Starting with Germany's invasion of Poland in , Adolf Hitler's military machine pulled off a string of stunning victories at the start of World War II, perhaps none as shocking as Germany's utter trouncing of France in Now it's all over in a little less than two weeks.
The reason for Hitler's spectacular early success in WWII was a brazen new style of warfare known as Blitzkrieg, a combination of the German words for "lightning" blitz and "war" krieg coined by Western journalists who were floored by the speed and ferocity of the Nazi attack.
Nearly 2 million German soldiers were killed during World War I , primarily as casualties of an agonizingly slow style of fighting known as trench warfare. In the first battles of WWI , all sides suffered such devastating losses from artillery, machine guns and other modern weapons that they resorted to digging long trenches in the battlefield for protection.
The mud-filled, rat-infested trenches became the closest thing to hell on earth for these soldiers. One of the longest and deadliest examples of trench warfare was the day Battle of the Somme, in which the British, French and German armies suffered more than a million combined casualties. Every nation that fought in WWI vowed to never fight in another miserable trench, but they each had different ideas for how to achieve it, says Kirchubel.
During the interwar years, the British invested heavily in aircraft technology, planning to fly over trenches and bomb the enemy at home. The French decided to build a more permanent and fortified version of a trench known as the Maginot Line , a series of 58 underground fortresses constructed along the French-German border in the s. The philosophy of Blitzkrieg is to hit the enemy hard where it's the weakest and attack with three components of the military at once: armored tanks, infantry and air bombardment.
