The German military strategy of today is one of liquification, rotting and eroding the opposing army—true, in this war increased speed and fire power have affected tactics. but the whole picture of a battlefield has radically changed. It used always to be a concentration of opposing forces on a definite front—there was always a "front line" upon which schemes of attack and defence were based. Today "front lines" have ceased to exist. This is a direct development of a defending action fought by the Germans at Arras in 1917 when skillful dispositions saved the enemy from a major defeat; at Arras there was for the first time real depth in defence and an elasticity of line. That was for defence, but it was evolved for attack a year later. The British tank attack of August 8, 1918 destroyed the time honoured "front line" for-inula, when it combined depth. weight and speed. After the war all military powers reacted to the new experiences, the two major problems being (1) how to compel the rapid breakdown of organized resistance, and (2) how to resist such an attack as might accomplish this result.
So far in this war we have seen the breakdown of defence as when the German panzer columns struck deep into France. But the Germans knew thatythese columns could not succeed unsupported, and as they were soon out of range of artillery support they sent over wave after wave of bombing planes; the panzers drove straight through to the coast, thus severing lines of communication and supply. Surprisingly few men were involved in this operation, in fact hundreds of thousands of French soldiers were never really engaged, but the rigid type of defence adopted by the French was destroyed and they surrendered. Thus were the inferences of 1918 carried to their logical conclusion, and with the greater speeds attained in 1940 the liquefaction of France began in earnest.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.