julian wrote: You know pretty well that there was a proposal by made by OKH on 18 august for the advance to Moscow . Given the reasoning of the OKH this operation was certainly not intended to start later than the beginning of september. If a clear decision had been made earlier for the focus on Moscow this operation would have had more forces than the one actually proposed.
If you go for Moscow as the main objective , you start early and AGN and AGS are limited to protecting the flank of AGC. You certainly never wait unitl october.
Thats all well and good, have you looked at the lage Ost maps in addition to the Wehrmacht Intel estimate of enemy forces? The lage Ost maps show enemy (Soviet) troop dispositions and the Intel estimate demonstrates what AGC knew and expected to encounter. The problem here as clearly demonstrated by Glantz in several of his books is that the German estimates were wrong and conversely so were their expectations.
You may find it interesting to note that until the Kiev operation the Red Army had actually done it's job of stopping Barbarossa. The enemy was stopped at fortress Kiev and Leningrad, also stopped just east of Smolensk. STAVKA expected the next push would be on the Smolensk-Moscow Axis and had concentrated forces there and on the flanks to create pressure, which is why Guderian had such a relatively easy time in the Kiev operation (Red Army defenses oriented in other directions). The Kiev operation strategically unhinged the Soviet position, so without it the Germans are meeting Soviet expectations by attacking Moscow. The dynamic of Typhoon following the Kiev operation is therefore in no way comparable to an earlier push on Moscow which forgoes the Kiev operation and flank clearing operations on AGC's wings as well. The mobile units need 10-14 days of refit to reach a maximum of 60% strength, which means they need to be fully extracted and in rear areas by 17-18 August. The implication here is that they don't just magically move to the rear, they have to disengage from combat and administratively move prior to the 17th which suggests no mobile combat units engaged in offensive operations from 10 August?
This link provides units, dates, locations for the operations that this effects in the short term:
http://operationbarbarossa.net/Brief-Mi ... tory3.html
Personally, I think Glantz' "Barbarossa Derailed" is the best source of what went wrong with Barbarossa and what the Red Army did right (in a relative way).
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1906033722