Blitzkrieg

Blitzkrieg Tactics

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The main characteristic of what is commonly known as "Blitzkrieg".. This photo was taken during operations along the Terek River in 1942.

The Blitzkrieg tactic is mostly regarded as the greatest tactic ever used by any army. Blitzkreig in german means literally "Lightning War". So, as you might suspect, it consists of lighting fast attacks. In many forms of the tactic, the attacking army will use its air squadrons and moblie artillery to bombard the target. Then Tanks, Half Tracks will advance forward to the objective, where it causes the enemies army to fall abck into a pocket of defense, where the following infantry will kill the encircled troops. The tanks will keep up the assault until the enemy is drove back to the objective. A good example of this attack is the Battle of Dunkirk, where the German Wermacht, or army, used Blitzkreig tactics to advance upon the British troops. The Blitzkreig tactic was so fast that the British didn't have time to retreat properly, this casued massive casualties of the British troops.

Anti-Blitzkreig Tactics

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General Stanisław Maczek, one of the early developers of anti-blitzkrieg tactics

Later in World War II, the Russians invented a tactic that was very effective over the Germans Blitzkreig tactics. It was developed by many people, but the most renowned person was General Stanisław Maczek who designed the tactic. The tactic consisted of gaining air support, which kept the air bombardments by the Germans immpossible, it also kept the Tanks and Half-Tracks from moving freely. To do this however, the Russians needed a ground attack aircraft that could do the job of destroying tanks from the air. The Russians answer to this was the Ilyushin Il-2, which consisted of a crew of two people (a pilot and a rear gunner), a maximum speed of 257 Mile per hour, an operational range of 450 Miles, and an Armament consisting of two fixed forward-firing 23 mm VYa-23 cannons, two fixed forward-firing 7.62 mm ShKAS machine guns, one manually aimed 12.7 mm Berezin UBT machine gun the in rear cockpit, and up to 1,320 Pounds of bombs and/or Four RS-82 or RS-132 rockets. These ground attack aircraft were used to combat the German Messerschmitt Bf 109's. This caused the Blitzkreig tactic to become less effective. This tactic paved the way for Americans and British to do the same and keep the Germans from trying attacks of the magnitude of these attacks again.