Why Btonze Age?

[Anomalocaris]

But No one seem to argue that the German army was therefore an incompetent force.

Hitler made it an incompetent army later on. At the start of the war, it was led by brilliant strategists having learned their lessons from WWI. As opposed to their opponents, who won the first war and didn't see much reason to work on new strategies.

Hitler's hand is first shown in not allowing to move for Dunkirk, thereby allowing the allies to evacuate some 350.000 troops. It's largely down to him that the ensuing campaigns went badly. Apart from the fact that there was no chance in hell that an army of give or take ten millions could ever hope to hold and supply a frontline of 32.000 kilometers against a coalition which included the major industrial powers of this world.

I think the notion that the German army was led by brilliant strategists at the beginning of the war is taking the point much too far.   The officers of the German army arguably never had any significant opportunity to exercise real Independent strategic judgement between the first day of the war and the last.  Hitler was always the first and last word in German strategy.

The Germans did have brilliant practitioners at a level one step below strategy, in the arena of operational arts.  Guderian and Manstein comes to mind.  And I agree that as the war progressed, hitler become more and more inclined to interfere in operational decisions of the German army.  So Germans were increasingly easily outmaneuvered by the soviets on the operational level.

However, both before Stalingrad and before operation bagration, while hitler certainly made very bad judgement calls, it should be remembered those calls were not made in the context of thin air.  They were made possible by colossal failures of German military intelligence in assessing Soviet dispositions and intentions.

In one case directly analogous to the roads through the Ardennes, the German army had retreated some distance behind major rivers, and believed the rivers presented an impenetrable barrier to the soviets because the Germans had blown all the bridges. However, the soviets, working at night, built new bridges whose road surface were submerged 1-2 feet below water level. The Germans could not see these new bridges in aerial photos, and were confident the rivers remain impermeable to Soviet armor. As a result, when the Soviet attacked across the rivers, the Germans were taken completely by surprised. So how is that a smaller failure than the French with the Ardennes?