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The key to Blitzkrieg was to organize the troops into mobile forces with excellent communications and command, able to keep the momentum up while the battle unfolded. The basic concept was to concentrate all available forces at a single spot in front of the enemy lines, and then break a hole in it with artillery and infantry. Once the hole was opened, tanks could rush through and strike hundreds of miles to the rear. This allowed the attacking force to fight against lightly armed logistics units, starving the enemy of information and supplies. In this way even a small force could destroy a much larger one through confusion, avoiding direct combat as much as possible. In a perfect development the enemy would be retreating to the rear to set up new defensive lines, which the attacking force would have already passed. Increasing confusion and desperation among the defender's chain of command would render it competely ineffective.
Blitzkrieg was a fast and open style of warfare, heavily reliant on new technologies. First aircraft were used as long-range artillery to destroy enemy strongholds, attack troop concentrations, and spread panic. Then combined arms forces of tanks and motorized infantry coordinated by two-way radio destroyed tactical targets before moving on, deep into enemy territory. A key difference to previous tactical models was the devolutionDevolution or Home rule is the pooling of powers from central government to government at regional or local level. It differs from federalism in that the powers devolved are temporary and ultimately reside in central government. Any devolved assemblies ca of command. Fairly junior officers in the field were encouraged to use their own initiative, rather than rely on a centralised command structure.
The idea of using rapid movement to keep an enemy off-balance is almost as old as war itself. However for the majority of history armies were limited in speed to that of the marching soldier, about equal for everyone involved. This meant that it was possible for opposing armies to simply march around each other as long as they wished, with supply conditions often deciding where and when the battle would finally be fought. Perhaps the most famous example of this ended with the Battle of AgincourtThe Battle of Agincourt was fought on October 25, 1415 Saint Crispin's Day in northern France as part of the Hundred Years' War between the heavily outnumbered army of King Henry V of England and that of Charles VI of France, the latter under the command, prior to which Henry V of EnglandHenry V ( August 9 or September 16, 1387 August 31, 1422), King of England, son of Henry IV of England by Mary de Bohun, was born at Monmouth, Wales, in September 1387. On his father's exile in 1398, Richard II took the boy into his own charge, and treate avoided combat while marching to CalaisThis article is about the French city. Alternate meanings: Boreads (mythical), Calais, Maine, Calais, Vermont Calais is a city in northern France, located at 50°57N 1°52E. It is in the departement of Pas-de-Calais, of which it is a sous-prefecture''. to resupply, allowing him to pick the battlefield.
Napoleon's introduction of logistics changed the nature of warfare considerably. Now the invading army was not under the same sort of timing pressure to bring the opposition to battle as soon as possible. This allowed his forces to attack where and when they wanted, often giving him the advantage of terrain. It also allowed him to form much larger armies because they were no longer straining the local economies directly.But things didn't really change until the introduction of various forms of mechanized transport, starting with trainThis article is about trains in rail transport. For other types of train see train (disambiguation Coventry, England In rail transport, a train consists of several connected rail vehicles that are capable of being moved together along a guideway to transps. Now the opposing armies were no longer limited in speed, and a war of maneuver became a real possibility. Some train-borne maneuvering took place during the War Between the States in the 1860s, but the sizes of the armies involved meant the system could provide only limited support.
In the Franco-Prussian WarMars-la-Tour, August 16, 1870 The Franco-Prussian War ( July 19, 1870 May 10, 1871) was waged between the Empire of France and the Prussian led North German Confederation allied with the south German states of Baden, Bavaria and Wurttemberg. The conflict the Prussian army, knowing that the French could field larger forces, devised a war plan that relied on speed. If, on declaration of war, they could mobilise, invade and seize Paris fast enough, then they would be victorious before the vast French army could form and retaliate. This tactic was used to devastating effect in 1871, when the Prussian forces were able to defeat two large French forces before they were able to join in the field.
Given the success they had in 1870s, it's not surprising that the German battle plan for what would become World War I was based on similar concepts. However technology had changed considerably in the four decades, with the machine gun and considerably more powerful artillery swinging the balance of power desicively to the defense. While all combatants were desperate to get the front moving again, this proved difficult. The introduction of the tank in a series of increasingly successful operations pointed the way out of trench warfare, but the war ended before the British plans to field thousands of them could be put into place.