Well, I'll revive this mainly since I'm bored, and look at the myth of super-competent German generals and their success in Barbarossa. Warning: lots of text. No way around it, if we want to avoid the over-simplifications.
The thing about Barbarossa is, Hitler's explicit order was to go south and take the Ukrainian farmland and the oil fields of Caucasus first. Not only that would cover Germany's massive food and oil deficit (even the addition of Romanian oil barely halved that defficit, but it still was massive, and it was crippling both tanks and logistics) and allow it to wage war better, but it should have in theory crippled the Soviet ability to wage war too.
Basically Barbarossa was supposed to START with what would later become Fall Blau.
Which makes sense strategically.
THAT was why they gambled doing the attack anyway, even after quartermaster general Wagner already warned them that their logistics leash would only go as far as 500 to 800 km from the border. Because if they managed to pull THAT stunt, the win would be massive and give them a chance to win anyway.
Problem is, if you take a ruler to a map, Caucasus is a LOT farther away than that. They'd have to go between 3 times that (if Wagner's maximum estimate was correct), and 5 times that (if the lower one was correct.) And normally you go with the lower one, better to be safe than sorry.
Mother Russia is big, comrade
Halder doesn't tell Hitler that. He just makes his own plans that are a rehash of France. Just encircle their army, drive for the capital, and *bam* they surrender. (Never mind that they didn't when Napoleon does it.) The army group that was supposed to go after the oil fields is actually given the lowest priority for supplies and reinforcements, and are now only expected to advance a short way to an arbitrary line on the map and keep the Russians busy. And by arbitrary, I mean not even defined by any geographic features. It's literally just an arbitrary slanted line on the map.
Now while you could argue that that's the least unrealistic plan, given the logistical constraints, the fact is he never tells Hitler that the initial plan is impossible, which might have avoided the whole idiocy. He just makes a different plan that completely misses the strategic objectives, but Hitler doesn't know that. Hitler only learns what's ACTUALLY happening when he starts getting reports of the thrust to Moscow.
(And incidentally, stuff like this, where his generals lied to him and did something that missed the strategic point, may well be why Hitler starts to distrust and ignore generals later in the war. At the very least it IS why he has someone check Halder's plans for Fall Blau, and correct them. Because, surprise, Halder was AGAIN ignoring an order from Hitler.)
What Halder doesn't get, though, is that Russia isn't France. The distances are much higher, and there is no sea to pin the enemy against. Instead of adapting it to do the smaller pincers of Fall Blau (never mind that those didn't work either), the idea is to encircle a whole front or two by making one big push to... WHAT EXACTLY? But the infantry can't keep up, so essentially instead of one big encirclement, they had just created a giant bulge that the Soviets could just walk out of if they wanted. That's why they have to stop the drive to Moscow and turn south to actually complete the encirclement.
The plan is so incompetent, it's slapstick comedy. Well, it would be if it didn't involve hundreds of thousand dead.
But wait, some will say, it worked great, didn't it? They took a lot of ground, they took UNBELIEVABLE numbers of prisoners, etc. Surely it was a good plan, if it worked so well? Well... thing is, Stalin was worse at military stuff than Halder and Hitler put together, that's why it worked.
1. Stalin correctly guesses that the only sane thing to do if you were going to attack the USSR is to go south. So that sector of the front is the most heavily manned, and the northern sector is given the lowest priority for material and reinforcements.
Remember when I said before that a lot of nominally tank or motorized divisions were actually lacking parts, ammo and trucks? How that made them less mobile than non-motorized divisions, because the latter at least had horses to pull their artillery? Yeah, the effort to fix that is concentrated in the south. The northern ones remain hamstrung.
Even with evidence suggesting otherwise, as reports of German forces massing on the border start coming in and painting a different picture, Stalin actually is convinced that that's just a diversion and the main attack will go south. (Strangely foreshadowing what the Germans will believe about Normandy and Calais a couple of years later.)
Stalin actually moves MORE of the northern divisions south, to counter that supposed main thrust. When Barbarossa starts, some divisions are caught disorganized because they're in the middle of moving south.
So when the main thrust goes center instead of south, they meet by far not enough resistance there. Germany is outnumbering the USSR by more than 2 to 1 on the whole front anyway, but that situation is far worse for the USSR in the centre and northern sectors. Those guys get completely overwhelmed by the German thrust.
2. Stalin does do something smart, and that is take the time to dismantle the factories in the west and move them into the Urals. Pretty much an order of magnitude beyond what the German logistics could possibly allow reaching.
But that is going to take time. Most of those won't be producing tanks or some even trucks until 1942. He deliberately trades more land and human lives in the short term, for a better fighting chance in 1942 and beyond.
Now this isn't bad strategy, but it makes the German wins look bigger, when it's really only a loan of territory, and it will come to bite them in the ass later. Hard.
3. Stalin has to do one more dumb thing, and this one tops it all. It's so idiotic, that even just a little more idiocy would cause it to collapse into a singularity of human stupidity, and the shockwave would leave the whole galaxy running around with pencils up the nose and underpants on the head
By his orders, and enforced by the NKVD commissars, there is only one allowed course of action: keep frontally counter-attacking to drive the Germans out. There is no strategic retreat, no regrouping, no reinforcing flanks or lines of supply. You can only order a frontal attack towards the west, or the commissars will override you. And shoot you.
Remember how I said that Germany didn't create as much encirclements for a while, as bulges that you could leisurely walk out of, if you wanted? Remember how they took ridiculous numbers of prisoners anyway?
Yeah, the Russians counter-attacked themselves into encirclements
Halder's plan was crap, but by Jove, Stalin worked hard to make it work anyway
