Mid Barbarossa Strategy Review
With Leningrad all but cut off by land there is little point keeping the tanks for the job of crossing the Neva river or for urban street fighting - that job is best left to the infantry. So what should be done with the northern motorised units? To answer that question also means deciding what is the next part of our Barbarossa campaign.
Historically 4th Panzer Group was simply backed out of the north and transported to the central sector as part of the final Operation Typhoon for Moscow. But we decide on a different approach. 4th Panzer Group will switch its advance to a south easterly direction crossing the river Volkhov and surrounding Novgorod by turn 11. It will then advance towards Kalinin to link up with Army Group Centre by turn 15. This will release many forces now holding the area in Army Group Centre to be redeployed to the advance on Moscow. 4th Panzer Group with much of the rest of Army Group North would then become the northern pincer of the advance on Moscow - with an outside eye of maybe even getting to Yaroslavl on the Volga.
Plans elsewhere are more diffuse. Although the centre is getting tougher and there is always a danger of hubris, the feeling is Moscow is ours now. There is just not enough time to dig the fortification levels needed to hold - and not on a wide enough arc to stop us surrounding it. So the question is what next? Keep going east and you have the great industrial prize of Gorky. It has so much industry that even using all of the Soviet Unions railway capacity it cannot be evacuated at once. Merely to threaten taking Gorky turns in advance will mean tying up all railway capacity on its evacuation. Alternatively there could be a large encirclement with south meeting at Voronezh taking advantage of the forward positions of a lot of the Soviet forces between them.
