Rolf Hobson

Blitzkrieg, the Revolution in Military Affairs and Defense Intellectuals

Abstract This article examines the unspoken assumptions behind the ideal image of Blitzkrieg to be found in the literature on the Revolution in Military Affairs. This image has little in common with current historical research into the Wehrmachts way of war. It is based on an isolated operational analysis of the German victory over France in 1940, a comparison of doctrine which ignores strategic and economic factors, and the removal of the Eastern Front from the picture of Nazi warfare. This image of Blitzkrieg in fact reflects post-Vietnam American warfighting ideals. Taken together with a widespread and uncritical admiration for the Wehrmacht, it raises the question of the extent to which defense intellectuals are disciplined by a methodology designed to weed out bad theory and self-serving assumptions.

Weserübung in German and Norwegian Historiography

The defence of Weserubung was established early: it was a preemptive strike, a swift reaction to Allied aggression that had been planned well in advance and was already under way prior to 9 April, 1940. The further evolution of the German historiography of Weserubung also goes by the name of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung . Marxist genuflection was reserved for the claim that the interest of German monopoly capitalism in Scandinavian raw materials had been the real guiding force behind the strategic planningof the OKW. On the whole, their approach to Weserubung was no longer very different from that of their West German equivalents. It has been a specific trait of the Norwegian historiography to state at the outset, or take it as given, that there is little reason to carry the study of the pre-history of Weserubung further back than the outbreak of war in September 1939. Keywords:Allied aggression; German historiography; German monopoly capitalism; Norwegian historiography; Weserubung