The Germans were stopped at Yelnia for several weeks, they suffered an ammonition crisis, they were forced to dig in, spent their rare supply to this salient just to finally withdraw from the sailent. I would consider this a tactical defeatof the Germans. If you read von Bock's diary you'll see the headache Yelnia caused to him, screwing up his entire timetable. All this would not happened if the Red Army would have withdrawn any further (with a Soviet rail system under heavy distress, I wonder how much troops and equipment would have arrived in the rear defense positions).

Falling back "little" to built up "perfect" defence in the areas of mobile warfare is very hard to accomplish.

Operationally speaking, the Soviet's forward defense (& strike back)-doctrine is including the risks of being flanked out and becoming encircled but works perfectly to pull out momentum of the attacking force. Advantage is that you "buy" more time by stiff delayed defensive compared to an all-out withdrawal probably finding yourself in a only slightly better defense situation, but with demoralized, decimated troops and equipment and a good part of your country given as a gift to the enemy. Disadvantage is that you'll have to sacrify your troops as wavebreakers to a certain degree.

I can't say that letting millions of red Army soldiers becoming encircled and destroyed is a sign of clever operational genius, however with the existant Soviet military doctrine and under the given Soviet logistigal circumstances, a large disengagement movement was not possible (nor wished by Stalin, btw).

The Red Army soldiers who were encircled in the huge pockets stood firm and were sacrified for the sake of buying time. Tough for the Reds, lucky for the Nazis. But even with so much working positively for the nazis, it still worked out for Stalin at the end, as we know.

I can't say if an all-out full withdrawal to a more or less fortified Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov-line, facing the attack of fully intact German Army in September would have worked out that way.

But I daer to say that if the Red Army would have managed to save more men & material in the inital months, Germany would never have sawn anything more eastern than Vjasma, but that is Monday morning quarterbacking.


As usual in this Redzun-discussions, I'd like to ask for sources supporting your assesment that Stalin planned to attack germany in 1941.

Cheers,

__________________
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
(President Merkin Muffley in "Dr. Strangelove")