Hitler also was deluded not to equip hes army with winter equipment and hes soldiers paid the price. He encirclement did gut the soviet forces in army group south which was another of Stalins mistakes not to break out of the encirclement. This put Moscow out of reach of army group center.
Hold fast orders might have worked in 41 but these doomed Germany when they were repeated in Stalingrad and through out the rest of the war
Failure to acquire winter equipment wasn't a Hitler decision. It was part of the general German logistical breakdown. Not really his fault. The
Wehrmacht probably could not have attacked in 1941 with better logistical preparation - a future offensive would probably have to be postponed.
The assertion that Guderian's "southward turn" prevented the Nazis from launching
Typhoon early and reaching Moscow before the winter is false. Guderian's destruction of the Southwestern Front around Kiev eliminated an extremely powerful force that could outflank Army Group Center (and which had been building up in August
for that very purpose), and furthermore gave the German forces around Smolensk time to rest and recuperate after the bloody engagements there earlier in August. Far from being a diversion from
Typhoon, it was the necessary precondition
for it. In addition, the halt around Smolensk gave Stalin and the
stavka time to organize another fruitless counterattack which further attenuated the forces guarding the Moscow approaches.
Hitler's order to "stand fast" in late 1941 is actually almost unique in the Great Patriotic War. After 1942, he frequently permitted
Wehrmacht forces in danger of encirclement to withdraw, and generally gave his approval for the vaunted "elastic defense" proposals that Manstein and others put forward. The decision not to retreat from Stalingrad wasn't really an error, because Sixth Army was not merely fighting at Stalingrad for Stalingrad: it was guarding the flank of Army Group A in the Caucasus, and had Paulus been ordered to retreat at some point during the fall, the forces further south would've been almost certainly cut off and destroyed. The failure of BLAU was a consequence of its very nature: an operation along two strategic axes (Stalingrad and Baku) that probably did not possess the resources to succeed in either - but so was its initial success.
An argument that Paulus could have broken the Sixth Army out of Stalingrad had he been permitted to do so is ridiculous. For illustration, I'll compare it to something else well-known in the annals of modern European warfare: the encirclement of Marshal Bazaine's Imperial French forces at the fortress of Metz in August 1870. Following a series of battles that numbered among the bloodiest and largest in European history up to that point - Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte-St. Privat - Bazaine's vaunted Army of the Rhine had been forced back into the Metz fortifications. The Germans promptly left an army of observation around the fortress and took the majority of their army to deal with Marshal MacMahon and Napoleon III's Army of Chalons, which was marching to Bazaine's relief. That campaign ended on September 2, with the Army of Chalons penned up against the Belgian border, briefly attempting a violent breakout attempt of its own - the famous Battle of Sedan - and ultimately forced to surrender. The argument goes that, had Bazaine roused himself from his torpor and tried to make contact with Napoleon, the French could have perhaps won the day. But such an argument presupposes that the Germans guarding Metz - which included some of their best troops, albeit some of the most-bloodied ones, and which were commanded by one of the few German commanders suited to competent independent command - would not have simply pursued them,
even if the French did manage to break out. Most likely, the French would have been thrown back into their fortifications. And if Bazaine's troops had managed to escape, disorganized from the breakout attempt, they would have been brought to battle once more somewhere west of Metz by their erstwhile jailers, and comprehensively defeated.
So it is with Stalingrad. Realistically, the Soviet ring of steel around the Sixth Army was far too strong for the Sixth Army - deprived now of supplies, except the trickle that came in from
Luftwaffe air-drops - to even attempt a breakout. But let's say they did. The much more mobile Communists would almost certainly have simply brought in even more troops and crushed the Hitlerites on the plains west of Stalingrad. It was not unreasonable for Hitler to presume that a hold-fast order was most appropriate. For one thing, again, Army Group A had to be rescued from the Caucasus, and the Sixth Army, even when it was sacrificed, bought Kleist's panzer spearheads and mountain troops critical time. For another thing, Paulus' troops had a much greater power of resistance in the bombed-out ruins of Stalingrad than they did on the open steppe west of the city, and would last much longer while the
Wehrmacht planned a rescue. If the rescue failed, well, there it was. Realistically, Sixth Army was doomed as soon as URANUS started. Hitler's orders to hold on in the city certainly saved Army Group A, and gave Sixth Army itself a puncher's chance of survival as well.
I've been always wondering how much insight into the strategic considerations Hitler actually had or if he was mainly motivated by naive/emotional ideas of how "war had to be fought". Short, was Hitler just lucky there?
There is no good answer to that question.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure if the distinction even matters.
They were definately better then the Greeks whose military system basicaly consisted of 'lets get a bunch of guys with spears and have then run at a bunch of other guys with spears'.
Um, which Greeks are we talking about here?
Yes. He really didn't have a clue in most situations. His famous "intuition" was a combination of luck and his willingness to take gambles that others were unwilling to even consider. And more luck, like when he met Manstein just in time to change the plan for the war against the West, or when Soviet amateurism turned his mistakes into victories.
I think that this sort of viewpoint comes mostly from an over-reliance on Hitler's marshals' memoirs, in which they sought to exculpate themselves of military failure by scapegoating the conveniently-dead and generally-reviled
Führer. The
Wehrmacht didn't lose - it was driven to defeat by Hitler's stupid decisions. Strikingly, the higher military officers of Nazi Germany sang a different tune when things were going well, and Hitler was feted as a strategic genius - even when one assumes that everybody who took part in such an operation would want to take credit for it,
especially under the disorganized patronage-reliant Nazi regime of "working 'toward' the
Führer".
It's rather similar to the First World War. The imperial army didn't lose the war - it had
a war-winning plan (history article plug) but the incompetent Moltke failed to carry it through properly. The imperial army didn't lose the war - it was that bloodthirsty lunatic Falkenhayn's fault for pursuing a strategy of attrition instead of a proper
Vernichtungsschlacht. The imperial army didn't lose the war - it was stabbed in the back by the civilian government and the mutinying soldiers at Kiel. Anything to preserve the image of the unbeatable German military - even if all those things were
prima facie false, and everyone who had served in the war at OHL knew it.
Like I said earlier, I don't really care about whether Hitler made the decisions he did out of lucky ignorance, incompetence, or hidden military genius. It doesn't really matter. It's like, did Alexander launch his famous charge at Gaugamela out of an innate understanding of the
Schwerpunkt of the Iranian army - of the vaunted
coup d'oeil - or did he charge at Darayavahush III's position out of personal pique, displaying no more military genius than the anger-crazed Incredible Hulk? Surely it doesn't matter - not that we'll ever find out anyway. I do, however, care that the correct reasons for the course of the Great Patriotic War are made properly clear, because that
is history, and damn if Hitler isn't one of the key reasons the Nazis did so well for so long.
