The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 1

Blitzkrieg. Among the possible explanations for the German victory was the concept of Blitzkrieg 3 (lightning war), a military concept for exploiting speed and surprise to

disorganise the enemy and enable the attacker to use locally concentrated firepower to

create a ‘snowball’ effect to collapse entire fronts. When Operation Yellow was conceived,

traditionalists in the German High Command indeed realised that a war against France

needed to be won ‘fast’, as a drawn-out war of attrition could not be sustained by German

industry. Hence, although speed and agility was of the essence, on many occasions, senior

officers pleaded for traditional infantry movement and fire. Those with this new vision were

opportunists, such as Guderian, misunderstood by their superiors:

…Guderian’s doctrine about tank warfare was neither fully understood nor fully approved

by his commanders, and Rommel’s idiosyncratic doctrine was at odds with it. Still

German generals, even German colonels and majors, certainly felt freer to try new

approaches and tactics than did their counterparts in the French army or the BEF. (May

2009, 449)

While it was later to became an undisputed recipe for success – until a string of defeats

rattled that belief − the campaign in 1940 was really an ad-hoc military solution, driven by the

need to launch an attack in favourable weather, and shaped by the existing circumstances:

The breakthrough at Sedan, however, was an experiment for which there were no models.

(Frieser 2005, 174)

Armoured warfare. The German Army in 1940 is often portrayed as an armoured

monster, burying any French resistance under its tracks. Actually, it was not dissimilar to the

Army of World War I, a force dependent on horses. Only 7 per cent of the German armed

forces were motorised; out of 135 divisions engaged, ten German divisions were fully

armoured; the majority relied on foot and horses.

3 The origin of the term Blitzkrieg (lightening war) is obscure; it has not been an established in German military handbook’ or used as an official terminology in military circles. The success of the Polish and French Camping led the British Press to popularize it as Blitzkrieg (used in the German translation). In a speech in November 1941, Adolf Hitler said: "I have never used the word Blitzkrieg, because it is a very silly word" (Frieser 2005, 5) .

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