Decryption: Why did the all-win German blitzkrieg ultimately fail?

When it comes to the "Blitzkrieg" launched by Germany during World War II, many military fans will always think of it as the most powerful magic weapon in World War II. The reason why the German army chose this seemingly "cool" tactics actually had its own unspeakable secret - Germany, which ranked second in the world in terms of industrial power at the time, was actually a "poor country" lacking oil resources. Why did the "blitzkrieg" of killing gods and Buddhas on the Western Front battlefield not work as soon as it reached the Eastern Front? Why was Hitler eager to declare war on the Soviet Union? This article will reinterpret the seemingly glamorous "Blitz War" from the perspective of resource warfare.

Being dragged to death by protracted battles

First of all, we have to talk about how the high-level Blitzkrieg came about. The opposite of blitzkrieg is, of course, protracted war, but the history of Europeans fighting protracted wars was particularly short, and it did not really begin until World War I. Prior to this, the strife between various countries on the European continent for more than a thousand years seems to have been a blitzkrieg today. A big battle with a scary-sounding name like the "Hundred Years' War" between Britain and France turned out to be composed of countless disconnected battles. During the intermission between these battles, the nobles who were the main body of the war and the civilians who were responsible for the walk-ins were originally in a state of herding sheep in their respective families. The reason is that the small lords in Europe at that time had too small territories and poor resource allocation capabilities. They could not sustain a large-scale eight-year battle like the Chu-Han War in China. After the war lasted for a while, both sides could take a breather. Demands cannot be resolved quickly, and are often resolved through duels between knights. This is the same as Xiang Yu's fight with Liu Bang in Cheng Gao.

This kind of petty fighting has given Europeans the illusion that war is a popular entertainment activity where "fighting is healthier." The Germans suffered the most in this regard. The most intense war they experienced before World War I was the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. However, this war for the founding of Germany sounded very huge. It originally only lasted half a year, during which the two sides really fought. The time is less than two months. France declared war on Prussia on July 19 of that year. On September 2, Napoleon III led the main force of more than 400,000 French troops to surrender in Sedan. Therefore, from the perspective of the Germans before World War I, war was a harmless existence for humans and animals.

"Children, when autumn comes and the leaves fall from the trees, you can go home with your medals." In August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II saw off the soldiers participating in the war. , once so sure.

However, when the German soldiers arrived on the battlefield, they discovered that they might be able to go home in the autumn, but the specific autumn of that year depended on God's mood. Due to technological innovation and the expansion of the national power of European powers, Europeans who had not fought a major war for half a century suddenly saw a new thing called protracted war. Trench warfare replaced the clean cavalry assault and the frontline infantry lined up to shoot each other. The trenches were dug to the limit and the machine guns were fired until the sea was dry. The war suddenly opened its bloody mouth, and both sides of the war had to fill it with a large amount of resources, money and lives every day. In this kind of competition, the colonial powers such as Britain and France were not afraid. Their vast territories provided them with a large amount of resources for consumption. Germany is in a terrible situation. The purpose of launching the war was to seize enough resources for its own industry. However, instead of harvesting resources, they were blocked and of course they could only be dragged to death.

In the early days of World War II, many countries were "instantly killed"

Among the Germans who were miserably trapped by the protracted war in World War I, there was a professional officer named Guderian. This man was originally a cavalry officer. The cavalry was basically only responsible for soy sauce in the battle with machine guns and barbed wire, so the shame of defeat naturally deepened for Guderian. After the war, Guderian was determined to find a way to break this boring war. He eventually found inspiration in the "paralyzed war" theory of British strategist Fuller. Inspired by Fuller, Guderian proposed that tanks should be used together. Tanks and aircraft should work closely together to break through a narrow area of ????the opponent's territory, and then quickly advance in depth to expand the occupied area, implement encirclement, encirclement, and annihilate the opponent's troops. . Interestingly, Guderian's theory was not taken seriously by his old-fashioned bosses at first. When he applied to his superiors to establish a specialized mechanized force, he received a rude reply from the Minister of Defense: "Hell! They only transport mechanized troops." Flour!" It wasn't until the ambitious Hitler came to power that Guderian got the chance to show off his talents.

With Hitler's support, the entire early period of World War II almost became a testing ground for Guderian's theory.

Germany used this tactics to complete an "instant kill" against its enemy countries. It conquered Poland in 27 days, Denmark in 1 day, Norway in 23 days, the Netherlands in 5 days, Belgium in 18 days, and the so-called "Europe's strongest army" in 39 days. of France. Especially in the "Yellow Plan" implemented against France, when the German army faced the British and French coalition forces whose tanks were superior in quantity and quality to their own, they relied on the concentrated use of tanks to defeat their opponents in a short time. The British and French allied forces almost lost their will to fight in the face of German tanks that sometimes emerged from the flanks while their own troops were still eating, and as many as 1.5 million people were captured. After this battle, this tactic was officially named "Lightning" by American newspapers. The Blitzkrieg became famous all over the world. At that time, it seemed that people on earth could no longer stop Germany from pushing the world flat.

The smooth start gave rise to illusions

However, while the Blitzkrieg was conquering Europe, it also had another name that didn’t sound so nice: “the poor man’s tactics.” If you ask why Blitzkrieg has such a name, you have to go back to Guderian's original intention of creating this strategy - Germany is a country with small resources.

The formation of the Blitzkrieg relied on the concentrated use of tanks and aircraft, and to activate these iron guys required the consumption of an important strategic material - oil. Unfortunately, among several important strategic resources, Germany has plenty of coal, steel and non-ferrous metals, but it is extremely short of oil. The annual local oil production is only a few hundred thousand tons. For the tens of millions of tons of oil consumption In terms of quantity, it is simply a drop in the bucket, let alone a blitzkrieg with oil as the core. In order to search for oil resources, Nazi Germany attacked in many ways before the war and tried to hoard more oil: first, importing it from the slave country Romania; second, purchasing Soviet oil on the condition of exporting technology and political concessions; third, spending it on its own Synthesized from coal at a high price. It should be said that despite all the efforts to search the world, the oil reserves found were still not enough for Germany to fight a conventional war. As of the war in 1939, Germany's oil reserves were only 2.4 million tons. The German High Command has made estimates in the past that this inventory is only enough for about 3 months of peacetime consumption. If the war machine is fully activated, it will be even worse. It may only be able to maintain the normal conduct of the war for more than a month. It is a copy of "Moonlight". clan".

The stretched oil dilemma determined Germany’s inability to afford to delay in World War II. In this sense, the German army's record of "instantly killing" enemy countries in the early days of World War II was originally forced - because they knew the "moonlight" properties of their oil reserves, before the Soviet-German war began, the German General Staff When formulating combat plans for invading various countries, a one-month cycle is used. The central idea is to stop the war machine to take a rest after finishing an offensive, stock up on fuel, and prepare for the next attack.

However, in all calculations, even the Germans themselves probably did not expect that the Blitzkrieg would be so successful in Europe. Due to the sudden death of the invaded country, coupled with the Soviet Union's oil exports to Germany, oil " The nightmare of "Moonlight" once seemed like a fantasy. According to estimates by British historian Meidrickter, in September 1939, the German army and air force raided Poland. Because the battle was fast and short, the Japanese army consumed about 155,000 tons of oil and achieved the goal of occupying the country with low energy consumption. The following year, the German army's attacks on Norway, Denmark and Western Europe used less than 500,000 tons of oil. In addition, the daily consumption in the first four months of the year was less than 300,000 tons. From the launch of the war to the surrender of France, Germany's total consumption was insufficient. 1.5 million tons. The German army originally estimated that the conquest of Europe would cost about 5 million tons of oil, but now it only used less than one-third. The even greater good news is that the German army has plundered no less than 1.5 million tons of oil from all over Europe. This alone is enough to make up for the consumption of the previous war. By 1940, Germany's oil reserves once reached around 5 million tons, and this wealth became the basis for the German army to launch a war against the Soviet Union. Hitler obviously wanted to use this war to seize Soviet oil for himself and once and for all solve Germany's "oil shortage" problem.

The surprisingly smooth success of the Blitzkrieg sent a wrong signal to Germany, thinking that the war could continue with low energy consumption. However, it was on the Soviet battlefield that the Blitzkrieg met its nemesis.

The sharp weapon eventually turned into a noose

Because the Soviet Union’s territory was too vast and road transportation was not as good as in Western Europe, the German army had to waste precious oil in the transportation process.

At this time, the Blitzkrieg encountered an unexpected paradox - the German armored clusters could indeed repeat the large-depth penetration that had been performed on the Western Front, but on the vast Russian plains, the more this tactic was used, the more This means that the faster the fuel is consumed, the greater the pressure on logistical supplies. As a result, Blitzkrieg transformed from the "magic weapon" that Germany originally relied on to become a noose around Germany's own neck. The more successful it was, the tighter the noose became.

By the end of 1941, Germany's oil reserves had dropped to less than 800,000 tons. The stretched resource reserves disrupted Germany's original orderly war plan. Hitler once transferred the main armored force of the Central Army Group on the outskirts of Moscow to the southern front in an attempt to seize the Soviet oil-producing Baku. This decision delayed the start of the Battle of Moscow for a month. Russia's extremely cold weather and the German army's stretched logistical supplies eventually overwhelmed the German army, which was good at fighting.

The faster the advance, the greater the strategic depth and the longer the oil supply line, which makes it easier for the enemy to attack the supply line. At the end of World War II, Germany's oil supply system began to suffer continuous bombing by the American and British air forces. Swedish scholar Bo Hernbeck said that within four months, "every important synthetic petroleum plant in Germany was hit by air raids at least twice, sixty-nine refineries, many storage devices, and various liquids. Fuel plants were also hit by air strikes." Germany ultimately paid the price for the smooth sailing of the Blitzkrieg at the beginning of the war. In December 1944, the German army mobilized its last fuel reserves and launched a counterattack in the Ardennes Forest area on the Western Front. The early stages of the battle proved that even in the face of Allied forces whose equipment and troops were far superior to their own, the German blitzkrieg could still be fought. However, the fuel shortage caused by the rapid advancement of the armored corps once again became a noose suffocating the German army. The Ardennes Counterattack finally had to end after a month. Most of the tanks lost by the German army in this battle were not destroyed, but were eventually abandoned on the roadside due to lack of fuel. The glorious blitzkrieg in the past had to end with this embarrassing ending.

Clausewitz, the 19th-century German military strategist, warned his descendants in his theory of war: "War is the continuation of politics." No matter how wonderful a war theory is, if it is separated from the consideration of national strength, it will It will inevitably lead to failure. In this sense, Guderian and his colleagues who formulated the Blitzkrieg theory were not good students of Clausewitz. Their failure was that they allowed Germany, which was short of resources, to have illusions and confidence that should not belong to it. , and indulge in it, which cannot help but remind people of the famous saying: "War is such an important matter that we cannot leave it to only soldiers to consider.