So the best way to fight was simply not to fight, and to accept the inability to capture Moscow- concentrating any extra divisions to capture Leningrad and Sevestapol?
The fact is that German strategic planning was deeply flawed from the start, and it was based on a series of assumptions that were quickly proved false after a month of the start of Barbarossa.
Historically, the Prussian / German military thinking followed the saying of Frederick the Great: Prussia was a continental power with exposed borders on all sides, and so its wars had to be led in a quick and violent way, and aimed at the destruction first and foremost of the enemy's field armies in the quickest possible way.
This led to the Prussian / German General Staff to be centered almost exclusively on operational planning, and to ignore all the other factors that would only become really important in face of a protracted war. But as Germany would never face a protracted war, they were unimportant; it was a kind of circular thinking. Added to it, there was another failure less exclusable, the indifference towards proper intelligence work, which was mainly a subproduct of arrogance.
In Barbarossa, all these traits of German military thinking just failed to deliver, as they had failed to do so in 1914. But as these principles had given them an astonishing triumph over the western Allies in May-June 1940, the Germans had fully recovered their self-confidence and were sure that this way of waging war would also allow them to prevail over the Soviet Union.
Fuelled by self-confidence, Hitler, the OKH and the OKW planned a flawed campaign in Barbaross, and all its contradictions came to the fore in August 1941, when it became clear to all that the original plan (the total destruction of the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dnieper river line, less than 500 km inside the USSR) had failed.
Then the real bickering and infighting began between the OKH and Hitler about how the campaign should be conducted from that moment on. It should be told that until them there'd been total agreement between Hitler and his generals about the main goal of Barbarossa: the destruction of the Red Army as a coherent fighting force, in the classical Prussian way of Frederick the Great or Moltke the Elder, preferably by encirclement battles.
But in late August and early September, Hitler and the OKH had accepted that the war against the USSR would not be won in 1941 and that a further campaign (hopefully the definitive one) would be needed in 1942. But what should be done with the four-six weeks of good weather that they had still available? And here the real differences emerged between Halder (head of the OKH) and Hitler.
Halder wanted to launch a direct blow to Moscow immediately. And his reasoning was that, as Moscow was such an important transportation nod, industrial and population center, and the political capital of the USSR, the Soviets would launch there all their remaining forces, allowing the Ostheer finally to fight the climactic, apocaliptic encirclement battle that would destroy the Red Army for ever.
But Halder's fixation on Moscow found many objections, not only in Hitler. For starters, Hitler was very aware that rather than going 200 km eastwards to fight a Red Army that could or could not be concentrated there around the capital, there were more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers in the Southwestern Front concentrated around Kiev, blocking the advance of Army Group South and menacing the right flank of any advance further east towards Moscow. Added to it, if the war against the USSR was to keep going at least for a year more, capturing the economic resources of the Ukraine would be key, both to win them for the German economy and to deny them to the Soviets. They were solid strategic reasons.
And then there was the question that Bock and the army and army group commanders of Army Group Center wanted to stop, rest their troops, reorganize, repair their vehicles and AFVs and gather supplies before any further advance east after two months of non-stop fighting. It need not be a full month, but at they eckoned that at least one or two weeks were completely necessary. The supply situation was also hanging on a thin thread, and at last Bock and his subordinate field commanders acknowledged the necessity to fix as much as it was possible the rail transport and the roads behing the lines before any further pushed east could be launched.
Given this state of things, Hitler imposed his will (he was supreme commander, and he had the right to do so) and the AGC was ordered to rest and rebuild, but he ordered its two panzer groups to be ceded one to Army Group North and the other to Army Group South. This ensured that Leeb encircled Leningrad and that the Germans won the amazing encirclement battle at Kiev.
The rational thing at this point would have been to keep advancing just in the south, where the Soviet front had collapsed, and stop and entrench everywhere else, amybe launchng only limited operations to gain further jumping points for next year's campaign.
Instead, Halder began again pressuring with his idea to attack Moscow, as he still hoped that a decisive Kesselschlacht against Moscow would break the Red Army's backbone, and if that did not happen, it would break havoc on the Soviet railways, as they were built radially from Moscow, and make it impossible for the Soviets to move troops or supplies north of Moscow.
And Hitler agreed, making a big mistake, for all the reasons exposed in my post above. The Germans just pushed too far, and they ran out of luck. Typhoon began on October 2, way too late in the season, once 2nd and 3rd Panzer Armies rejoined AGC and 4th Panzer Army was detached from AGN and joined 3rd Panzer Army in the northern arm of the offensive.
By then, the Soviets had had a full month to recover strength, but instead of reinforcing the lines in front of Moscow, all their efforts had gone to trying to save Leningrad and to trying to plug the gaping hole created in their southern front by the Kiev
débacle. In little more than one week, the German AGC encircled the Western and Reserve Fronts, opening a huge gap in the Soviet front directly in front of Moscow. By October 10, the German armored pincers had closed around the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets, but the surrounded Soviet forces kept on fighting, forcing the Germans to employ 28 divisions to reduce both pockets. And on October 7,
rasputitsa began, which turned all further German advances into a crawl.
When the Germans began moving again eastwards, they found another nasty surprise: the approaches to Moscow were not open, for the Soviets still had available forces there, and a defence line (the Mozhaisk line) that the Germans encountered on October 13. Plus, Stalin had appointed Zhukov as general supervisor of all the fronts defending the approaches to Moscow, and this time Zhukov (who had been until then propping things up in Leningrad) made sure that the scarce Soviet forces available were competently deployed, blocking the most likely avenues that the German armored columns would be using.
The Mozhaisk line served its purpose, because it slowed down the German advance, giving time to STAVKA to build more fortificatins around Moscow, to evacuate critical industrial plants and workforce, and to move and train more forces to defend the capital. Until the October 27, the Germans were not able to force the crossing of the Mozhaisk line after heavy fighting (and heavy losses), with Zhukov directing an orderly withdrawal of his forces to another defence line along the eastern bank of the Nara river.
In the meantime, the German armored pincers had tried to outflank the Mozhaisk line; the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies had outflanked it far to the north taking Kalinin, and the 2nd Panzer Army (Guderian's) taking Kaluga but being repealed at Tula by an improvised defense of 50th Army soldiers and civilian militia (October 26-29).
By October 31, the OKH ordered a pause in operations to all units of AGC to reorganize, regroup and bring forward any supplies that could be scrapped together.
By then, the Germans had been fighting for a whole month with high intensity and they'd still not reached Moscow, although the city was just 200 km from the starting point of the offensive. For the next and final push the OKH waited until November 15 (of course, the Soviets also profited from this lull in operations).
Why did they wait until November 15? They waited until then because by then the ground had frozen solid, and so the
rasputitsa was over, which restored much of its mobility to the German armored pincers; contrary to popualr myth, the oncoming of winter actually favored the German advance.
But this final German advance was a crawl in front of an increasingly stiffening Soviet resistance, which was what put a stop to the German advance, with minimal gains against huge losses. By the end, while 2nd Panzer Army was unable to bypass Tula in the south, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies were launching frontal assaults trying to reach Moscow, having abandoned all plans of a grandiose eastern encirclement (which completely defeated the original purpose of Typhoon).
