Good point. For a counter point, the German Blitzkrieg helped them get France in WW2.
This would not happen today because the exposed tanks would be taken out by relatively cheap anti tank missiles.
Virtually unstoppable armor helped, extreme local coordination helped, and extreme general decoupling helped. All of these factors are relevant to Blitzkrieg's success.
Genghis Khan would have laughed at the slow German Blitzkrieg.
That said, they still specifically timed their campaign cycles around the availability of forage in the country to be attacked.
A Mongol army could have reached Paris in 2-3 days, because their troops could operate without support for a while. WW2 Germany still relied largely on horse-drawn carts for logistics, and its armies could not advance substantially faster than a Roman legion.
More like: wherever you didn't have abundant grass, Mongol armies essentially couldn't go, or at least lost so much advantage that they usually chose not to.
On a related point: the southern half of Ukraine has some of the best soil in the world for agriculture, yet for centuries it was very thinly populated and called the "Wild Fields", because it's naturally steppe and living there put you in reach of the Crimean Tartars, descendants of the Mongols who also used the same tactics for devastating raids. Further north, where the land was covered in forest, they did not go.
> That said, they still specifically timed their campaign cycles around the availability of forage in the country to be attacked.
Everyone did that (had to) back then.
In the context of the conversation, Blitzkrieg worked because it specifically avoided getting bogged down in heavily fortified urban areas. The German army of WWII was not at all suited to long battles like what they encountered in WWI (see the eastern front casualty numbers for a good illustration of how that went).
Stalingrad (mentioned in the article) is rather famous for being a perfect urban battlefield to grind a massive and well equipped modern (for the time) army into pulp. They couldn't blitzkrieg it, and so it defeated them.
The German Army ca. WWII's entire doctrine centered on (as podcaster Dan Carlin describes it) throwing a haymaker and ending the fight quickly. They by no means had a glass jaw, but compared to the Americans or (especially) the Soviets, they simply could not sustain a battle of attrition. And urban warfare so heavily favors the defenders that assaulting a city is almost always a battle of attrition.
Folks forget that the French had rather excellent tanks ~1939 [0], especially in their calvary arms (the Hotchkiss H35 and SOMUA S35).
Which makes sense, since they essentially invented the modern tank in the FT. [1]
The rapid success of the Blitzkrieg was mostly a result of (a) France still being in the middle of re-organizing, equiping, and training their armored forces, (b) some bullshit at Sedan, and (c) French leadership making terrible strategic military decisions again and again [2].
Had the DCr's been supplied (who knew tanks need fuel?) and used to effectively counterattack, as designed, German plans would have ground to a halt.
Instead, you had the French Prime Minister declaring that all was lost six days after the Germans invaded the low countries.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_of_France#Inter_War
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_FT
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France#French_lead...
Meth.
Surprisingly, one of the best histories of Blitzkrieg I've read was a pop-history book (just called 'Blitzkrieg') by Len Deighton, better known for his spy novels. What it lacks in detail, biographical material and so on is made up for by its broad scope, going from industrial production and methods during the interwar rearmament period through to the logistics of the BEF evacuation at Dunkirk.
In war, various factors, like the element of surprise, can allow the offense to temporarily overcome an inherently stronger defense. In 1940, the Germans quickly overran the French by catching them off guard tactically and strategically. The French couldn't adapt their defense quickly enough and suffered too many crucial losses early on.
Next year, the Soviets fared even worse than the French initially; but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could stop cold even the best German tanks. The French themselves had a similar experience in WW1: after initially surviving for two hard years, they gave the German attackers a very bloody nose at Verdun.
At Kursk as your first example? I agree that the battle of Kursk showed the Germans how their best tanks could be crushed, but it's not a good example of your point as I understand it.
Firstly because the main reason for victory wasn't so much the ability to destroy German tanks. The Soviets already had this well before July of 1943. Instead victory was because they knew German attack planning in advance and were able to prepare an incredibly robust defense in depth against them while also concealing a superbly equipped counterattack.
Secondly, Kursk isn't the best example because the Battle of Stalingrad much earlier showed how it was possible to stop and then destroy a powerful, well equipped German Army with a tenacious defense and then even mount a ferocious counter offensive (operation Uranus).
Part of the success of Stalingrad for the Soviets was also due to a major earlier blunder of confidence by Hitler, who thought the 6th army alone was enough to take Stalingrad and ordered its accompanying 4th army to separate away from 6th and continue south to join the rest of the previously already split Army Group South (in an even earlier Hitler order that further weakened the later attack on Stalingrad) for an attack on the Caucasus
Fair enough and I see your point, though I still consider Stalingrad a more interesting example of how effective defense can be specifically because there (unlike at the Kursk Salient), the Soviet forces were at first inferior, weakly prepared and poorly commanded, yet still managed to grind the Germans to a gradual halt before grinding them down entirely through sheer tenacity.
And if we're arguing about the wider viability of both organized and even improvised defense tactics vs. intense, well-done offensive tactics, especially when you draw enemies into a complex urban area, Stalingrad excels as an example of what's possible.
The WWII invasion of France was so successful because they struck through the undefended Ardennes, rather than frontally attacking the Maginot line. In that sense the Maginot Line was actually a success, since it prevented a direct invasion of France from Germany, and forced the Germans to attack through other countries.
A key idea of Blitzkrieg (or "maneuver warfare" as it's called today) is that if you can move fast enough, this stops being true. You don't rely on fixed supply lines, and they can't attack your rear when they're not sure where you are and could be somewhere else by the time they organize an attack.
The botched invasion was nothing like the German Blitzkrieg.