Editing Blitzkrieg (section)

===''Heer''===
Frieser wrote that the {{lang|de|[[German Army (Wehrmacht)|Heer]]}} ({{IPA|de|ˈheːɐ̯}}){{efn|name=Heer}} was not ready for blitzkrieg at the start of the war. A blitzkrieg method called for a young, highly skilled mechanized army. In 1939–1940, 45 percent of the army was 40 years old and 50 percent of the soldiers had only a few weeks' training. The German Army, contrary to the blitzkrieg legend, was not fully motorized and had only 120,000 vehicles, compared to the 300,000 of the French Army. The British also had an "enviable" contingent of motorized forces. Thus, "the image of the German 'Blitzkrieg' army is a figment of propaganda imagination". During the First World War, the German army used 1.4 million horses for transport and in the Second World War 2.7 million horses. Only ten percent of the army was motorized in 1940.{{sfn|Frieser|2005|p=29}}

Half of the German divisions available in 1940 were combat ready, but they were less well-equipped than the British and French or the Imperial German Army of 1914. In the spring of 1940, the German army was semi-modern in which a small number of well-equipped and "elite" divisions were offset by many second and third rate divisions".{{sfn|Frieser|2005|pp=29–30, 33}} In 2003, John Mosier wrote that while the French soldiers in 1940 were better trained than German soldiers, as were the Americans later and that the German Army was the least mechanized of the major armies, its leadership cadres were larger and better and that the high standard of leadership was the main reason for the successes of the German army in World War II, as it had been in World War I.{{sfn|Mosier|2003|pp=284–288}}