What do you think?
Rate this book
Modern War Studies
When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
On first publication, this uncommonly concise and readable account of Soviet Russia's clash with Nazi Germany utterly changed our understanding of World War II on Germany's Eastern Front, immediately earning its place among top-shelf histories of the world war. Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, much of it the authors' own work, this new edition maintains the 1995 original's distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time.
In 1941, when Pearl Harbor shattered America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the Germany Army and put an end to Hitler's imperial designs. In swift and stirring prose, When Titans Clash provides the clearest, most complete account of this epic struggle, especially from the Soviet perspective. Drawing on the massive and unprecedented release of Soviet archival documents in recent decades, David Glantz, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Soviet military, and noted military historian Jonathan House expand and elaborate our picture of the Soviet war effort - a picture sharply different from accounts that emphasize Hitler's failed leadership over Soviet strategy and might.
Rafts of newly available official directives, orders, and reports reveal the true nature and extraordinary scale of Soviet military operations as they swept across the one thousand miles from Moscow to Berlin, featuring stubborn defenses and monumental offensives and counteroffensives and ultimately costing the two sides combined a staggering twenty million casualties. Placing the war within its wider context, the authors also make use of recent revelations to clarify further the political, economic, and social issues that influenced and reflected what happened on the battlefield. Their work gives us new insight into Stalin's political motivation and Adolf Hitler's role as warlord, as well as a better understanding of the human and economic costs of the war - for both the Soviet Union and Germany.
While incorporating a wealth of new information, When Titans Clashed remains remarkably compact, a tribute to the authors' determination to make this critical chapter in world history as accessible as it is essential.
In 1941, when Pearl Harbor shattered America's peacetime pretensions, the German blitzkrieg had already blasted the Red Army back to Moscow. Yet, less than four years later, the Soviet hammer-and-sickle flew above the ruins of Berlin, stark symbol of a miraculous comeback that destroyed the Germany Army and put an end to Hitler's imperial designs. In swift and stirring prose, When Titans Clash provides the clearest, most complete account of this epic struggle, especially from the Soviet perspective. Drawing on the massive and unprecedented release of Soviet archival documents in recent decades, David Glantz, one of the world's foremost authorities on the Soviet military, and noted military historian Jonathan House expand and elaborate our picture of the Soviet war effort - a picture sharply different from accounts that emphasize Hitler's failed leadership over Soviet strategy and might.
Rafts of newly available official directives, orders, and reports reveal the true nature and extraordinary scale of Soviet military operations as they swept across the one thousand miles from Moscow to Berlin, featuring stubborn defenses and monumental offensives and counteroffensives and ultimately costing the two sides combined a staggering twenty million casualties. Placing the war within its wider context, the authors also make use of recent revelations to clarify further the political, economic, and social issues that influenced and reflected what happened on the battlefield. Their work gives us new insight into Stalin's political motivation and Adolf Hitler's role as warlord, as well as a better understanding of the human and economic costs of the war - for both the Soviet Union and Germany.
While incorporating a wealth of new information, When Titans Clashed remains remarkably compact, a tribute to the authors' determination to make this critical chapter in world history as accessible as it is essential.
568 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
254 people are currently reading
2927 people want to read
About the author
David M. Glantz
95 books216 followersDavid M. Glantz is an American military historian and the editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
Glantz received degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Defense Language Institute, Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and U.S. Army War College. He entered active service with the United States Army in 1963.
He began his military career in 1963 as a field artillery officer from 1965 to 1969, and served in various assignments in the United States, and in Vietnam during the Vietnam War with the II Field Force Fire Support Coordination Element (FSCE) at the Plantation in Long Binh.
After teaching history at the United States Military Academy from 1969 through 1973, he completed the army’s Soviet foreign area specialist program and became chief of Estimates in US Army Europe’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (USAREUR ODCSI) from 1977 to 1979. Upon his return to the United States in 1979, he became chief of research at the Army’s newly-formed Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1979 to 1983 and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1983 to 1986. While at the College, Col. Glantz was instrumental in conducting the annual "Art of War" symposia which produced the best analysis of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front during the Second World War in English to date. The symposia included attendance of a number of former German participants in the operations, and resulted in publication of the seminal transcripts of proceedings. Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 1986, he helped found and later directed the U.S. Army’s Soviet (later Foreign) Military Studies Office (FMSO), where he remained until his retirement in 1993 with the rank of Colonel.
In 1993, while at FMSO, he established The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, a scholarly journal for which he still serves as chief editor, that covers military affairs in the states of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union.
A member of the Russian Federation’s Academy of Natural Sciences, he has written or co-authored more than twenty commercially published books, over sixty self-published studies and atlases, and over one hundred articles dealing with the history of the Red (Soviet) Army, Soviet military strategy, operational art, and tactics, Soviet airborne operations, intelligence, and deception, and other topics related to World War II. In recognition of his work, he has received several awards, including the Society of Military History’s prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Prize for his contributions to the study of military history.
Glantz is regarded by many as one of the best western military historians of the Soviet role in World War II.[1] He is perhaps most associated with the thesis that World War II Soviet military history has been prejudiced in the West by its over-reliance on German oral and printed sources, without being balanced by a similar examination of Soviet source material. A more complete version of this thesis can be found in his paper “The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945).” Despite his acknowledged expertise, Glantz has occasionally been criticized for his stylistic choices, such as inventing specific thoughts and feelings of historical figures without reference to documented sources.
Glantz is also known as an opponent of Viktor Suvorov's thesis, which he endeavored to rebut with the book Stumbling Colossus.
He lives with his wife Mary Ann Glantz in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Glantzes' daughter Mary E. Glantz, also a historian, has written FDR And The Soviet Union: The President's Battles Over Forei
Glantz received degrees in history from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is a graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Defense Language Institute, Institute for Russian and Eastern European Studies, and U.S. Army War College. He entered active service with the United States Army in 1963.
He began his military career in 1963 as a field artillery officer from 1965 to 1969, and served in various assignments in the United States, and in Vietnam during the Vietnam War with the II Field Force Fire Support Coordination Element (FSCE) at the Plantation in Long Binh.
After teaching history at the United States Military Academy from 1969 through 1973, he completed the army’s Soviet foreign area specialist program and became chief of Estimates in US Army Europe’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (USAREUR ODCSI) from 1977 to 1979. Upon his return to the United States in 1979, he became chief of research at the Army’s newly-formed Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from 1979 to 1983 and then Director of Soviet Army Operations at the Center for Land Warfare, U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from 1983 to 1986. While at the College, Col. Glantz was instrumental in conducting the annual "Art of War" symposia which produced the best analysis of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front during the Second World War in English to date. The symposia included attendance of a number of former German participants in the operations, and resulted in publication of the seminal transcripts of proceedings. Returning to Fort Leavenworth in 1986, he helped found and later directed the U.S. Army’s Soviet (later Foreign) Military Studies Office (FMSO), where he remained until his retirement in 1993 with the rank of Colonel.
In 1993, while at FMSO, he established The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, a scholarly journal for which he still serves as chief editor, that covers military affairs in the states of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union.
A member of the Russian Federation’s Academy of Natural Sciences, he has written or co-authored more than twenty commercially published books, over sixty self-published studies and atlases, and over one hundred articles dealing with the history of the Red (Soviet) Army, Soviet military strategy, operational art, and tactics, Soviet airborne operations, intelligence, and deception, and other topics related to World War II. In recognition of his work, he has received several awards, including the Society of Military History’s prestigious Samuel Eliot Morrison Prize for his contributions to the study of military history.
Glantz is regarded by many as one of the best western military historians of the Soviet role in World War II.[1] He is perhaps most associated with the thesis that World War II Soviet military history has been prejudiced in the West by its over-reliance on German oral and printed sources, without being balanced by a similar examination of Soviet source material. A more complete version of this thesis can be found in his paper “The Failures of Historiography: Forgotten Battles of the German-Soviet War (1941-1945).” Despite his acknowledged expertise, Glantz has occasionally been criticized for his stylistic choices, such as inventing specific thoughts and feelings of historical figures without reference to documented sources.
Glantz is also known as an opponent of Viktor Suvorov's thesis, which he endeavored to rebut with the book Stumbling Colossus.
He lives with his wife Mary Ann Glantz in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Glantzes' daughter Mary E. Glantz, also a historian, has written FDR And The Soviet Union: The President's Battles Over Forei
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 134 reviews
July 24, 2016
I read this book over ten years ago, so the details are no longer with me.
Nevertheless, I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in World War II, particularly if you have a bit of a gap in your knowledge concerning the Eastern Front.
The authors of the book are both American military historians; David Glantz is editor of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
I’m not an expert on WW II, but I’ve read a number of books in a rather disconnected way, over a period of many years. Once I’d gained a certain level of knowledge (and much of it was gained through war games based on various theaters and battles of the war), I always felt somewhat perplexed by the fact that most people I knew (all Americans) seemed quite unaware of what went on between Germany and Russia in the war. More on that in a bit.
First, a few general words about the book. Given its topic, it could easily have been three (or four or more) times as long, as indeed some books covering similar territory are. The text of the book, including the introductory Prelude section of almost fifty pages, and the Conclusion of another ten pages, occupies only 290 pages! (The rest of the 414 pages are Appendices, a Bibliography, Notes, a short section about the authors, and a thirty page Index.)
