Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The regimes and their dictators: perspectives of comparison
- 1 Stalin and his Stalinism: power and authority in the Soviet Union, 1930–53
- 2 Bureaucracy and the Stalinist state
- 3 Cumulative radicalisation and progressive self-destruction as structural determinants of the Nazi dictatorship
- 4 ‘Working towards the Führer’: reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship
- 5 Stalin in the mirror of the other
- 6 The contradictions of continuous revolution
- 7 From Blitzkrieg to total war: controversial links between image and reality
- 8 Stalin, the Red Army, and the ‘Great Patriotic War’
- 9 The economics of war in the Soviet Union during World War II
- 10 From ‘Great Fatherland War’ to the Second World War: new perspectives and future prospects
- 11 German exceptionalism and the origins of Nazism: the career of a concept
- 12 Stalinism and the politics of post-Soviet history
- 13 Work, gender and everyday life: reflections on continuity, normality and agency in twentieth-century Germany
- Afterthoughts
- Index
7 - From Blitzkrieg to total war: controversial links between image and reality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The regimes and their dictators: perspectives of comparison
- 1 Stalin and his Stalinism: power and authority in the Soviet Union, 1930–53
- 2 Bureaucracy and the Stalinist state
- 3 Cumulative radicalisation and progressive self-destruction as structural determinants of the Nazi dictatorship
- 4 ‘Working towards the Führer’: reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship
- 5 Stalin in the mirror of the other
- 6 The contradictions of continuous revolution
- 7 From Blitzkrieg to total war: controversial links between image and reality
- 8 Stalin, the Red Army, and the ‘Great Patriotic War’
- 9 The economics of war in the Soviet Union during World War II
- 10 From ‘Great Fatherland War’ to the Second World War: new perspectives and future prospects
- 11 German exceptionalism and the origins of Nazism: the career of a concept
- 12 Stalinism and the politics of post-Soviet history
- 13 Work, gender and everyday life: reflections on continuity, normality and agency in twentieth-century Germany
- Afterthoughts
- Index
Summary
The German Wehrmacht conducted two distinct, though not unrelated and at times overlapping types of warfare between 1939 and 1945. One was based on massive, concentrated, and well-coordinated attacks along narrow fronts, leading to encirclements of large enemy forces and aimed at achieving a rapid military and political disintegration of the opponent by undermining both his logistical apparatus and psychological determination at a minimum cost to the attacking force. The other constituted a stubborn and costly defence, along huge, static, or gradually retreating fronts, normally launching only local attacks and counter-attacks with relatively limited elements of the armed forces, and relying increasingly on fortifications and doggedness rather than on speed and daring. The first type, which came to be known as Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, since it assumed a brief, though intense military confrontation, called for the preparation of limited stocks of armaments (without any major, long-term changes in the economy) needed for the implementation of such shock tactics, namely tanks, armoured personnel carriers, motorised artillery, and anti-aircraft guns, as well as fighter planes and tactical support light and medium bombers.
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- Information
- Stalinism and NazismDictatorships in Comparison, pp. 158 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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