Blitzkrieg, Strategy and Doctrine
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States Blitzkrieg (lightning war) is the term, popularized by wartime journalists rather than coined by the Wehrmacht itself, for the combined-arms method Germany used from 1939 to 1941: concentrating armor, motorized infantry and air power at a single decisive point to break through enemy lines, then encircling and destroying the resulting pocket rather than advancing on a broad, even front. A body of historiography, most prominently Karl-Heinz Frieser's The Blitzkrieg Legend (1995), argues that Germany never adopted blitzkrieg as a formal, codified operational doctrine, and that its early campaign successes owed as much to improvisation, local initiative and French and Polish mistakes as to any deliberate lightning-war theory.
This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
The concentrated-armor breakthrough tactics Germany used from 1939 to 1941 are solidly documented; what is contested is whether the Wehrmacht itself ever held a codified doctrine called Blitzkrieg, or whether the label is a journalistic and postwar invention imposed on improvised, locally-driven successes. See the attached dissent.
Source Wikipedia: Blitzkrieg