Two officers sat across from me.
To anyone who would one day study armored warfare, they would become household names.
Men whose ideas would reshape modern armies.
The Reich’s future military geniuses—
Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian.
As expected, both wore puzzled expressions.
Yet there was something else in their faces as well.
A look that seemed to say, So it’s finally our turn.
(Well, after talking to practically every major branch of government, word was bound to spread.)
Over the past few weeks, I had held meeting after meeting—with the Navy, the Luftwaffe, the Foreign Ministry, and the Ministry of Economics.
Each time, I had announced sweeping changes in policy.
Anyone with even a modest network of contacts—especially officers of general rank—would have heard the rumors.
And they would also know that the Army was the only branch I hadn’t addressed.
Naturally, being summoned by the Fuhrer under those circumstances was enough to make anyone cautious.
“There’s no need to be on your guard,” I began.
“I have no intention of interfering heavily in Army affairs.
Least of all with the armored divisions the two of you are trying to build.
Their organization and doctrine will remain in your hands.”
The tension visibly eased from their shoulders.
The armored divisions they envisioned…
To people in the future, any serious student of military history would recognize them instantly.
Modern armies simply could not exist without armored formations.
But in 1936, things were very different.
Here, they were the radicals.
Most military thinkers still imagined the next war as little more than a continuation of the last.
Miles upon miles of trenches.
A grinding struggle where every yard of ground was bought with blood.
That was what they expected.
The armies of other nations remained trapped in rigid branch rivalries, and few saw any value in concentrating tanks into independent formations.
Many countries experimented with armored divisions.
Almost all of those experiments failed before they ever became practical.
The problem wasn’t just doctrine.
It was the tanks themselves.
Most nations still divided them into two completely separate categories: cruiser tanks under the cavalry, built for speed and maneuver, and infantry tanks assigned to the infantry, designed to crawl forward alongside foot soldiers.
Britain and France were perhaps the clearest examples of this way of thinking.
Unfortunately, many within the Reich still shared those outdated assumptions.
The officers of the Army High Command—OKH—were especially prone to it.
Yet these two men had reached a different conclusion.
They had conceived the idea of Blitzkrieg.
Though, in truth, Blitzkrieg itself wasn’t entirely new.
It was, in many ways, a rebirth of the infiltration tactics developed by the Imperial German Army during the closing stages of the Great War.
One could even argue that those infiltration tactics were Blitzkrieg stripped of tanks and aircraft.
They had achieved impressive local successes.
But they had failed to change the outcome of the war.
The reasons were simple.
Without aerial reconnaissance, identifying weak points in the enemy’s lines took far too long.
Even when a breakthrough was achieved, there were no portable radios capable of coordinating the units pushing through the gap or directing reinforcements quickly enough to exploit it.
And even if those reinforcements arrived, the logistics of the time—still dependent almost entirely on railways—couldn’t sustain a rapidly advancing force.
The underlying concept had been sound:
Break through the enemy’s weakest point with a fast, flexible force, then strike deep into their headquarters and supply lines before they could react.
The idea wasn’t the problem.
The technology simply hadn’t caught up.
Only with the combined advances in aviation, motor vehicles, and radio communications could such a doctrine truly become possible.
Honestly…
it’s astonishing they conceived it at all without the benefit of hindsight.
Still, from the perspective of someone who knew the future…
There were parts of it that needed to be corrected.
Especially the equipment.
That was where I intended to intervene.