blitzkrieg

Man for man, the German and Polish forces were an even match. Hitler committed about 1.5 million troops, and the Polish commander, Marshal Edward Smigy-Rydz, expected to muster 1.8 million. That was not the whole picture, however. The Germans had six panzer (armored) and four motorized divisions; the Poles had one armored and one motorized brigade and a few tank battalions. The Germans' 1600 aircraft were mostly of the latest types. Half of the Poles' 935 planes were obsolete.

Result of German Blitzkrieg on Poland

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. The Polish army expected the attack to come along the Polish frontiers. But Hitler introduced a new kind of war called a blitzkrieg, which means “lightning war.” Waves of German bombers targeted railroads in Tczew, shown here, which crippled Polish military mobilization. Hundreds of tanks smashed through Polish defenses and rolled deep into the country. The Poles fought hard, but on September 17, the Soviet Union invaded their country from the east. By the end of the month, Poland had fallen.

Polish strategic doctrine called for a rigid defense of the whole frontier and anticipated several

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By September 20, practically the whole country was in German or Soviet hands, and only isolated pockets continued to resist. Throughout Europe, conquered peoples, especially Slavs and Jews, were executed or enslaved in German war factories, while their countries were drained of food and raw materials.

In Germany, the naval chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, urged Hitler to occupy Norway for the sake of its open-water ports on the Atlantic, but Hitler showed little interest until late January 1940, when the weather and the discovery of some invasion plans by Belgium forced him to delay the attack on the Low Countries and France indefinitely. On August 5, having crossed the Dnieper River, the last natural barrier west of Moscow, the army group wiped out a pocket near Smolensk and counted another 300,000 prisoners. 9 million troops on the western border and outnumbered the Germans by two to one in tanks and by two or three to one in aircraft. Because their own losses were too high, the Germans had to switch to night bombing at the end of September. In May 1943 the USSR dissolved Comintern.

World War II

At the start of World War II, the German blitz campaigns in Poland and Western Europe skillfully combined air and surface mobility and striking power. War games had indicated a victory in about ten weeks, which was significant because the Russian summer, the ideal time for fighting in the USSR, was short, and the Balkans operations had caused a 3-week delay at the outset. The Soviet troops, on the other hand, were often badly led, in part because political purges had claimed many of the Red Army's senior officers. The Germans failed to reckon with a new device, radar, which greatly increased the British fighters' effectiveness. These campaigns made the elaborate permanent fortifications of the Maginot line, built by the French in the 1930s and named after its creator, the war minister André Maginot, the symbol throughout the world of military futility.

Common topics in this essay:
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