Army in World War II, although Kursk in July 1943 is a strong candidate. The Wehrmacht
suffered heavy losses in Russia from the outset in the summer of 1941 until the end
of the war, a constant drain augmented by the casualties suffered in North Africa, Italy
and eventually in France, the Low Countries and the Reich itself. No single stroke of
operational genius on any front could have brought down Hitler’s regime, so strong was
it overall. Defeat could be imposed only gradually. It is true that mechanization and
motorization had restored mobility to warfare, but, contrary to the expectations of many,
except in a very permissive context that RMA did not offer a short cut to victory via
annihilating manoeuvre.
Third, Blitzkriegwas not a new way of war. Rather, it was simply the adaptation of
long-standing German military doctrine to exploit mechanization and enemy errors. The
Germans did not discover a new formula for victory. Instead, they demonstrated in
Poland, France and initially the Soviet Union that fast-moving panzer forces, supported
closely by air power, could run rings around slower-moving opponents. The Germans fell
victim to the familiar malady of ‘victory disease’, and in 1940 began to believe that their
forces and way of war were so superior that defeat was all but unthinkable. One important
reason why the planning for Operation Barbarossa was so casual with regard to logistics
was that the Germans were convinced that they would defeat the Russians in short order,
virtually no matter how they conducted the invasion. Certainly the Germans pioneered
the large-scale employment of armoured and other mechanized forces, and in Poland,
France and Russia they demonstrated what those forces could achieve when they were
handled with dash and imagination. Alas for them, though, they did not grasp the extent
to which a so-called Blitzkriegstyle of warfare was intensely contextual in its effec-
tiveness. Mechanized forces do not fare well when campaigning over great distances
with only the most tenuous of logistic support. Also, if the enemy has an abundance
of mobilizable manpower and a continent of space, even dramatic encirclements will
not deliver truly decisive military success. Furthermore, at the tactical level, Blitzkrieg
warfare met its match as first Russian, then British and American, soldiers applied
effective attritional answers to the challenges that it posed. After the Kursk offensive of
July 1943 the German Army really showed its operational and tactical mettle when, in a
context of growing adversity, it had to manage a fighting retreat all the way back to
Germany. That was manoeuvre warfare in reverse; defensive manoeuvre when the enemy
generally had both the initiative and a massive superiority of military assets.
Fourth, World War II tested everybody’s theory of air power. The theories of the
advocates of the strategic bombing of civilians, of economic ‘key nodes’ and of the
‘industrial web’, of close ground support including dive bombing, and of air power as an
instrument to deliver light infantry from the sky behind enemy lines were all tested
extensively in practice. The strategic impact of air power of all kinds on the course and
outcome of the war is fairly clear. The experience of war showed beyond room for
argument that in the early 1940s victory on the ground or at sea was unlikely, perhaps
impossible, unless the enemy’s air power had been defeated first. This does not mean
that air power won the war, but it does mean that air power was more than just another
player on the combined-arms team. It became a critical, arguably the decisive, source of
Allied advantage. The failure of the Luftwaffe in early 1944 to defend the Reich at home,
and its subsequent, consequential inability to protect and assist the German Army in the
West, amounted to a war-losing development, although one of a number, it should be
World War II in Europe, II 147