A damning indictment of Paulus, who'd never commanded anything higher than a company prior to taking the Sixth Army (he'd been a staff officer for most of his career).
Paulus showed that he was not a true combat leader in alot of ways. To my knowledge, he never inspected front line positions during the Stalingrad battle. Likewise, he expressed surprise as to why aircraft could not land at various landing strips at night. Evidently, he had never even been to the airstrips and never realized that not all of them were equipped with landing lights. Instead, Paulus spent alot of time at his headquarters indulging in a personal hobby- redrawing maps of Napoleon's Russian campaign.
As a side note, I watched a Russian documentary on Vlasov. He and Paulus had an awful lot in common:
- Both were competent, but hardly inspirational to their soldiers. Though Vlasov was identified by Zhukov as being talented, Vlasov rarely inspected front line positions and even communicated to his immediate staff
via messages written from a closed office and then delivered by an aid.
- Both kept their headquarters relatively well stocked with creature comforts while their men starved (Vlasov even brought a "field wife" to his encircled army).
- Both saw their armies needlessly destroyed and later broke with their respective tyrants.