The Blitzkrieg Revolution
One of the great lessons to be learned from World War II is that a relatively small change at the tactical level can have a tremendous effect on the strategic situation. Such was the case when the German army introduced mechanized divisions -- the panzer divisions. On a purely technical baisis these units were not dissimilar to armored divisions deployed and experimented with in other countries and while these showed some promise they hardly represented a significant deviation from the norm in the armies of the great powers. However, when combined with the "storm troop" tactics developed during the First World War, these mechanized units proved to be the basis for an entirely new form of warfare and a new term entered our vocabulary to describe it -- Blitzkrieg.
Germany solved the problem of static trench warfare by 1918 but it went virtually unnoticed at the time. With American troops flooding onto the Western Front and German troops in full retreat after the spring offensive collapsed, there was not the time to give serious consideration to the effectiveness of the German tactical doctrine by the allied camp. Besides which, the lack of mechanization made the "storm troop" tactics that the German army had developed ineffectual at the strategic level. The mobility necessary to make these tactics work simply did not yet exist.
One reason for the allied victory in World War I was the use of tanks in support of infantry attacks-- a British technological advance. There were other reasons as well, but tanks featured prominently in almost all the explanations. The mechanical limits on early armored fighting vehicles, however, led most military experts to conclude that this new element in land warfare should be relegated to an infantry support role. Visionaries, meanwhile, seized on the tank as a revolutionary weapons system and argued for its massed employment in fully mechanized units instead of the parceling out of armored assets to the infantry units which was the norm for post Great War armies.
In the Soviet Union of the 1930s the idea of fully mechanized armored units was actually adopted for a while as official doctrine. Once the full implications, especially the industrial requirements, of such a doctrine became apparent there was a reversal in official sanction. The kind of fully mechanized army being proposed was simply beyond the capabilities of the Soviet state to provide. A typically Stalinist means of revising doctrine was applied to the Soviet officers who favored the mechanized idea -- the military purge.
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