Fast-moving groups of elite stormtroopers penetrated enemy lines after concentrated artillery fire blasted lanes through them.
WWII blitzkrieg German-style sprang from their spring offensives in WWI. Then, while the infantry mopped up, they had moved on, to strike again far behind what had been called the front.
Working sometimes 30 miles ahead of infantry and artillery, they had broken down the Polish defenses before they had time to organize. They had sawed off communications, destroyed stores, scattered civilians, spread terror. Swift columns of tanks and armored trucks had plunged through Poland while bombs raining from the sky heralded their coming. For this was no war of occupation, but a war of quick penetration and obliteration-Blitzkrieg, lightning war. The battlefront disappeared, and with it the illusion that there had ever been a battlefront. Published on 25 September 1939, well into the campaign, the journalist's account reads: It first coined by a journalist from the United States newsmagazine TIME describing the 1939 German invasion of Poland. *Though "blitzkrieg" is a German language word meaning "lightning war", the word did not originate from within the German military. Broadly speaking, blitzkrieg operations required the development of mechanised infantry, artillery and engineering assets that could maintain the rate of advance of the tanks. This required the development of specialised support vehicles, new methods of communication, new tactics, and the presence of a decentralized command structure. The blizkrieg thus first and foremost required a concentration of armored assets at a focal point, closely supported by mobile infantry, artillery and close air support assets. Methods of blitzkrieg operations centered on using maneuver rather than attrition to defeat an opponent. Historians have termed it a period form of the longstanding German principle of Bewegungskrieg, or movement war. To do this, self-propelled formations of tanks motorised infantry, engineers, artillery and ground-attack aircraft operated as a combined-arms team.
Operationally, its goal was to use indirect means such as mobility and shock to render an adversary's plans irrelevant or impractical. Strategically, the ideal was to swiftly effect an adversary's collapse through a short campaign fought by a small, professional army. It was first used by the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Originally conceived in the years after the First World War, it was a new tactic developing from existing techniques of maneuver warfare and combined arms warfare. Blitzkrieg* (German for "lightning war") was an operational-level military doctrine which employed mobile forces attacking with speed and surprise to prevent an enemy from organizing a coherent defense.
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