So the story of the actual fighting between Germany and Russia is a slim, fairly high-level summary of 230 pages. For a real WW II fanatic, this would make the book almost laughably irrelevant. But for the general reader, it is quite an alluring aspect. (There are also about 15 pages of black and white photos, which are not numbered, hence do not count against that 230 pages.)
This story is divided into three sections.
FIRST PERIOD OF THE WAR: June 1941 to November 1942, extends from 22 June 1941, the start of Germany’s invasion of Russia (Operation Barbarosa), to the fall of 1942, the beginning of the Soviet counterattack at the besieged city of Stalingrad.
SECOND PERIOD OF THE WAR: November 1942 to December 1943. This section describes the lifting of the siege of Stalingrad (via the destruction/surrender of the German VI Army), and continues through 1943. In December of that year the Russian armies had advanced in a wide front literally across the breadth of the Soviet Union, had burst into and through the Kiev salient, and were poised to enter the easternmost countries of Europe.
THIRD PERIOD OF THE WAR: January 1944 to May 1945. In the beginning of 1944 the Russian armies (Fronts) advanced into Poland and the Ukraine, and (finally) lifted the 900-day siege of Leningrad. This was certainly the most brutal segment of the war on the Eastern Front; the Russians committed horrendous and vengeful atrocities as they drove through the Eastern provinces of Germany itself. At the beginning of May 1945, after desperate fighting around and within the city, the remnants of German forces surrendered Berlin to the Soviets. The iconic photo of Russian soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag (about which there’s an interesting story, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_...) is the cover photo of this book.
How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
The subtitle of the book (above) is discussed at length in the authors’ Conclusion.
The comparisons continue over the next few pages. To my mind these facts make clear that Hitler’s largest blunder in World War II was attacking Russia – though obviously Hitler, being the man that he was, couldn’t have not attacked the Soviets, and in fact always intended to.
Nevertheless, I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in World War II, particularly if you have a bit of a gap in your knowledge concerning the Eastern Front.
The authors of the book are both American military historians; David Glantz is editor of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
I’m not an expert on WW II, but I’ve read a number of books in a rather disconnected way, over a period of many years. Once I’d gained a certain level of knowledge (and much of it was gained through war games based on various theaters and battles of the war), I always felt somewhat perplexed by the fact that most people I knew (all Americans) seemed quite unaware of what went on between Germany and Russia in the war. More on that in a bit.
First, a few general words about the book. Given its topic, it could easily have been three (or four or more) times as long, as indeed some books covering similar territory are. The text of the book, including the introductory Prelude section of almost fifty pages, and the Conclusion of another ten pages, occupies only 290 pages! (The rest of the 414 pages are Appendices, a Bibliography, Notes, a short section about the authors, and a thirty page Index.)
So the story of the actual fighting between Germany and Russia is a slim, fairly high-level summary of 230 pages. For a real WW II fanatic, this would make the book almost laughably irrelevant. But for the general reader, it is quite an alluring aspect. (There are also about 15 pages of black and white photos, which are not numbered, hence do not count against that 230 pages.)
This story is divided into three sections.
FIRST PERIOD OF THE WAR: June 1941 to November 1942, extends from 22 June 1941, the start of Germany’s invasion of Russia (Operation Barbarosa), to the fall of 1942, the beginning of the Soviet counterattack at the besieged city of Stalingrad.
SECOND PERIOD OF THE WAR: November 1942 to December 1943. This section describes the lifting of the siege of Stalingrad (via the destruction/surrender of the German VI Army), and continues through 1943. In December of that year the Russian armies had advanced in a wide front literally across the breadth of the Soviet Union, had burst into and through the Kiev salient, and were poised to enter the easternmost countries of Europe.
THIRD PERIOD OF THE WAR: January 1944 to May 1945. In the beginning of 1944 the Russian armies (Fronts) advanced into Poland and the Ukraine, and (finally) lifted the 900-day siege of Leningrad. This was certainly the most brutal segment of the war on the Eastern Front; the Russians committed horrendous and vengeful atrocities as they drove through the Eastern provinces of Germany itself. At the beginning of May 1945, after desperate fighting around and within the city, the remnants of German forces surrendered Berlin to the Soviets. The iconic photo of Russian soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag (about which there’s an interesting story, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_...) is the cover photo of this book.
How the Red Army Stopped Hitler
The subtitle of the book (above) is discussed at length in the authors’ Conclusion.
On the 50th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion of 1944, a U.S. news magazine featured a cover photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was labelled the man who defeated Hitler. If any one man deserved that label, it was not Eisenhower, but Zhukov, Vasilevsky, or possibly Stalin himself. More generally, the Red Army and the Soviet citizenry of many nationalities bore the lion’s share of the struggle against Germany from 1941 to 1945 …
From June through December 1941, only Britain shared with the Soviet Union the trials of war against the Germans. Over three million German troops fought in the East, while less than a million fought elsewhere, attended to occupied Europe, or rested in the homeland. From December 1941 through November 1942, while over nine million troops on both sides struggled in the East … [only in North Africa did a small contingent of British forces engage Rommel and the Italians.] …
The comparisons continue over the next few pages. To my mind these facts make clear that Hitler’s largest blunder in World War II was attacking Russia – though obviously Hitler, being the man that he was, couldn’t have not attacked the Soviets, and in fact always intended to.
November 16, 2012
Actually four and a half stars.
We have been trained to think of World War Two as essentially a Western war, with the Russian contribution somehow being amorphous, off line, and, to to speak, off-screen. It might not be a bad idea to begin reading this book with Table E on page 307, which shows the Wehrmacht losing 13,448,000 dead, missing, and disabled by war's end. Of these, the overwhelming majority fell on the Eastern front -- as many as 9,000,000. In comparison, all the Western front battles from North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany itself was a comparative small fraction, irrespective of what we learned in school and from watching endless documentaries lauding the American and British contributions.
Glantz and House have written a formidable book. Perhaps it is too formidable in its massive details, often whole paragraphs of different units and generals with relatively few anecdotes. In a way, it needed something equivalent to the Knocking at the Gate scene in Macbeth to relieve the tension. At times the book resembled a sentence outline jam-packed with statistics.
In the last two or three years of the war, the Soviets fielded six million men in arms stretched over a front line that extended almost 3,000 miles from Finland to the Caucasus.
Despite the dryness of the authors' presentation in When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, the magnitude of the Soviet accomplishment shines through. (Even I find myself trying to cite statistics in describing the Eastern Front, it was just so massive in scale.)
Stalin, Zhukov, Vasilevsky and other members of the Stavka, or Supreme High Command, are probably the heroes of World War Two. Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery and Bradley would have just been four generals in Russia, among scores of others who merited equal praise.
Books like this make one think about our closely held cultural myths which we have perpetuated across three or more generations. For us, WW2 was a "Good War"; for the Soviets, it was either win or die horribly.
We have been trained to think of World War Two as essentially a Western war, with the Russian contribution somehow being amorphous, off line, and, to to speak, off-screen. It might not be a bad idea to begin reading this book with Table E on page 307, which shows the Wehrmacht losing 13,448,000 dead, missing, and disabled by war's end. Of these, the overwhelming majority fell on the Eastern front -- as many as 9,000,000. In comparison, all the Western front battles from North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany itself was a comparative small fraction, irrespective of what we learned in school and from watching endless documentaries lauding the American and British contributions.
Glantz and House have written a formidable book. Perhaps it is too formidable in its massive details, often whole paragraphs of different units and generals with relatively few anecdotes. In a way, it needed something equivalent to the Knocking at the Gate scene in Macbeth to relieve the tension. At times the book resembled a sentence outline jam-packed with statistics.
In the last two or three years of the war, the Soviets fielded six million men in arms stretched over a front line that extended almost 3,000 miles from Finland to the Caucasus.
Despite the dryness of the authors' presentation in When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, the magnitude of the Soviet accomplishment shines through. (Even I find myself trying to cite statistics in describing the Eastern Front, it was just so massive in scale.)
Stalin, Zhukov, Vasilevsky and other members of the Stavka, or Supreme High Command, are probably the heroes of World War Two. Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery and Bradley would have just been four generals in Russia, among scores of others who merited equal praise.
Books like this make one think about our closely held cultural myths which we have perpetuated across three or more generations. For us, WW2 was a "Good War"; for the Soviets, it was either win or die horribly.
July 8, 2021
David Glantz is the foremost historian when it comes to the history of the Eastern Front of the Second World War. All I can give him and Jonathan House is nothing but praise for their work. A youtuber by the username of TIK (whose extensive World War Two videos inspired me to buy this book) said “We are living in the age of Glantz”, and that would be true. I have not read any other comprehensive books that cover the Eastern Front in depth like Glantz; I have yet to read any of Anthony Beevors or James Hollands’ work (I will in the future), but I am someone who likes the nitty gritty details when it comes to military history, and Glantz satisfies me in this regard. This man deserves a lot more credibility, respect, and wider awareness from the general public, the historical academia & from any historical documentaries that will be made in the future on the Second World War! What I learned from this book is so applicable to my knowledge of history, and now I feel I have a greater understanding of the eastern front than I did before.
