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[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1981-070-15, Frankreich, Panzer IV.jpg|300px|left|thumbnail|Panzer IV in France 1940]]

When the Hohenzollern monarch became the Kaiser of Germany, the Prussian Way of War became the German Way of War. The Prussian General Staff became the main conduit for this tradition, and it continued to advocate “short and lively wars.” This military weltanschauung persisted even though Germany rapidly became one of the most industrialized and populated countries in Europe during the 19th century and was thus more capable of winning long, attritional wars.

====World War I====

The German experience of World War I was therefore quite different from that of the French and the British and the “lessons” they drew from it were consequently also different. They were not as wedded to the idea of stalemate or the irrelevance of the offensive and operational maneuver and chose to view the Stellungskrieg of the trenches as an aberration that could be overcome. In the German view, ''Bewegungskrieg'' had not been rendered obsolete or untenable—it just had to be adapted to the new circumstances.

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Guderian and Ludwig Beck, then chief of the German army, did indeed come into conflict, but not because Beck was an anti-armor traditionalist. Instead, Beck had a broader view of the situation than did Guderian, who was only concerned with the panzerwaffe. Beck was worried that concentrating all of the army’s massive assets like tanks and motorization in a few panzer divisions would reduce the fighting ability of the rest of the military. He wanted to allocate some tanks to the infantry divisions to give them more offensive capability. Guderian resisted this, thinking that it would dilute Germany’s armored strength.<ref>Showalter, ''Hitler’s Panzers'', pp. 45-46; Friesser, The Blitzkrieg Legend, pp. 28-33.</ref> He eventually won this debate, and Germany concentrated her mechanized and motorized assets into a few panzer and light divisions—the rest of the German army remained leg-mobile infantry not much different from their World War I counterparts. This would prove problematic in the long run, but on the eve of war, it gave the Wehrmacht an elite, concentrated fighting force of excellent hitting power, mobility, and flexibility. The panzer divisions would serve as spearheads for the mass army.

====The Role of Airpower and the Luftwaffe in German Blitzkrieg====