment. Only Germany managed to develop both viable equipment AND methods, in other words, the correct combination of hardware and software. During the Second World War, this mechanized combined-arms warfare became known as the blitzkrieg, and dominated the European theater as aircraft carrier task forces did in the Pacific.

Although made up of German root words, the term blitzkrieg was not used by them; Hitler claims to have hated the word, saying it was an Italian concoction. The new form of warfare introduced in Poland and perfected in France was actually a combination of traditional Prussian/German, Auftragstaktik (mission-type orders), Bewegungskrieg (maneuver warfare), Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation) and other concepts. The term blitzkrieg was a post-facto attempt by military observers to describe what was happening on the battlefields of Europe from 1939-41. Since then, blitzkrieg has become shorthand for
maneuver warfare that wedded a flexible command structure to combinedarms tactics, the internal-combustion engine, radios
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and aircraft. The word will be used in that sense in this book.