Blitzkrieg

The word Blitzkrieg was never used as an official military term by the Wehrmacht except in propaganda, and it was never officially adopted as a concept or doctrine; senior German officers described the war-winning tempo of 1939 to 1941 as ad hoc solutions that emerged from the situation rather than a preplanned doctrine, and modern historians remain divided on whether it names a real, coherent method or a journalist's label applied after the fact.

Frieser's The Blitzkrieg Legend (1995) argues that the Wehrmacht never adopted blitzkrieg as a codified operational doctrine and that no German field manual or general staff document of the period names or defines it; the term was coined by wartime journalists to describe the visible SPEED of the 1939 to 1941 campaigns, not a doctrine the German army itself planned around. On this reading, German successes owed more to superior operational-level improvisation, aggressive local initiative by individual commanders, and Allied command failures than to any unified lightning-war theory, and treating blitzkrieg as a settled, named doctrine overstates how deliberate and centrally planned the German approach actually was.

Historians disagree on whether blitzkrieg was ever a real, codified Wehrmacht doctrine. J. P. Harris calls the term "a piece of journalistic sensationalism, a buzz-word with which to label the spectacular early successes of the Germans in the Second World War," and the article notes it "was never used as an official military term by the Wehrmacht, except for propaganda, and it was never officially adopted as a concept or doctrine." A competing, more conventional reading treats blitzkrieg as a real, if informally named, operational method: "modern historians use the term casually as a generic description for the style of maneuver warfare practised by Germany during the early part of World War II."

Frieser argues Germany never adopted blitzkrieg as a formal, codified operational doctrine: the early campaign successes of 1939 to 1941 owed as much to improvisation, local initiative and French and Polish mistakes as to any deliberate lightning-war theory. This challenges the plain reading of this entity's own core-claim, which states the combined-arms breakthrough-and-encirclement method as settled fact rather than as the traditional, contested reading of a term historians agree was popularized by wartime journalists rather than coined by the Wehrmacht itself.