Blitzkrieg
From OMGWiki
Blitzkrieg (German, "lightning war") is a military doctrine of an all-mechanized force concentrating its attack on a small section of the enemy front then, once the latter is pierced, proceeding without regard to its flank.
In OMG it is a Wehrmacht Blitzkrieg Doctrine ability that increases speed of tanks for a short time.
History
The principal impetus behind the development of the tank, as it had been behind the formulation of German "infiltration" tactics, was to end the stalemate of "positional" trench warfare on the Western Front of The Great War which was killing a million soldiers a year by 1917. The American military writer James Dunnigan commented that "The tank was a mechanical solution to a mechanically viewed problem; infiltration tactics were a philosophical solution to a philosophically viewed problem". Both solutions nevertheless proved to be only partial answers to the ever-thickening trench systems.
During the inter-war years, after the embryonic technologies of the airplane and tank had matured and were combined with systematic application of the German tactics of infiltration and bypassing of enemy strong points, leaving them to be reduced by eingreif, or "interlocking", divisions, the doctrine of armored warfare known as blitzkrieg, as it would later be labeled by Western journalists during the 1939 invasion of Poland, came into being.
The strategy was particularly effective in the German invasions of Western Europe and initial operations in the Soviet Union. These operations were dependent on surprise penetrations (e.g. the penetration of the Ardennes forest region), general enemy unpreparedness and an inability to react swiftly enough to the attacker's offensive operations.
Only later, during the invasion of the Soviet Union, would the flaws of "blitzkrieg" come to be realized. In France and Poland, the foot-bound infantry had been, at most, a few hours behind the armored spearheads. In the vast, open Russian steppe, delays of hours would become days. The Allies, both in the West and the USSR, would learn from both the Wehrmacht's successes and failures in blitzkrieg warfare.
Tactics & Tips
- Use it tactically when you need to give your tanks a burst of speed.
