The meaning of blitzkrieg

Russia is trying to conquer Ukraine using a method of warfare deployed by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in the Second World War.

The term blitzkrieg, meaning “lightning war”, was coined around a decade before the strategy was used against the Soviet Union in 1941. But according to History.com, Blitzkrieg “had its roots” in military strategy earlier than either of the 20th century world wars.

The roots of blitzkrieg

The blitzkrieg theory – that “concentrating forces against an enemy” and “making a single blow against a carefully chosen target” is “more effective than dispersing those forces” – can be traced back to 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s “concentration principle”, said History.com.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The word blitzkrieg is often said to be a “pseudo-German term” invented by the Anglo-American press in WWII to describe the “emerging Nazi way of war”, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas E. Ricks in Foreign Policy magazine. But in The Myth and Reality of German Warfare, author Gerhard Gross explained that the term “was not coined in the Anglo-Saxon world, as often claimed, but actually appeared in German military publications as early as the mid-1930s”.

Following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, military leaders began preparing for “a shorter conflict won through military manoeuvers” that avoided becoming bogged down “in the attrition of trench warfare”, said History.com.

The combined forces of tanks, motorised infantry and artillery, backed by the air force, were to be used to penetrate the enemy’s defences on a “narrow front”, explained the Imperial War Museums (IWM) site.

“You identify the weak point in the enemy’s line, break through, and cause disruption in the enemy’s rear areas,” said the museum’s John Delaney. “So you defeat them by dislocation, not destruction on the battlefield.”

The strategy worked with “spectacular success” during the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, and against Poland and France earlier in WWII, said IWM. But it was “less successful against well-organised defences”, and Soviet commanders “learned to blunt German assaults with successive defence lines of guns and infantry”.

Blitzkrieg or blitzfail in Ukraine?

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is “following a course many military analysts had predicted”, said Bloomberg. Moscow is “hitting Ukraine hard in a bid for lightning victory”.

Putin launched an air and land attack last Thursday in a bid to crush armed resistance. The Russian president cannot afford a drawn out engagement, so “it will be a blitz, a blitzkrieg”, said Pavel Felgenhauer, a Moscow-based defence analyst for the Jamestown Foundation think-tank.

In an article for New Eastern Europe magazine, Ukrainian academic Valerii Pekar agreed that Russia wanted a “short victorious war”.

“It is no coincidence that the war began in the early morning with a heavy airstrike on Kyiv, just as in 1941,” he continued. But “so far, blitzkrieg has become blitzfail”.

Moscow’s invasion has flounded in the face of “the heroism, resilience and high morale of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” and the “resilience and dedication of millions of citizens”, many of whom have joined or volunteered to help their military.

Putin and his army chiefs “planned their logistics on a blitzkrieg” but are “running into logistics problems”, James Townsend, from the Center for a New American Security, told USA Today.

“Supply chains have failed, leaving troops stranded on roadsides to be captured because their vehicles ran out of fuel,” added The Washington Post. Russia has failed to secure “air superiority” or a “meaningful chunk of territory”.

Military experts caution that “it is still too early to draw conclusions about the eventual trajectory of a war that is only days old”, said the paper. “What is clear, however, is that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gamble on a swift and decisive takeover of Ukraine has not paid off.”