Here in America, we really don’t give much credit to the Soviet Union for its help in defeating Nazi Germany; and while I am not supportive of the political ideology known as Communism (I don’t believe in Statism), I think without Zhukov, Vasilevsky or Rokossovsky, we would’ve seen the third Reich victorious in the east. The western allies would’ve either had to have sued for peace, or would’ve fought a long and costly war against a strong Third Reich that would’ve had the full might of its armed forces ready to defeat whoever stood in its way. I have always had an interest in the Red Army, and the Wehrmacht, because both were unique, and it seems that the roles reversed for both armies in 1943. As Glantz noted the Wehrmacht in 1944-1945 switched its roles with the Red Army of 1941-1942, while the Red Army was vice-versa. This is not to say the Red Army copied the Wehrmacht largely, but it learned a lot from them, and they learned the art of defense in depth, heavy artillery barrages, multiple wave attacks, and leadership that was left to its own devices for the most part by Stalin after 1943.
I would recommend this book to everyone who is interested in History, specifically the Eastern Front, and especially those who are like me, in that History is their greatest love of all time.
A big thank you to the Youtuber “TIK”, he shouts the highest praises for David Glantz, and his work on Youtube bridges the gap for the world when it comes to the eastern front! If it wasn’t for him, I possibly would’ve never have bought this book.
Here in America, we really don’t give much credit to the Soviet Union for its help in defeating Nazi Germany; and while I am not supportive of the political ideology known as Communism (I don’t believe in Statism), I think without Zhukov, Vasilevsky or Rokossovsky, we would’ve seen the third Reich victorious in the east. The western allies would’ve either had to have sued for peace, or would’ve fought a long and costly war against a strong Third Reich that would’ve had the full might of its armed forces ready to defeat whoever stood in its way. I have always had an interest in the Red Army, and the Wehrmacht, because both were unique, and it seems that the roles reversed for both armies in 1943. As Glantz noted the Wehrmacht in 1944-1945 switched its roles with the Red Army of 1941-1942, while the Red Army was vice-versa. This is not to say the Red Army copied the Wehrmacht largely, but it learned a lot from them, and they learned the art of defense in depth, heavy artillery barrages, multiple wave attacks, and leadership that was left to its own devices for the most part by Stalin after 1943.
I would recommend this book to everyone who is interested in History, specifically the Eastern Front, and especially those who are like me, in that History is their greatest love of all time.
A big thank you to the Youtuber “TIK”, he shouts the highest praises for David Glantz, and his work on Youtube bridges the gap for the world when it comes to the eastern front! If it wasn’t for him, I possibly would’ve never have bought this book.
March 12, 2022
This is considered a pivotal book in the understanding of the Eastern Front of World War II. Glantz and House provide an overall narrative of the strategic and operational course of the fighting, mostly from a Soviet point of view but with keen insights on German strengths and weaknesses in each phase of the fighting. The book is not a great read but it is clear and crisp and well argued, namely that the Soviet military, in addition to its material strength and assistance from the west, made itself the master of operational warfare by 1944. If I have one compliant, it is that why Soviet manpower losses continued to be heavy, even into 1945, is not properly explained. This though might require a more thorough tactical analysis, which even if outside of the book's scope, should have received a bit of coverage.
April 9, 2016
Glantz's "When titans clashed" is an incredible book based on primary sources, mainly soviet fonts, newly avaliable russian resources. The author writes on concise form the war on the eastern front, provides an extensive explanation of plans and preparations; based on staff reports of high command structure. With a huged supply of maps, and interested on operational history, with an good description and great structure, written for the most important specialist about German - Russian war.
In conclusion this book is an excellent overview of the war of the eastern front. I recommend this book for scholarly people likes operational details, because is an great summary of the operations about conflict.
In conclusion this book is an excellent overview of the war of the eastern front. I recommend this book for scholarly people likes operational details, because is an great summary of the operations about conflict.
March 28, 2021
This book is dry and methodical with its facts, and i sometimes wished the tone more reflected the titanic struggle of humanity and ideologies that is being covered. But the sheer amount of facts give you a very sober understanding of everything that actually happened from 1941-1945 from a mostly bird’s eye operation-level view.
As much as hysterical anticommunists want to say otherwise, the Soviet Union saved the world from fascism. They did it by enduring unimaginable human misery and losses of resources and material wealth. But by doing so saved tens of millions more lives from extermination or slavery by the Nazis.
Looking at the scale of troops and mechanized forces involved, and the logistics required to supply them over insane distances of various terrains and geographic obstacles, it’s clear that the Americans and British were really doing light work in the West.
For the entire war, the German army suffered 11 million casualties, 9 million of which were inflicted by the red army. Yet Americans watched Saving Private Ryan and were convinced the US defeated Hitler and saved the world.
As much as hysterical anticommunists want to say otherwise, the Soviet Union saved the world from fascism. They did it by enduring unimaginable human misery and losses of resources and material wealth. But by doing so saved tens of millions more lives from extermination or slavery by the Nazis.
Looking at the scale of troops and mechanized forces involved, and the logistics required to supply them over insane distances of various terrains and geographic obstacles, it’s clear that the Americans and British were really doing light work in the West.
For the entire war, the German army suffered 11 million casualties, 9 million of which were inflicted by the red army. Yet Americans watched Saving Private Ryan and were convinced the US defeated Hitler and saved the world.
March 20, 2012
One of my loves besides scifi and fantasy is military history. I was a history major in college and over the years have really just focused on military history. This boook is one of the reasons I still read about military history and over the last three years or so I have focused in on the eastern front of WWII. The author, David Glantz, is now considered the preminient writer for this area of study. He became prominent in the 90's as he was one of the first historians to be able to read and study Soviet archival material that was released for the first time after the fall of the USSR. This book is a short,compact history of the operational issues that the Soviet military faced when the Germans attacked June 6th 1941 and how over the next 4 years they turned what looked to be certain defeat into victory. Glantz has a dry facts based writing that really lends itself to the subject matter. He is writing about the single greatest conflict in human history and any overly emotive style of writing would gloss over the epic struggle that he recounts. His book at the time it came out was also the begining of a wave of revisionist scholarship of how the war in the east was fought and the real cost to the Soviets and Germans. Much of the previous scholarship was based largely on German sources because the Soviet sources were not availible and this understandly slanted some of the analysis. Glantz details the true cost and the difficult choices made by the Soviet leadership and people to stop the German assault on their country as well as helps dispell the notion that the Germans lost because of their leadership not do to Soviet actions. While I am famaliar with Glantz's work and the time period he covers this book was still a great read. Besides the narrative Glantz has almost 100 pages of appendices, statistics, and foot notes to deepen the readers knowledge. Glantz's strength as a historian is in not only being able to read the soviet archives and then share that knowledge but he also drives his analysis with an amazing amount of facts and figures that gives his narractive depth and scope. He also included in this book in the appendix his thoughts at the time of the "opening" of the Soviet archives and how it has helped balance the picture of the eastern front but also how far it had to go still to be truely a resource for scholars. One tidbit that I read that I had not seen before is that Stalin had planned his own invasion of Japan and he just called it off otherwise we might have a divided Japan like we do Korea. So in conclusion this is a remarkable book but it is only for a niche audience that is deep into military history.
July 31, 2021
This book is a pretty epic story of the Soviet perspective of their war with Germany in WW2. Mr. Glantz is a highly respected historian who does a terrific job compiling all of the newly opened Soviet records and condensing them into this book. I'd have to say that almost half of the book is just notes and references, and that is stunning to me and worthy of high praise. I also greatly appreciated seeing material on the Soviet invasion of Japanese territory at the end of the war. Precious little out there on that.
Now for my bad thoughts. This book is in no way objective or pretends to be accurate. It presents the material as it appears from the Soviet records and is superficially at best fact checked against well established historical records the Germans maintained. This is NOT trying to be partisan to western viewpoints on the war, but simply a cry against putting out data or information which is clearly incorrect at best or worse simply propaganda. One cannot destroy 1500 tanks if there were only 250 present. Or shoot down 3000 planes when there were less than 10% of that active. German records were meticulous on detail driven information and are in good standing with historians. You cannot disregard this and look to be objective and fact based. That is not to say we should toss out all the Soviet records or ignore them, and Glantz does a fine job of portraying their data almost to the point of being overwhelming. This said, I feel he should have taken the time to cross reference records and pointed out legitimate differences in the records. I think he knew his access was solely because his story was going to be expected to be pro-Soviet, and so he did little to jeopardize the meal ticket this access was going to become. His later books cater less to this, but these early ones drip pretty heavy of propaganda. I'm just calling it as I see it.
It is impossible to read these books and not be impressed with what the Soviets endured and how they adapted to overcome the Germans. Glantz does a great job reinforcing this and highlights the burden they carried. I won't get into the popular debate of who is most responsible for the defeat of Germany, as it is childish and reeks of political cheerleading. It was a team effort. Saying otherwise is wrong.
This is a highly technical book for folks with a heavy background in military history, doctrines, and warfare. I do not recommend this as a beginners book. It is however a terrific addition to a veteran historian library. It is fairly dry, but this was not an issue for me. The detailed references and notes were awesome, albeit they are all bundled at the end of the book. I think I prefer seeing notes put on the applicable pages, but no score hits on this as that is a personal preference thing.
