Snake Featherston
Banned
Geez, the guy is clearly the victim of some misinformation; no need to be snarky. There are a lot of bad history books out there that give completely the wrong impression about World War II in general, and the Eastern Front in particular.
For the most part, Nazi Germany's tactical choices were correct, all the way though.
Driving straight for Moscow was unrealistic. The Russian transport system, the lack of heavy transport vehicles like trucks (and even with those, the Germans didn't have competent drivers in a lot of cases), and the fact that it takes time and energy to supply a million troops along supply lines hundreds of miles long, made a direct thrust at the capital unrealistic, because you're bottlenecking more troops and supplies at one point. Furthermore, Moscow wasn't going to just fall; most likely it would be Stalingrad-style urban warfare, except with a bigger city, with the German troops in worse condition and the Russian troops getting reinforced with Siberian veterans.
It was a miracle that the German spearheads even got TO Moscow; they were a shell of their former selves by then. Getting their earlier doesn't change much.
Not exactly. The majority of Soviet troops in 1941 were in the Ukraine and the immense losses of the earlier battles meant that the Germans had a temporary numerical advantage over the Soviets in front of Moscow. If the Soviets had chosen to limit their winter 1941/2 offensive just to Army Group Center that part of the German military would have been destroyed, and the butterflies from that for the Axis-Soviet War as a whole would be rather considerable.