Panzer Battles was instrumental in forming the misconceptions that influenced the U.S. view of Eastern Front military operations up to 1995, when Soviet archival sources became available to Western and Russian historians.

The historian Wolfram Wette lists Mellenthin in the group of German generals who authored apologetic, uncritical studies on World War II, alongside Ferdinand Heim, Kurt von Tippelskirch, Waldemar Erfurth and others.

[3] Mellenthin blames Wehrmacht's defeat solely on the Soviet advantages in men and materiel, describing the Red Army as a "ruthless enemy, possessed of immense and seemingly inexhaustible resources".

[1] Wehrmacht's adversaries on the Eastern Front are consistently depicted in derogatory and racial terms, including in a section dedicated to the "Psychology of the Russian Soldier".

[1] Panzer Battles was instrumental in forming the misconceptions which influenced the U.S. view of Eastern Front military operations up to 1995, when Soviet archival sources became available to Western and Russian historians.

The historian Robert Citino notes the influential nature of Mellenthin's works in shaping the perceptions of the Red Army in the West as "a faceless and mindless horde" whose idea of military art was to "smash everything in its path through numbers, brute force and sheer size".