Scoring this book is difficult. It is well written and has everything I like in references and notations. I simply cannot disregard the need for fact checking and cross referencing with readily available materials from other sources. Every historian knows that records are often wrong when it comes to military claims. To make little effort to validate claims that can clearly cast many of the new records as "wishful thinking" is an egregious sin in my mind. Glantz failed me in this regard, as I would have expected him to point out the differences in previously published material and provide a basis on why he believed the Soviet records were more or less accurate. He could have made an "go-to" history book instead of a book that really only offers up history as one side wants it to appear to be. That saddens me. I see this same cheerleading style done by certain British authors writing about Napoleon. Give me objective facts and information any day over propaganda pieces. I'm deducting a full star for this issue, plus another for basically admitting right up front that the book was not trying to be objective. I won't nitpick the small details, as I really did like the effort in presenting the Soviet viewpoint. I simply think it did the community harm in not comparing/contrasting the Soviet information more with the German archives.
3 Stars
Now for my bad thoughts. This book is in no way objective or pretends to be accurate. It presents the material as it appears from the Soviet records and is superficially at best fact checked against well established historical records the Germans maintained. This is NOT trying to be partisan to western viewpoints on the war, but simply a cry against putting out data or information which is clearly incorrect at best or worse simply propaganda. One cannot destroy 1500 tanks if there were only 250 present. Or shoot down 3000 planes when there were less than 10% of that active. German records were meticulous on detail driven information and are in good standing with historians. You cannot disregard this and look to be objective and fact based. That is not to say we should toss out all the Soviet records or ignore them, and Glantz does a fine job of portraying their data almost to the point of being overwhelming. This said, I feel he should have taken the time to cross reference records and pointed out legitimate differences in the records. I think he knew his access was solely because his story was going to be expected to be pro-Soviet, and so he did little to jeopardize the meal ticket this access was going to become. His later books cater less to this, but these early ones drip pretty heavy of propaganda. I'm just calling it as I see it.
It is impossible to read these books and not be impressed with what the Soviets endured and how they adapted to overcome the Germans. Glantz does a great job reinforcing this and highlights the burden they carried. I won't get into the popular debate of who is most responsible for the defeat of Germany, as it is childish and reeks of political cheerleading. It was a team effort. Saying otherwise is wrong.
This is a highly technical book for folks with a heavy background in military history, doctrines, and warfare. I do not recommend this as a beginners book. It is however a terrific addition to a veteran historian library. It is fairly dry, but this was not an issue for me. The detailed references and notes were awesome, albeit they are all bundled at the end of the book. I think I prefer seeing notes put on the applicable pages, but no score hits on this as that is a personal preference thing.
Scoring this book is difficult. It is well written and has everything I like in references and notations. I simply cannot disregard the need for fact checking and cross referencing with readily available materials from other sources. Every historian knows that records are often wrong when it comes to military claims. To make little effort to validate claims that can clearly cast many of the new records as "wishful thinking" is an egregious sin in my mind. Glantz failed me in this regard, as I would have expected him to point out the differences in previously published material and provide a basis on why he believed the Soviet records were more or less accurate. He could have made an "go-to" history book instead of a book that really only offers up history as one side wants it to appear to be. That saddens me. I see this same cheerleading style done by certain British authors writing about Napoleon. Give me objective facts and information any day over propaganda pieces. I'm deducting a full star for this issue, plus another for basically admitting right up front that the book was not trying to be objective. I won't nitpick the small details, as I really did like the effort in presenting the Soviet viewpoint. I simply think it did the community harm in not comparing/contrasting the Soviet information more with the German archives.
3 Stars
August 29, 2017
This book, a project of 'Modern War Studies' and published by the University Press of Kansas, is exactly, completely and meticulously what it purports to be: a day by day account of the positions, plans, movements, strength, armaments, and commanders of the two armies, Wermacht and Red throughout the almost 4 year battle across Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. If, for research or curiosity, you need to know the casualty figures for each army group in the battle for Kursk in 1943, you will find it here. Also every other battle on Hitler's eastern front. This book is the encyclopedia of battle for Stalin's Great Patriotic War; it is not an engaging tale of personal heroism and sacrifice. In fact, there are no developed characters except for Hitler, Stalin, and a handful of top-ranked generals on either side.
A more readable and more interesting telling of the same material lies in Paul Carell's books 'Hitler Moves East' and 'Scorched Earth'. (According to Wikipedia, Paul Carell is the pen name of Paul Karl Schmidt, an SS Lieutenant Colonel [equivalent] and Nazi propagandist. Without question, the Carell books portray the German side of the war with the Soviets, showcasing the best of Wermacht tactics, discipline, courage, and sacrifice.)
A more readable and more interesting telling of the same material lies in Paul Carell's books 'Hitler Moves East' and 'Scorched Earth'. (According to Wikipedia, Paul Carell is the pen name of Paul Karl Schmidt, an SS Lieutenant Colonel [equivalent] and Nazi propagandist. Without question, the Carell books portray the German side of the war with the Soviets, showcasing the best of Wermacht tactics, discipline, courage, and sacrifice.)
February 9, 2021
This chunky book is a eye opening experience to anyone who can get through the slow and meticulous movements of every division on the Western front in WWII. It can get monotonous, but once the whole pictures available it paints a totally new light on the war between Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union. Glantz addresses common misconceptions about this side of the war and how they came about. Then he back up when actually happened by comparing primary sources of the Germans and the Soviets. Without demonizing or Humanizing the Soviets, Glantz describes their epic struggle for survival and how the consequences of their actions helped the allied powers immeasurably. A must read for anyone who seriously considers themselves a history buff.
November 8, 2021
Very good
September 26, 2017
Perhaps the best book I've read on the Great Patriotic War in my life, and I started Paul Carel when I was about 8 or 9! David Glantz is the man among US historians of the period and Soviet history generally, with all the Russian Military connections to make sure you are getting the real scoop. Glantz uncovers literally dozens of previously overlooked or covered up Soviet Military offensives that other sources don't mention. His knowledge of the Soviet Army is exhaustive, and his explanations are simple and straightforward. The War is divided into three periods. June 1941- November 1942 - the Onslaught is Barbarossa and the period of German ascendancy, where the Red Army, decapitated by the purges and confused by Stalinism, staggered under the blows from the Wehrmacht. Glantz is unstinting in his crtiques. Then comes the second period of the war, November 1942-December 1943, where the Red Army finds its way battling the Germans and their allies as equals locked in a death fight. Starting with Stalingrad, the Russians begin to use the hard lesson learned in the retreat, to attack in overwhelming strength...but also to defend in depth as at Kursk. Glantz gives you the facts, but also the rebirth of "deep penetration" in the Soviet doctrine, and the development of the forces to carry it out- the 5(then 6 ) Guards Tank Armies. Then comes the Third Period January 1944- May 1945, when the Soviet Armies ran roughshod over the Germans, displaying a sophistication of operational ability that outshone all others in WWII. The Russian's use their "Deep Operations" are still taught today as examples of excellence in planning and logistical support. Glantz lays out each attack in wonderful detail and help you comprehend the collapse of the Third Reich. This is a great book for readers of all ages, and a great find for the Military Enthusiast/Gamer/Modeller as a background source for both the war and the forces involved. Read it!
