BlairWitch749
Banned
Yes, I'm familiar with the Battle of Kiev where several Soviet generals, including Budenny warned Stalin that the big disaster was about to happen and where those forced to fight there in the doomed pockets kept the Germans tied down for months despite all the Soviet disadvantages of 1941. It's a scenario won as much by Soviet mistakes as what Model himself actually did, which is a victory that attests more to his tactical skills than it does anything like the ability to fight the kind of mobile offensive that both sides excelled at in that war.
His 1944 battles reflected again as much on his ability to ruthlessly exploit Red Army mistakes as to what he did in conditions rather more static than in the protracted, sustained mobile operations that characterized much of the war. Like with the Soviet generals of the Leningrad Front after the siege was broken and Bernard Montgomery he was good in static set-piece battles, though his defensive skills were perhaps some of the greatest in the entire war.
Model could only destroy the divisions in front of him regardless of poor soviet strategic decision making; which he and the third panzer division did; his division alone took over 200,000 prisoners and captured 600 tanks and 1000 artillery pieces in 1941 alone.
Model was good at reading maps and putting his forces in the right place which is how he won his battles. Zhukov impatiantly and stupidly sent his forces into east prussia without waiting for neighboring fronts to catch up and screen his flanks which Model and Hossbach realized, massed the 3rd panzer army on his flank and punched him in the mouth causing the loss of thousands of experienced troops and loads of heavy equipment in a battle that the Russians should have never had thrust on them after learning the lesson at third kharkov
If Walter Model(as ETO ground forces commander for the allies) was looking at the map seeing the German army mindlessly throwing themselves at averanches he would have moved his divisions like lightening to the flanks; wrapped the german army up and proceeded to beat their brains in to surrender with his airpower and artillery