Lightning war — or blitzkrieg as the Germans called it — was a natural outgrowth of the use of machines of war. When the Allies first introduced tanks to the battlefield during the First World War they had little idea what to do with them. So they came to the battlefield piecemeal and were duly destroyed. By the time of the Spanish Civil War there were self-propelled guns and armored troop carriers. As well as aerial support. The Germans experimented with their joint use and the art of the blitzkrieg was invented. Neither France nor Britain took heed of these developments until it was too late. My Americans in 1863 did what the Germans did in 1936. They applied all the lessons of combat that they had learned the hard way, through he death of soldiers, to invent a new and more successful kind of warfare.