July 5, 2022
這是我第二次看這本書了。幾年前買的時候，應該是本書作者David M. Glantz的作品初次引進，而如今現在他的所有作品相信不是已經出版就是在翻譯中了。簡體書市對Glantz 重視也不是沒來由的。此公年近半百從美軍中退役，初次與人合著這本《巨人的碰撞》就展露頭角，聲名大噪。此後他關於蘇德戰爭的作品如雨後春筍般一部一部冒出，更是在歐美學界引起不小話題。
Glantz是軍人出身，文筆樸實，敘事簡潔，分析深入且條理分明，其引用了德蘇雙方大量的檔案資料，以強大豐富的數據說服讀者，更是一大特色。本書是“東線”戰爭的通史作品，個人認為兩位作者的拿捏的程度很好，這是本既可推薦給新手，對於熟悉本主題的人也能從引用資料數據中得到滿足。
書中的討論有幾點讓我想說說。
第一，Glantz提到，在上個世紀末的時候，學界忽然興起了一股學說，聲稱“史達林本想先主動發動戰爭佔取先手，德軍發動巴巴羅沙只是破壞了這個企圖”。作者對這個說法嗤之以鼻。他認為這只是當時蘇聯剛剛瓦解，有一派學者為了反對前政權，也為了引人注目而誇大其詞。朱可夫確實在41年中提過對德的作戰計畫，但史達林根本連看都懶得看。他太心知肚明紅軍在被大清洗後的積弱慘況了。伊恩‧克肖更是再三強調，莫斯科拚了命想要把開戰時間拖延，希望至少能再多一年準備，又怎麼可能自己先動手？別說這在軍事上會是場悲劇，怕是連政治上都可能讓歐美替它們洗白。Glantz後來還專門寫了一本書：《泥足巨人》(有簡中)來駁斥這個論點。
第二，蘇德戰爭在規模上算是世界史上少有的宏大，雙方死傷數把台灣總人口弄上去怕是都還填不滿。而整場經過的戲劇變化與曲折，最經典的對比就是羅馬與迦太基之間的第二次布匿克戰爭。兩邊都是有一方佔盡先機，但卻遲遲無法取得最終勝利，而讓對方以空間換取了學習了反擊之法的時間，最終逆轉。不過，其實呢，紅軍在三十年代早期才是領先群雄的。當時在圖哈切夫斯基的指導下，很早就開始展開機械化作戰的嘗試，並發展出大縱深作戰學說。但這一切卻被史達林硬生生地打斷，導致紅軍出現了一個大斷層，只能在戰爭中付出沉重的教訓從頭來過。但即便如此，蘇聯的軍工還是開發出了T-34、KV-1等先進坦克，幾乎變成了德軍的噩夢。作者說了一段故事：41年初，蘇聯派軍事訪問團前往柏林，要求訪查德軍裝甲部門，希特勒指示要“毫無保留”。結果東道主把四號坦克秀給對方看的時候，紅軍人員根本不相信這就是征服半個歐洲的德軍最先進的裝甲，大發脾氣。然後就換德方一頭霧水了，而這謎底要在下半年戰場上碰面時，才會揭曉。
其實德國除了在出色的參謀本部，基層實戰訓練跟裝甲作戰的經驗上領先遭逢斷層的紅軍外，在這場戰爭佔的優勢不大。就算是從後見之明上來看，如果沒有在“閃電戰”沒有迅速取得決定性勝利，這場戰爭就容易難以為繼。而蘇聯廣闊的領土形成的“距離的暴虐”，讓德軍的後勤整個悲劇，而你又是主打亡國滅族逼對方誓死抵抗的戰爭，要打贏真的很難。
這邊又帶到另外一個有趣的點。Glantz 在結論時說了，儘管盟軍在西線確實發揮了側面牽制的作用，並且提供大量的戰略物資支援，但如果沒有斯拉夫民族付出了成千上萬的人命，是不可能擊敗納粹的。兩位作者對於紅軍的貢獻，是不吝於指出的。
《巨人的碰撞》簡體絕版久矣，而英文版在2015年出了修訂版，兩位作者依據俄方釋出的新檔案，更新了大量的資料。而就我所知，簡體有��的軍事出版社指文已經有計畫出這個版本(相信應該是請回兩位譯者修訂吧)，大家可以期待。而這間出版社也出了很多Glantz的作品，之前提到的《泥足巨人》，還有《斯大林格勒三部曲》、《列寧格勒戰役》、《庫斯克會戰》、《巴巴羅撒脫軌》，這些都收錄在《東線文庫》裡。其實這間出版社真的出了很多好的作品，翻譯品質也都還行，只是價格比較不那麼親民，口袋真的要很深才行。
最後一提的是，本書的地圖不太行，不過我偷看了一下英文原版也畫得不好，希望簡體修訂版能夠幫忙改正。也許這要求有點過分？
Glantz是軍人出身，文筆樸實，敘事簡潔，分析深入且條理分明，其引用了德蘇雙方大量的檔案資料，以強大豐富的數據說服讀者，更是一大特色。本書是“東線”戰爭的通史作品，個人認為兩位作者的拿捏的程度很好，這是本既可推薦給新手，對於熟悉本主題的人也能從引用資料數據中得到滿足。
書中的討論有幾點讓我想說說。
第一，Glantz提到，在上個世紀末的時候，學界忽然興起了一股學說，聲稱“史達林本想先主動發動戰爭佔取先手，德軍發動巴巴羅沙只是破壞了這個企圖”。作者對這個說法嗤之以鼻。他認為這只是當時蘇聯剛剛瓦解，有一派學者為了反對前政權，也為了引人注目而誇大其詞。朱可夫確實在41年中提過對德的作戰計畫，但史達林根本連看都懶得看。他太心知肚明紅軍在被大清洗後的積弱慘況了。伊恩‧克肖更是再三強調，莫斯科拚了命想要把開戰時間拖延，希望至少能再多一年準備，又怎麼可能自己先動手？別說這在軍事上會是場悲劇，怕是連政治上都可能讓歐美替它們洗白。Glantz後來還專門寫了一本書：《泥足巨人》(有簡中)來駁斥這個論點。
第二，蘇德戰爭在規模上算是世界史上少有的宏大，雙方死傷數把台灣總人口弄上去怕是都還填不滿。而整場經過的戲劇變化與曲折，最經典的對比就是羅馬與迦太基之間的第二次布匿克戰爭。兩邊都是有一方佔盡先機，但卻遲遲無法取得最終勝利，而讓對方以空間換取了學習了反擊之法的時間，最終逆轉。不過，其實呢，紅軍在三十年代早期才是領先群雄的。當時在圖哈切夫斯基的指導下，很早就開始展開機械化作戰的嘗試，並發展出大縱深作戰學說。但這一切卻被史達林硬生生地打斷，導致紅軍出現了一個大斷層，只能在戰爭中付出沉重的教訓從頭來過。但即便如此，蘇聯的軍工還是開發出了T-34、KV-1等先進坦克，幾乎變成了德軍的噩夢。作者說了一段故事：41年初，蘇聯派軍事訪問團前往柏林，要求訪查德軍裝甲部門，希特勒指示要“毫無保留”。結果東道主把四號坦克秀給對方看的時候，紅軍人員根本不相信這就是征服半個歐洲的德軍最先進的裝甲，大發脾氣。然後就換德方一頭霧水了，而這謎底要在下半年戰場上碰面時，才會揭曉。
其實德國除了在出色的參謀本部，基層實戰訓練跟裝甲作戰的經驗上領先遭逢斷層的紅軍外，在這場戰爭佔的優勢不大。就算是從後見之明上來看，如果沒有在“閃電戰”沒有迅速取得決定性勝利，這場戰爭就容易難以為繼。而蘇聯廣闊的領土形成的“距離的暴虐”，讓德軍的後勤整個悲劇，而你又是主打亡國滅族逼對方誓死抵抗的戰爭，要打贏真的很難。
這邊又帶到另外一個有趣的點。Glantz 在結論時說了，儘管盟軍在西線確實發揮了側面牽制的作用，並且提供大量的戰略物資支援，但如果沒有斯拉夫民族付出了成千上萬的人命，是不可能擊敗納粹的。兩位作者對於紅軍的貢獻，是不吝於指出的。
《巨人的碰撞》簡體絕版久矣，而英文版在2015年出了修訂版，兩位作者依據俄方釋出的新檔案，更新了大量的資料。而就我所知，簡體有��的軍事出版社指文已經有計畫出這個版本(相信應該是請回兩位譯者修訂吧)，大家可以期待。而這間出版社也出了很多Glantz的作品，之前提到的《泥足巨人》，還有《斯大林格勒三部曲》、《列寧格勒戰役》、《庫斯克會戰》、《巴巴羅撒脫軌》，這些都收錄在《東線文庫》裡。其實這間出版社真的出了很多好的作品，翻譯品質也都還行，只是價格比較不那麼親民，口袋真的要很深才行。
最後一提的是，本書的地圖不太行，不過我偷看了一下英文原版也畫得不好，希望簡體修訂版能夠幫忙改正。也許這要求有點過分？
May 3, 2021
This is no way a pop-history book; rather it's a good recommendation for military-history academia. More than half of the book consists of references and notes, tables and statistics. It's not an easy read, and even if you've got decent knowledge about military strategy and tactics, without closely following a large scale map of Soviet Union and Europe, it'd be difficult to follow the course of the battles. Yet this is a must-read for anyone interested in the second world war, especially the war between Soviet Union and Germany. The author referenced an unbelievable amount of previously classified Soviet documents, and perhaps that is why this is the most neutral history of the war in the east I've read so far. It took me a painstakingly long time to finish the book, but the effort worth it. Enjoyable, in a difficult way.
July 3, 2022
Estudio operacional de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en el frente del Este.
Hay que aclarar que es un texto al que se tienen que cercar aquellos que realmente estén interesados en el tema y tengan una serie de conocimientos previos, se aproxima notablemente a un libro de texto, y también sirve como puerta al estudio más detallado de campañas más concretas.
Hay que aclarar que es un texto al que se tienen que cercar aquellos que realmente estén interesados en el tema y tengan una serie de conocimientos previos, se aproxima notablemente a un libro de texto, y también sirve como puerta al estudio más detallado de campañas más concretas.
August 18, 2021
Book: When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Modern War Studies)
Publisher: University Press of Kansas; New edition (1 December 1995)
Language: English
Paperback: 428 pages
Item Weight: 609 g
Dimensions: 15.24 x 3.18 x 22.86 cm
Price: 5982/-
The battle of Stalingrad—the most vicious and toxic battle in human history — ended on February 2, 1943.
With a projected death toll in surplus of a million, the bloodletting at Stalingrad far exceeded that of Verdun, one of the costliest battles of World War I.
The equivalence with Verdun was not lost on German and Soviet soldiers who fought at Stalingrad. As they described the “hell of Stalingrad” in their private letters, some Germans saw themselves trapped in a “second Verdun.”
Many Soviet defenders meanwhile extolled Stalingrad, a city with a prehistory of bloody warfare, as their “Red Verdun,” vowing never to surrender it to the enemy.
But, as a Soviet war correspondent reporting from Stalingrad in October 1942 remarked, the beleaguered city differed from Verdun in the following ways:
1) It had not been designed as a throttlehold and it possessed no fortresses or concrete shelters.
2) The line of defense passed through waste grounds and courtyards where housewives used to hang out the laundry, across the tracks of the narrow gauge railway, through the house where an accountant lived with his wife, two children and aging mother, through dozens of similar houses, through the now deserted square and its mangled pavement, through the park where just this past summer lovers sat whispering to one another on green benches.
