World War II
Model spent the first year of World War II as a chief of staff, first of IV Corps during the invasion of Poland, and then of Sixteenth Army during the Battle of France. He was promoted to major general (Generalleutnant) in April 1940, and earned his first senior command posting in November that year, when he was assigned to lead the 3rd Panzer Division. He immediately proceeded to ignore all formalities of organization and command, which endeared him to his men and exasperated his staff—who often had to clean up the mess he left behind. He also instituted a combined arms training program where his men were thrown together in various ad-hoc groupings regardless of their parent unit: tankers would train with infantry, engineers with recon units, and so on. Model thus anticipated by some months the regular German use of kampfgruppen in World War II; while this would become routine later on, it was still not a universal practice in the Wehrmacht in late 1940 and early 1941.
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Famous quotes containing the words world war, world and/or war:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Come Vitus, are we men, or are we children? Of what use are all these melodramatic gestures? You say your soul was killed, and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmaros fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?”
—Peter Ruric, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff)