The panzers were neither a direct descendant of Moltke’s and Schlieffen’s
concepts of operational art nor an instrument directly designed to fulfil those
concepts. They stemmed, however, from the same matrices: on one hand, policy
and strategic imperatives for short, decisive wars, and, on the other, technological
factors inhibiting prospects for decision at the tactical level. It was the final
element in what Robert Citino callsBewegungskrieg: war of movement, intended
to strike rapid, unexpected, decisive blows in the context of a military objective. 65
The panzers’ contribution to the army’s operational focus had specific contexts
as well. Total war of the kind Hitler seemed willing not merely to risk but to affirm
remained, in strategic terms, the wrong kind of war for Germany. And in social
and political contexts, a mass war involving the GermanVolkwas likely to benefit
the Nazis far more than the soldiers. 66 The head-over-heels, improvisational
nature of the Third Reich’s peacetime mobilization was anything but reassuring.
In contrast to the days of Frederick, to 1866, 1870, and 1914, most of the divisions
were formed by ‘waves’ (Wellen), each with differing scales of equipment, levels of
training, and operational effectiveness. In planning for war, the army was con-
strained to develop a hierarchy of dependability, with the peacetime divisions of
the ‘first wave’ at its apex—and the mobile divisions at the apex of the first wave.
That situation offered a political and military window of opportunity. The
tactical, doctrinal, and institutional concepts refined after 1933 provided the
prospect of decisive offensive operations executed by specialized formations
within a mass. The high-tech force multipliers, essential for such formations,
favoured developing an elite: a functional elite able to employ ways and means of
war inapplicable by homogenized mass armies in the pattern of 1914–18. It was
an elite that would bring victories despite the institutional weaknesses of the new
Wehrmacht—and despite any signs of clay feet or cardboard spine Germany’s
Fu ̈hrer might show along the way.
PERIHELIONLike the ‘German way of war’ itself, the panzers were an art form. There was an
aesthetic to their concept, their structure, and their employment that continues to
defy logical analysis. That same appeal invites confusion and conflation of the
panzers’ way of war with the concept of operational art. The problem is com-
pounded by the blitzkrieg controversy. Reduced to its essentials, the critique of
blitzkrieg is that the German victories of 1939–40 were not consequences of
doctrine or planning. They developed from a series of accidents and coincidences
reflecting operational improvisations born of the necessity to avoid a drawn-out
war of attrition, and responding to strategic imperatives generated by the essen-
tially random nature of the National Socialist regime. 67
Blitzkrieg was certainly not a structure of concepts like AirLand Battle or
counter-insurgency, expressed in manuals, taught in schools, and practised in
manoeuvres. The word itself had appeared now and then in German military
Prussian–German Operational Art, 1740–1943 51