This is certainly not correct, and not correct by far. In fact what you are saying is the very opposite of Maoist warfare. The very principle of asymmetric or guerrilla warfare in land stresses a lot of individual and squad level initiative. A guerrilla army does not have the communication and radio resources conventional armies have, and for that reason, actually requires much greater autonomy on the troop and squad level compared to conventional armies. A good example is the guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. You think every Charlie there can afford to have a radio on his own?
Now for the so called German "decentralization" that's another myth. Look at North Africa. Once the command core of the Afrika Korps was broken, the Germans simply gave up and surrendered. In Europe the same thing. Once the central command is dismembered, the Germans simply gave up and surrendered. This is in contrast to the martial cultures of the East, where individually, even without a central command structure, they kept fighting to the death.
Individual initiative is always stressed in Mao's own doctrines, and in fact he goes on to even say that the individual would make the difference against a technologically superior enemy.
As for culture, this culture also invented the concept of squad formations in the first place in its ancient history.
Maoist doctrine never had to contend with mechanized warfare, which is a very different animal from straight-foot infantry, let alone guerilla, warfare. Command, control, and communications that relies upon face-to-face orders, visible signals, human couriers, and rigidly predetermined actions are not suited to mechanized warfare - the French and Soviets attempted much the same early in WWII and it didn't work out very well. It requires not only an understanding and anticipation of the problems of mechanization and combined arms operations (of which the Chinese have little practical wartime experience), but also a thorough grasp of command, control, and communications in high-speed, high-intensity conditions of often very imperfect, even critically flawed information about the enemy and simply having to get on the with job whilst operating in what sometimes amounts to an information-vaccuum so to speak.
As for Vietnam, the VC especially, and the NVA typically conducted extensive long-term reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering about the forces they faced and the objects they were assigned to attack. They then engaged in lengthy preparations for set-piece operations which featured much in the way of pre-planned fires (if available) and pre-determined "coordination" of units and support to the extent that operations were usually forced to either be cancelled outright, or to simply go ahead and take additional losses when conditions had substantially changed and there was no time to adapt plans to those changes. Few major VC and NVA operations were battlefield successes - the US may have suffered a great political defeat in Vietnam, but it is true that it never lost so much as a single major battle - and the VC were practically marginalized after the defeat of the Tet Offensive in 1968. The VC and NVA attacked in human waves, without fire-and-movement (in the Western sense) to really speak of, and despite their usual quantitative superiority over their intended victims, they almost invariably failed, not least because those victims had superior command and control and communications and could rapidly and easily coordinate their forces to defeat the relatively cumbersome VC and NVA.
Set-piece plans with more pre-determination standing in for more the more spontaneous coordination that mechanized warfare requires (and that said, many armies are still very much influenced or locked into mindsets and operational concepts that feature such things as phase lines even when conducting mechanized oeprations!) are suited to attrition warfare, not combined arms maneouver warfare (in most cirumstances).
Guerrilla, warfare tends to be even more reliant upon predetermined planning (and especially lengthy prior information and intelligence-gathering about targets and forces to be struck or avoided, luxuries that simply do exist most of the time for mechanized operations) that it is very difficult to rapidly changing situations (and rapidly increasing distances).
And in that same vein, a simple straight-foot infantry rifle company may find itself, for example operating on a frontage of perhaps a quarter-mile to half-a-mile; its mechanized equivalent may find itself doing so on a frontage of up to nearly 3 miles! (why I that is so , I won't get into right now) thus requiring not only each armoured vehicle to carry at least one radio, but even each rifle squad/section to carry at least two radios (and in some armies each man now carries some sort of radio).
Another thing, the infantry of the PLA in Mao's time did not typically use Western style fire-and-movement; if you have been in the infantry of a Western country or at least received some infantry familiariztion training you will know what I am talking about and how difficult it is to truly master; if you do not, it will require a great deal more time and space than can easily be accomodated on this forum. Even at present, Western type fire-and-manoeuver is a relatively recent innovation in China, and though it has probably had time to master it successfully by now, it remains unclear that it is now able to combine the separate combat arms with the experience, custom, and familiarity that is common to many Western armies. At present, the Chinese do not appear to combine the separate combat arms with the same frequency and familiarity that Western armies do.
If one may think that proper command, control, and communications or air operations is fraught with potential difficulty (and I refer you to Utelore's recent post on the PLAAF on same), accomplishing the same thing in mechanized warfare often breaks down into a vertiable nightmare on exercises, even for armies experienced in mechanized and combined arms operations.
And finally, as for the Germans giving up when their command structures broke down, well, this requires a little more qualification. Typically, most forces do give up when the command structure breaks down, because in most of those cases the physical damage that has been done that leads to command breakdown has also inflicted crippling losses upon the fighting forces. The Germans in most cases were no different, though they tended to continue fighting on longer than other countries troops in similar situations.
In WWII the Germans performed military feats under conditions of supreme adversity that remain unmatched, such as the moving-pockets, break-outs and the defenses of Courland, East Prussia and Silesia (where the German forces were physically and permanently cut off from overland routes to Germany itslef, and still fought on for months) - on the Eastern front in the face of overwhelming Soviet strength and partisan campaigns behind their own main lines, the extraction of the German armies from the Falaise Gap in Normandy and the rapid reorganization of the German defenses that not only halted the Allied drive into Germany and the Low Countries for several months, but also defeated the Market-Garden offensive despite considerable Allied quantitative superiority.
Yes, there were serious, even grave faults in German command, control, and communications during the Second World War, but even in the midst of mass surrenders, the German army never completely broke down, but only stopped fighting when its poltical leadership surrended - the military leadsership largely remained in control throughout - and rapidly re-established control whenever temporarily lost.
I am not sure that I can entirely contest your argument, and you make a good point at the beginning about Maoist guerrilla warfare emphasizing, inded requiring individual initiative at the lowest levels. Where I begin to contest this is when Maoist guerrilla warfare moves from partisan warfare and its attendent raids and constant close surveillance of enemy troop movements amidst the population and the attacking of minor units when they expose themselves, to combined arms mechanized warfare, which is fundamentally different in both its capabilities and its requirements.
