German Strategy: Hard Shell, Soft Shell

While the Allied strategy was built upon isolating the invasion battlefield and persuading the Germans that the real invasion would occur at the Pas de Calais, the German strategy was to hold the invasion up long enough to push the invaders back into the sea. Ironically this inverted both sides’ general approach: the prior German successes had been rooted in rapid forward movement of armoured divisions in Blitzkrieg fashion, or, alternatively, in prolonged and skilful fighting retreats on the eastern front; the Allies’ successes, such as there were any early in the war, had been by maintaining strong defensive positions. In this sense the Germans, replicating the distinction between exogenous and endogenous skeletons, switched from their traditional ‘soft shell’ approach to a ‘hard shell’ approach and the Allies did the reverse. The soft shell approach embodies flexibility at the cost of sustaining reparable damage. In effect, like animals, the surface tissue is easily damaged but repairs easily too. However the ‘hard shell’/exogenous skeleton form is much tougher to ‘crack’ in the first instance because surface damage is easily resisted. However, once the surface is shattered then the integrity of the entire body disintegrates as the shell/skeleton ruptures.