A city of peace became a city of war. The laws of warfare placed it on the front line, at the epicenter of a battle that eventually shaped the result of the entire war.
In Stalingrad, the line of defense passed through the hearts of the Russian people. After sixty days of fighting the Germans now knew what this meant.
“Verdun!” they scoff. This is no Verdun. This is something new in the history of warfare.
This is Stalingrad.
This amazing battle has been described by the author in three phases. Each phase consists of several chapters.
The book inaugurates with a three chapter prelude. The subsequent chapters are: -
Prelude: 1918–1941
1. The Red Army, 1918–1939
2. Armed Truce, 1939–1941
3. Opposing Armies, 1941
The author argues here that one of the ironies of Russian history is that, having seized power in Petrograd by undermining military discipline and civil authority, the Bolsheviks had to create their own strong armed forces in order to survive. The shock troops of the October 1917 revolution were militant soldiers and sailors, but even with the addition of the armed workers of the Red Guard, these forces were inadequate to face the threats to the infant Soviet state.
The subsequent chapters of this book are as follows:
First Period of War: June 1941–November 1942
4. The German Onslaught
5. Soviet Response
6. To Moscow
7. Rasputitsa, Spring 1942
8. Operation Blau: The German 1942 Offensive
Second Period of War: November 1942–December 1943
9. Operation Uranus: The Destruction of Sixth Army
10. Rasputitsa and Operational Pause, Spring 1943
11. Kursk to the Dnepr
Third Period of War: January 1944–May 1945
12. Third Winter of the War
13. Operation Bagration: The Death of Army Group Center
14. Clearing the Flanks
15. Battles in the Snow, Winter 1944–1945
16. End Game
17. Conclusion
*The first, the so-called ‘defensive phase’, lasted from 17 July to 19 November 1942. It saw the German 6th Army advancing towards Stalingrad, first fighting its Russian opponents on the steppe and then in sadistic clashes in the city itself.
*The second phase, the ‘encirclement’, from 19 November 1942 to 10 January 1943, witnessed a secretly prepared Soviet counter attack on the northern and southern flanks of the 6th Army’s position. Its two pincers closed behind the German troops at Stalingrad, leaving them trapped and surrounded. In December fresh German forces attempted to break through the Russian lines and relieve them, but they failed.
*As a final point, in the third phase, from 10 January to 2 February 1943, the Soviet forces surrounding Stalingrad launched a battle of annihilation, destroying the Germans and their Romanian allies inside the Stalingrad ‘pocket’ or ‘cauldron’, as it was grimly named.
On 2 February 1943 the remnants of the Wehrmacht’s once-proud 6th Army surrendered in the northern part of the city, and the battle of Stalingrad was over.
The first, ‘defensive phase’, lies at the heart of any Russian veteran’s experience of the battle. In private, Chuikov would say simply: The story of the 62nd Army is the battle of Stalingrad. If the Germans had wiped us out and crossed the Volga everything would have been different – the emotional consequence of capturing Stalingrad would have been enormous.
The counter-offensive would not have worked.
He described the 62nd Army as ‘the army of the city battle’: Even Soviet soldiers who had fought all the way through to Berlin could not imagine the sheer horror of Stalingrad. We were impaled upon a line of burning fire – it was utter, indescribable hell. No one else was able to understand what we went through. We would say to each other afterwards – are you a veteran of the western bank, the fighting in the city?
Lasting six months, the battle also unfolded as a global media war. From the very beginning observers on all sides were fixated on the gigantic clash at the edge of Europe, heralding it a defining event of World War II.
The fight for Stalingrad would become the “most fateful battle of the war,” a Dresden paper wrote in early August 1942, just when Hitler’s soldiers were preparing their assault on the city. The British Daily Telegraph used virtually the same terms in September.
In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels read the papers of Germany’s enemies attentively. The battle of Stalingrad, the Nazi propaganda chief declared with a nod to the British daily, was a “question of life or death, and all of our prestige, just as that of the Soviet Union, will depend on how it will end.”
Starting in October 1942, Soviet newspapers regularly cited western reports that extolled the heroism of the soldiers and civilians defending the city against Germany’s mechanical warriors. In pubs throughout England the radio would be turned on for the start of the evening news only to be turned off after the report on Stalingrad had aired: “Nobody wants to hear anything else,” a British reporter noted. “All they talk about is Stalingrad, just Stalingrad.”3 Among the Allied nations, people euphorically commented on the performance of the Soviets at Stalingrad. This sentiment not only reflected the spirit of the antifascist alliance; it also owed to the fact that the western Allied soldiers could not offer any comparable feats: for over a year the British army had suffered defeat after defeat.
In November, a Soviet counterattack trapped more than 300,000 German and Axis soldiers in the Stalingrad pocket, or Kessel. German media abruptly stopped reporting on the battle and did not resume until late January 1943, when Nazi leaders realized they could not pass over the rout of an entire German army in silence. They cast the battle as one of heroic self-sacrifice, fought by German soldiers defending Europe against a superior Asian enemy.
The misinformation of fear, reinforced by appeals to German citizens to embrace total war, worked imperfectly. The German security police reported that people spoke of the last bullet, which they would save for themselves once “everything was over.”
One German official undertook particular precautions in the wake of Stalingrad: SS Chief Heinrich Himmler visited the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland in early March 1943. He urgently instructed the camp authorities to exhume all the bodies of the 700,000 Jews who had been killed there and cremate the corpses. For the next months until Treblinka was shut down, camp workers carried out their grim task while continuing to kill on a reduced scale. Himmler’s order grew out of an awareness that a time of reckoning for Germany was drawing near.
While it would be another year and a half before the Red Army liberated the camps in Poland, the battle on the Volga disrupted the Nazi death machine. The Dresden newspaper was right, if for the wrong reasons: Stalingrad did mark a turning point in world history.
Stalingrad represented a crushing defeat for Nazi Germany and a turning point in the Second World War. It was unprecedented for an entire German army to be destroyed and so many prisoners taken. Not surprisingly, Russians praised the achievement highly, but the tribute of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, written on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, stands out:
There have probably been hundreds of books written about this battle. And I think that for as long as people will be living on this Earth, they will remember it. And this is not surprising, for it was the largest battle in military history, in which socialism and fascism came face to face. For us, it was life and death which met on the Volga. And it was life which won the fight.
From the opposing side, General Hans Doerr fought at Stalingrad and subsequently wrote the first major German study of the battle. He saw it as: ‘the turning point of the Second World War. For Germany the battle of Stalingrad was the worst defeat in its history, and for Russia, its greatest victory.’
However, one would do well to remember that since Stalingrad was a shattering German defeat the story of this famous battle has typically been told in terms of the strategic blunders of Hitler and his High Command.
But Stalin and his commanders also made grave mistakes. They had never intended to leave Stalingrad’s defenders cut off in the city for so long.
But in September 1942 poor military planning led to the failure of one Soviet relief effort after another, forcing the 62nd Army to fight the irresistible might of the Germans entirely on its own.
Speedy, coherent and picturesque this book is a classic. A must must read for those interested in an in-depth knowledge of the Eastern Front.
Grab a copy if you choose.
Publisher: University Press of Kansas; New edition (1 December 1995)
Language: English
Paperback: 428 pages
Item Weight: 609 g
Dimensions: 15.24 x 3.18 x 22.86 cm
Price: 5982/-
The battle of Stalingrad—the most vicious and toxic battle in human history — ended on February 2, 1943.
With a projected death toll in surplus of a million, the bloodletting at Stalingrad far exceeded that of Verdun, one of the costliest battles of World War I.
The equivalence with Verdun was not lost on German and Soviet soldiers who fought at Stalingrad. As they described the “hell of Stalingrad” in their private letters, some Germans saw themselves trapped in a “second Verdun.”
Many Soviet defenders meanwhile extolled Stalingrad, a city with a prehistory of bloody warfare, as their “Red Verdun,” vowing never to surrender it to the enemy.
But, as a Soviet war correspondent reporting from Stalingrad in October 1942 remarked, the beleaguered city differed from Verdun in the following ways:
1) It had not been designed as a throttlehold and it possessed no fortresses or concrete shelters.
2) The line of defense passed through waste grounds and courtyards where housewives used to hang out the laundry, across the tracks of the narrow gauge railway, through the house where an accountant lived with his wife, two children and aging mother, through dozens of similar houses, through the now deserted square and its mangled pavement, through the park where just this past summer lovers sat whispering to one another on green benches.
A city of peace became a city of war. The laws of warfare placed it on the front line, at the epicenter of a battle that eventually shaped the result of the entire war.
In Stalingrad, the line of defense passed through the hearts of the Russian people. After sixty days of fighting the Germans now knew what this meant.
“Verdun!” they scoff. This is no Verdun. This is something new in the history of warfare.
This is Stalingrad.
This amazing battle has been described by the author in three phases. Each phase consists of several chapters.
The book inaugurates with a three chapter prelude. The subsequent chapters are: -
Prelude: 1918–1941
1. The Red Army, 1918–1939
2. Armed Truce, 1939–1941
3. Opposing Armies, 1941
The author argues here that one of the ironies of Russian history is that, having seized power in Petrograd by undermining military discipline and civil authority, the Bolsheviks had to create their own strong armed forces in order to survive. The shock troops of the October 1917 revolution were militant soldiers and sailors, but even with the addition of the armed workers of the Red Guard, these forces were inadequate to face the threats to the infant Soviet state.
