* Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” turns out itself to be a messy piece of improvisation from the German army. Karl-Heinz Frieser, a German military historian, notes in The Blitzkrieg Legend: “The campaign in the west . . . was not a planned campaign of conquest. Instead, it was an operational act of despair to get out of a desperate strategic situation” (Frieser with John T. Greenwood, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West [Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013]). After Blitzkrieg tactics were developed by Rommel and his fellow officers, and proved surprisingly successful, they were then embraced as a more official doctrine.