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 and/or war:
“But, where the road runs near the stream,
Oft through the trees they catch a glance
Of passing troops in the sun’s beam—
Pennon, and plume, and flashing lance!
Forth to the world those soldiers fare,
To life, to cities, and to war!”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)