Book review: Blitzkrieg

By Len "Funeral in Berlin" Deighton. Newly deceased, which was the reason for me ordering and reading this tome. This one is purely historical; but anyone reading his spy novels will have noticed his interest in military history. I think the book gains somewhat by him being an amateur: he doesn't stand on academic ceremony, and has no rivals to knife. Against that there's a certain pop-y feel to some of this. Nowadays, it is nice to just be able to look up various elements, like say the battle of Sedan, if you want more details or a second opinion.

Deighton traces, well, as it says: from the rise of Hitler to the fall of Dunkirk, with the intention of studying the Blitzkrieg, by which he means the rapid German advance. He asserts - quite possibly correctly - that this is the only instance of such; for example, the fall of Poland wasn't. And so it is a uniquiely interesting event to study.

His main conclusion is, I think, that the success was a mixture of, on the German side, luck and rewards-for-preparation-and-daring; and on the Allied side a mixture of bad luck, and failure-due-to-incompetence.

The entire thing is pretty readable, especially the second half about the campaign itself, so if you're interested I recommend just reading it; I'll try to pull out some factoids here.

LD goes through Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and so on, and from a German point of view these are great successes, driven by Hitler's daring, contempt for the old order, or recklessness, depending on your viewpoint. The campaign against Belgium, Holland and France follows in the same light, so although the tactics were down to the generals, inevitably Hitler gets credit for being bold enough to go with the flow. Likely, any other leadership would not have taken the risk; perhaps better said, likely other leadership would have more correctly assessed the risk and declined it.

But none of this would have worked without the gross incompetence from the Allies; most notably the French. LD points out that they had more tanks, and more aircraft, than the Germans. On the aircraft, there's a little section: why did the Germans havfe air superiority? Answer, because in the very first attack, airfields were attacked. In response, the French flew planes to safety in dispersed sites, and their comms and org structure was so schlerotic that they didn't bring them back into use.

From WWI, the winners had deduced that defensive warfare was how it was going to go, having won. The losers had concluded that was a really bad way to fight and something better needed to be found. At least in this instance, they turned out to be right. As to going through the Ardennes: "everyone" knew this was impossible, and yet - says LD - in fact some low-raking Frogs had war-gamed / tested actually doing so, and it worked; naturally this kind of upsetting fact found no favour. It was all like that.

Goodreads. Wiki.