The subsequent chapters of this book are as follows:
First Period of War: June 1941–November 1942
4. The German Onslaught
5. Soviet Response
6. To Moscow
7. Rasputitsa, Spring 1942
8. Operation Blau: The German 1942 Offensive
Second Period of War: November 1942–December 1943
9. Operation Uranus: The Destruction of Sixth Army
10. Rasputitsa and Operational Pause, Spring 1943
11. Kursk to the Dnepr
Third Period of War: January 1944–May 1945
12. Third Winter of the War
13. Operation Bagration: The Death of Army Group Center
14. Clearing the Flanks
15. Battles in the Snow, Winter 1944–1945
16. End Game
17. Conclusion
*The first, the so-called ‘defensive phase’, lasted from 17 July to 19 November 1942. It saw the German 6th Army advancing towards Stalingrad, first fighting its Russian opponents on the steppe and then in sadistic clashes in the city itself.
*The second phase, the ‘encirclement’, from 19 November 1942 to 10 January 1943, witnessed a secretly prepared Soviet counter attack on the northern and southern flanks of the 6th Army’s position. Its two pincers closed behind the German troops at Stalingrad, leaving them trapped and surrounded. In December fresh German forces attempted to break through the Russian lines and relieve them, but they failed.
*As a final point, in the third phase, from 10 January to 2 February 1943, the Soviet forces surrounding Stalingrad launched a battle of annihilation, destroying the Germans and their Romanian allies inside the Stalingrad ‘pocket’ or ‘cauldron’, as it was grimly named.
On 2 February 1943 the remnants of the Wehrmacht’s once-proud 6th Army surrendered in the northern part of the city, and the battle of Stalingrad was over.
The first, ‘defensive phase’, lies at the heart of any Russian veteran’s experience of the battle. In private, Chuikov would say simply: The story of the 62nd Army is the battle of Stalingrad. If the Germans had wiped us out and crossed the Volga everything would have been different – the emotional consequence of capturing Stalingrad would have been enormous.
The counter-offensive would not have worked.
He described the 62nd Army as ‘the army of the city battle’: Even Soviet soldiers who had fought all the way through to Berlin could not imagine the sheer horror of Stalingrad. We were impaled upon a line of burning fire – it was utter, indescribable hell. No one else was able to understand what we went through. We would say to each other afterwards – are you a veteran of the western bank, the fighting in the city?
Lasting six months, the battle also unfolded as a global media war. From the very beginning observers on all sides were fixated on the gigantic clash at the edge of Europe, heralding it a defining event of World War II.
The fight for Stalingrad would become the “most fateful battle of the war,” a Dresden paper wrote in early August 1942, just when Hitler’s soldiers were preparing their assault on the city. The British Daily Telegraph used virtually the same terms in September.
In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels read the papers of Germany’s enemies attentively. The battle of Stalingrad, the Nazi propaganda chief declared with a nod to the British daily, was a “question of life or death, and all of our prestige, just as that of the Soviet Union, will depend on how it will end.”
Starting in October 1942, Soviet newspapers regularly cited western reports that extolled the heroism of the soldiers and civilians defending the city against Germany’s mechanical warriors. In pubs throughout England the radio would be turned on for the start of the evening news only to be turned off after the report on Stalingrad had aired: “Nobody wants to hear anything else,” a British reporter noted. “All they talk about is Stalingrad, just Stalingrad.”3 Among the Allied nations, people euphorically commented on the performance of the Soviets at Stalingrad. This sentiment not only reflected the spirit of the antifascist alliance; it also owed to the fact that the western Allied soldiers could not offer any comparable feats: for over a year the British army had suffered defeat after defeat.
In November, a Soviet counterattack trapped more than 300,000 German and Axis soldiers in the Stalingrad pocket, or Kessel. German media abruptly stopped reporting on the battle and did not resume until late January 1943, when Nazi leaders realized they could not pass over the rout of an entire German army in silence. They cast the battle as one of heroic self-sacrifice, fought by German soldiers defending Europe against a superior Asian enemy.
The misinformation of fear, reinforced by appeals to German citizens to embrace total war, worked imperfectly. The German security police reported that people spoke of the last bullet, which they would save for themselves once “everything was over.”
One German official undertook particular precautions in the wake of Stalingrad: SS Chief Heinrich Himmler visited the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland in early March 1943. He urgently instructed the camp authorities to exhume all the bodies of the 700,000 Jews who had been killed there and cremate the corpses. For the next months until Treblinka was shut down, camp workers carried out their grim task while continuing to kill on a reduced scale. Himmler’s order grew out of an awareness that a time of reckoning for Germany was drawing near.
While it would be another year and a half before the Red Army liberated the camps in Poland, the battle on the Volga disrupted the Nazi death machine. The Dresden newspaper was right, if for the wrong reasons: Stalingrad did mark a turning point in world history.
Stalingrad represented a crushing defeat for Nazi Germany and a turning point in the Second World War. It was unprecedented for an entire German army to be destroyed and so many prisoners taken. Not surprisingly, Russians praised the achievement highly, but the tribute of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, written on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, stands out:
There have probably been hundreds of books written about this battle. And I think that for as long as people will be living on this Earth, they will remember it. And this is not surprising, for it was the largest battle in military history, in which socialism and fascism came face to face. For us, it was life and death which met on the Volga. And it was life which won the fight.
From the opposing side, General Hans Doerr fought at Stalingrad and subsequently wrote the first major German study of the battle. He saw it as: ‘the turning point of the Second World War. For Germany the battle of Stalingrad was the worst defeat in its history, and for Russia, its greatest victory.’
However, one would do well to remember that since Stalingrad was a shattering German defeat the story of this famous battle has typically been told in terms of the strategic blunders of Hitler and his High Command.
But Stalin and his commanders also made grave mistakes. They had never intended to leave Stalingrad’s defenders cut off in the city for so long.
But in September 1942 poor military planning led to the failure of one Soviet relief effort after another, forcing the 62nd Army to fight the irresistible might of the Germans entirely on its own.
Speedy, coherent and picturesque this book is a classic. A must must read for those interested in an in-depth knowledge of the Eastern Front.
Grab a copy if you choose.
June 29, 2013
actually, 3.5 stars
When Titans Clashed provides an overview of the most titanic armed struggle in history, the murderous fight between the German Axis forces (large numbers of Italians, Romanians, Hungarians and Bulgarians were involved) and the Soviet armed forces. The numbers of men and arms employed and ground into mincemeat are simply staggering. Even if the Wehrmacht had available to it all of the men facing the Allies in France, it still would have lost the battle, as the Red Army had more than 6.5 million men in the fray in 1944 (3 times more than the Axis), according to Glantz, and the Soviet military production had long since outstripped that of the Axis.
Glantz provides an eagle's eye view of this part of World War II, reporting well on strategic and operational policies and their evolution in the face of hard experience. But with only 290 pages of text, tactical considerations, most logistical matters, and every hint of the war on the ground had to be left aside. This led to the following very typical example of the author's style:
"While the German attention was riveted to the Korsun'-Shevchenkovskii salient, Soviet forces struck against both flanks of Army Group South, taking advantage of the fact that panzer operational reserves had been summoned to the sounds of the guns at Korsun' . On the 1st Ukrainian Front's right flank, Vatutin threw his 13th and 60th Armies, supported by 1st and 6th Guards Cavalry Corps, against von Manstein's overextended left flank south of the Pripiat Marshes. Between 27 January and 11 February, an audacious cavalry advance through inhospitable swampy terrain unhinged German defenses and seized Rovno and Lutsk, favorable positions from which to conduct future operations into Army Group South's rear."
I assure you, the quoted paragraph is not an introductory summary to be followed by details; this was everything he had to say about the entire operation. Nice try with the "riveted" and the "audacious", but page after page of this kind of writing gets wearing. Granted, if he wanted to tell the story from the strategic all the way down to the grunt's war, as Rick Atkinson does in his Liberation Trilogy, Glantz would need at least 2,000 pages. I hope that book(s) gets written. I'll read it.
Because Glantz managed to get access to closely guarded Soviet records, this first attempt (by a Western historian) to exploit them for historical purposes has my respect.
When Titans Clashed provides an overview of the most titanic armed struggle in history, the murderous fight between the German Axis forces (large numbers of Italians, Romanians, Hungarians and Bulgarians were involved) and the Soviet armed forces. The numbers of men and arms employed and ground into mincemeat are simply staggering. Even if the Wehrmacht had available to it all of the men facing the Allies in France, it still would have lost the battle, as the Red Army had more than 6.5 million men in the fray in 1944 (3 times more than the Axis), according to Glantz, and the Soviet military production had long since outstripped that of the Axis.
Glantz provides an eagle's eye view of this part of World War II, reporting well on strategic and operational policies and their evolution in the face of hard experience. But with only 290 pages of text, tactical considerations, most logistical matters, and every hint of the war on the ground had to be left aside. This led to the following very typical example of the author's style:
"While the German attention was riveted to the Korsun'-Shevchenkovskii salient, Soviet forces struck against both flanks of Army Group South, taking advantage of the fact that panzer operational reserves had been summoned to the sounds of the guns at Korsun' . On the 1st Ukrainian Front's right flank, Vatutin threw his 13th and 60th Armies, supported by 1st and 6th Guards Cavalry Corps, against von Manstein's overextended left flank south of the Pripiat Marshes. Between 27 January and 11 February, an audacious cavalry advance through inhospitable swampy terrain unhinged German defenses and seized Rovno and Lutsk, favorable positions from which to conduct future operations into Army Group South's rear."
