Editing Blitzkrieg (section)

===Strategy===
In 1965, [[Captain (land)|Captain]] [[Robert O'Neill (historian)|Robert O'Neill]], Professor of the History of War at the [[University of Oxford]] produced an example of the popular view. In ''Doctrine and Training in the German Army 1919–1939'', O'Neill wrote:

{{blockquote|What makes this story worth telling is the development of one idea: the blitzkrieg. The German Army had a greater grasp of the effects of technology on the battlefield, and went on to develop a new form of warfare by which its rivals when it came to the test were hopelessly outclassed.}}

Other historians wrote that blitzkrieg was an operational doctrine of the German armed forces and a strategic concept on which the leadership of Nazi Germany based its strategic and economic planning. Military planners and bureaucrats in the war economy appear rarely, if ever, to have employed the term ''blitzkrieg'' in official documents. That the German army had a "blitzkrieg doctrine" was rejected in the late 1970s by Matthew Cooper. The concept of a blitzkrieg ''[[Luftwaffe]]'' was challenged by [[Richard Overy]] in the late 1970s and by Williamson Murray in the mid-1980s. That Nazi Germany went to war on the basis of "blitzkrieg economics" was criticized by Richard Overy in the 1980s, and George Raudzens described the contradictory senses in which historians have used the word. The notion of a German blitzkrieg concept or doctrine survives in popular history and many historians still support the thesis.{{sfn|Harris|1995|pp=333–348}}

Frieser wrote that after the failure of the [[Schlieffen Plan]] in 1914, the German army concluded that decisive battles were no longer possible in the changed conditions of the twentieth century. Frieser wrote that the [[Oberkommando der Wehrmacht]] (OKW), which was created in 1938 had intended to avoid the decisive battle concepts of its predecessors and planned for a long war of exhaustion (''Ermattungskrieg''). It was only after the improvised plan for the Battle of France in 1940 was unexpectedly successful that the German General Staff came to believe that ''Vernichtungskrieg'' was still feasible. German thinking reverted to the possibility of a quick and decisive war for the [[Balkans campaign (World War II)|Balkan campaign]] and Operation Barbarossa.{{sfn|Frieser|2005|pp=349–350}}