Blitzkrieg

Blitzkrieg, ”lightning war”, strategy of modern warfare first used with brilliant success by Hitler's Wehrmacht against Poland in September 1939, later employed against the armies of France, Britain, Holland, and Belgium in May-June 1940.

The architect of Hitler's blitzkrieg invasion plan was General Fritz Erich von Manstein, Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, who evolved a system of rapidly advancing armoured units, supported by infantry and coordinated with overwhelming air support. Neither the Polish nor the French campaigns lasted much longer than a month: in both cases, massed tank columns smashed through static enemy lines and drove deep into their opponents' heartland, while the Luftwaffe destroyed communications, enemy air power, key industrial installations, and other military objectives ahead of the ground invasion. The result for Poland was the annihilation of its army and independence, and the result for the Allies in the West was the ignominious Dunkirk evacuation and the fall of France.

After World War II, fear of a blitzkrieg-style invasion dominated the military thinking of the Warsaw Pact and NATO alliances; latterly, the blitzkrieg principle was used by the allied forces under the command of General Norman Schwarzkopf to achieve a lightning victory over Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.