The Role of the Tank

[Kelen]

Well Lt Colonel John Fuller was the first person to propose that tanks shouln't just be there to support the intantry and should be used basically as cavalry to punch a hole in the enemy and sweep into the rear areas, leaving the infanty to mop up. Although not totaly successful this plan was implimented at Cambrai, and again more successfully at Amiens, where both heavy and light tanks were used. The heavies to punch the hole and the light whippets to fan out into the rear areas and attack communications, HQ units and supply columns.

Basil Hart who rewrote the army's Infantry Training Manual in 1920 propsoed an 'expanding torrent' form of attack where resources should be used to exploit gains rather than fed into areas where difficulties were encountered. He wrote that success lay, "...partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly un the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time, but above all in the 'follow through' - the way that a breakthrough (the tactical penetration of the front) is exploited by a deep strategic penetration, carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independantly."

These Germans used these tactics as the basis of Blitzkrieg, so I feel reasonably confident in saying that although they were indeed the first to use them on such a grand scale, they didn't come up with a 'unique' form of warfare, meremly 'borrowed' the ideas of others and refined them.

As for Market Garden, I wouldn't say that that was in anyway intended to be a Blitzkrieg. They couldn't bypass areas of resistance as they needed the whole length of the route secure. nor could the Armour range out in front of the infantry on it's own; and thirdly the intent wasn't to cut off or encircle units, nor to cause disruption behind the lines, but to achieve a specifc and limited tactical objective, i.e. to secure the crossings over the rivers.