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Comment by sushibowl | Hacker News Reader

This is in my opinion an oversimplification. Generally, the success of blitzkrieg had more to do with speed and coordination than the strength of armour. A combination of mechanised infantry, tanks, and close air support were instrumental to the tactics. German tanks were the only ones universally equipped with radio units at the start of the war.

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And, counterintuitively, lack of coordination. Blitzkrieg units were uniquely autonomous and trusted to meet higher level objectives how they saw fit rather than following a recipe book written weeks before and miles away from the action.

the ghost division :-)

The point is that tanks at the time were faster(along with mechanized infantry) and virtually unstoppable past enemy lines. This is pretty much unprecedented which allowed them to basically take strategic objectives uncontested.

This would not happen today because the exposed tanks would be taken out by relatively cheap anti tank missiles.

There were several innovations bundled into Blitzkrieg so I don't think it's productive to clarify what the point is.

Virtually unstoppable armor helped, extreme local coordination helped, and extreme general decoupling helped. All of these factors are relevant to Blitzkrieg's success.

Afaik, while better anti-tank weapons did come about during the war, a lot of it was also to do with adapting tactics and usage of existing weapons to counter the new "meta". For example, the flak 88 and the 90mm M1 were originally intended for use as antiaircraft weapons and were widely deployed as early as 1936-38. They just so happened to also be excellent antitank weapons, once people figured out how to deploy them as such.

The speed of logistics is more important than the speed of combat troops. Tanks can go behind enemy lines, but only for a short while. If they don't return, they will quickly run out of fuel and become vulnerable.

Genghis Khan would have laughed at the slow German Blitzkrieg.

Genghis had the advantage that his tanks ate grass, and grass grew everywhere the Mongols decided to conquer.

That said, they still specifically timed their campaign cycles around the availability of forage in the country to be attacked.

And his soldiers could eat tanks, if necessary.

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.

> Genghis had the advantage that his tanks ate grass, and grass grew everywhere the Mongols decided to conquer.

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.

See also Russia's campaign to rapidly take Kyiv using highly centralized command that failed catastrophically when faced with mobile, autonomous, hit-and-run tactics using antitank missiles like Javelin.

"speed and coordination"

Meth.

https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/

I think this is the correct analysis.

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.

The Blitzkrieg worked because the French political leadership was incapable of effectively directing its military, refusing to budge from a "Defend everywhere! All of the time!" strategy.

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...

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