I assure you, the quoted paragraph is not an introductory summary to be followed by details; this was everything he had to say about the entire operation. Nice try with the "riveted" and the "audacious", but page after page of this kind of writing gets wearing. Granted, if he wanted to tell the story from the strategic all the way down to the grunt's war, as Rick Atkinson does in his Liberation Trilogy, Glantz would need at least 2,000 pages. I hope that book(s) gets written. I'll read it.
Because Glantz managed to get access to closely guarded Soviet records, this first attempt (by a Western historian) to exploit them for historical purposes has my respect.
June 8, 2016
Glantz recognised a void in existing bibliography and set about to correct it; that void had to do with the history of WWII being presented from the Western PoV - and even when dealing with the Eastern front that view persisted (though to a lesser degree).
So Glantz wrote a book from the Soviet side, using new sources from the Russian archives etc. While it's undoubtedly great to have the 'other' view, the book suffers in two aspects:
-first, it's necessarily and by design one-sided. Of course Glantz bluntly tells you so from the off, so it's not like he failed in trying to do something else; but that one-sidedness is a bit monotonous and detracts from the big picture, as discussion on German tactics and events is confined to an absolute minimum. You could say that the German side is presupposed to be known to the reader, and it's quite true, but I feel that a little more balance would have greatly enriched the book.
-second, the story is very, very dry. Glantz never goes below regimental level, and what this means is that you don't get the feeling of difficulty, blood, tears and sweat associated with the Eastern front. Instead, the book focuses on the more strategic aspects. In that regard it's quite nice (though the maps are very few and not detailed enough, unfortunately), but it has to be one of the most dry histories I've read. The fact that I easily got to the end is testament to Glantz's ability to write in a fluid, engaging manner, but it can't quite overcome the shortcomings.
So, three stars it is, which is a pity because it could relatively easily get four, or more.
So Glantz wrote a book from the Soviet side, using new sources from the Russian archives etc. While it's undoubtedly great to have the 'other' view, the book suffers in two aspects:
-first, it's necessarily and by design one-sided. Of course Glantz bluntly tells you so from the off, so it's not like he failed in trying to do something else; but that one-sidedness is a bit monotonous and detracts from the big picture, as discussion on German tactics and events is confined to an absolute minimum. You could say that the German side is presupposed to be known to the reader, and it's quite true, but I feel that a little more balance would have greatly enriched the book.
-second, the story is very, very dry. Glantz never goes below regimental level, and what this means is that you don't get the feeling of difficulty, blood, tears and sweat associated with the Eastern front. Instead, the book focuses on the more strategic aspects. In that regard it's quite nice (though the maps are very few and not detailed enough, unfortunately), but it has to be one of the most dry histories I've read. The fact that I easily got to the end is testament to Glantz's ability to write in a fluid, engaging manner, but it can't quite overcome the shortcomings.
So, three stars it is, which is a pity because it could relatively easily get four, or more.
March 4, 2017
Incredibly Detailed Account of Operations
I jumped into this book after realizing that I, like many dedicated amateur historians, had only a superficial knowledge of operations on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. This book certainly went a long way towards correcting that.
What I'll say for it, both good and bad, is that you should understand that this is a detailed history of operations - down to the movements of individual units. This is very much a military history and not a political one.
I jumped into this book after realizing that I, like many dedicated amateur historians, had only a superficial knowledge of operations on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. This book certainly went a long way towards correcting that.
What I'll say for it, both good and bad, is that you should understand that this is a detailed history of operations - down to the movements of individual units. This is very much a military history and not a political one.
December 19, 2015
Col. David Glantz has made a name for himself in the military history community by bringing to light battles and campaigns, unknown largely in the West (though perhaps still remembered by some in Germany), that took place in the Eastern Front during WWII. In this book Glantz teamed up with Jonathan House to write a succinct, yet still detailed, overall history of the Eastern Front. What makes this book so unique, at least at the time 20 years ago when it came out, was it's focus on the Soviet side of the equation.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the opening up of state archives in Moscow and the former Soviet states, a clearer picture of the gigantic clash of titans that transpired in Eastern Europe and the expanses of Russian Eurasia began to take shape. Glantz dug into these archives, and the end result was this excellent work.
No other state in the Second World War paid as high a price for ultimate victory as did the Soviet Union. Tens of millions of civilians, and upwards of 20-29 million military personnel were lost in the battle for survival against Nazi Germany and her European allies.
Both sides were led by autocratic tyrants, and both sides were imbued with an entirely pitiless ideology that guaranteed that, once the clash of arms began, the blood would rise to the bridles.
The near total devastation exacted upon the Soviet Union and the near complete tearing to pieces of the Red Army in 1941 by the surprise German invasion was the most damaging invasion in human history. In a period of six months the Germans battled to the gates of Moscow, killed or took prisoner millions of Soviet soldiers, occupied the richest, most fertile, and most populace regions of the Communist state, and came within a hairs breadth of dominating Eurasia.
However the Soviets survived the horrendous onslaught, and in the wintry snows the Soviets counterattacked, driving away the exhausted, emaciated, strung out, and thoroughly spent forces of the Wehrmacht and their allies from the gates of the ancient city of Moscow.
In 1942 the Germans absorbed and ultimately crushed the Red Army offensives, winning at Kharkov at the Second Battle of Kharkov one of the most glorious victories in the annals of arms, and then went on to launch another massive offensive, this time into the south and the Caucasus. Again, however, the Soviets, despite horrendous losses, managed to hold out, learned from their adversaries, and at Stalingrad turned the tide. The loss of the Allied forces to Germany in the Stalingrad operation was key to Soviet victory, it weakened politically Hitler's alliance, and sapped the will of her allies, leaving Germany to do the vast majority of the fighting from here on out.
Although the Germans recovered in the late Winter, early Spring, including winning yet another crushing triumph at Kharkov, they went on to bash their Panzer forces, and the mythos of Blitzkrieg, into oblivion at the huge Battle of Kursk in July. From then on the Soviets launched a series of well planned, well timed, and well executed offensives that drove to Berlin itself, and ended the war.
Glantz covers the entirety of the conflict, including a concluding bit on the Soviet offensive into Manchuria, northern China and northern Korea at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific Theater. He also dis-spells some myths along the way.
Although no longer truism's, largely because of Glantz's work, unless you deeply study military history, you would still be beholding to the notion that the German Army (Wehrmacht) and the Waffen-SS were the most high tech, highly industrialized, mobile force on the planet. While certainly true that, even up till the very end, the Germans were operationally and tactically better than all their foes (Glantz will oppose this somewhat, but the Red Army never got to the Germans level in tactics, and only certain commanders were as good operationally), they were woefully deficient at the highest levels, and their reliance on operations and tactics to cover for their multitude of strategic sins eventually led to their damnation. Also the Germans were never as mechanized as their foes, and often their weaponry was, up until 1943, of inferior quality than their foes.
While the Soviets outproduced the Germans throughout the war, many of their early disasters can be blamed on obsolete and poorly produced equipment in the early months of the war. It wouldn't be until late in 1942 that the Red Army began producing, in sizable quantities, equipment comparable to the Germans'. And even then, it began a technology race that the Germans were always able to stay a bit ahead of their foes in. However, superior Soviet industrial methods (such as total mobilization for war of all facets of their nation, something Germany wouldn't do until after Kursk, when it was too late to save them) as well as lack of raw materials and, most importantly, fuel lessened the impact the better later war German weaponry had on the battlefield.
Glantz also showcases how the Red Army learned from their opponents. And how, in supreme irony, the two sides began to switch roles as the war wore on.
Initially the Germans were the best trained, best led, most dynamic, most flexible armed force on the planet. And while the Red Army would never, and during total war could never, take the time to train their men and officers to the German standards, those who survived the early battles, and the many subsequent disasters to befall the Soviets even till the end of the war, (the Germans always punished mistakes, just ask Monty) the Red Army began to mirror the qualities of the Wehrmacht of 1940-41. The role of political Commissars was reduced, field commanders were allowed more discretion and flexibility and personal initiative, and the 'book' was more often than not thrown out the window in favor of what would work.
While Stalin was always a detrimental source of interference into STAVKA (Red Army General Staff) planning (often a source of calamity), he learned to intrude less and less, to trust his own commanders and allow them to win victories. Ironically, Hitler would mold the German armed forces into a near mirror image of the Soviet armed forces, more and more, as the war wore on. Political officers of the Nazi party were introduced into the Wehrmacht to watch over the shoulders of the German offciers. The OKH and OKW (German Army General Staffs) began to be filled with incompetent yes men, much like the STAVKA was early on, and the few who voiced their dissent, such as von Manstein and Guderian, were simply put out to pasture in favor of men who would blindly follow Hitler's dictates.
However, as this work makes clear, the Germans lost the war far more than simply because of Hitler's interference. As mentioned previously, the Germans were masters of tactics and operations, however in terms of strategy they were sorely lacking. Their Generals could win battles even against long odds, however they lacked the competent General Staff, as of old, who could turn battles won into overall victory. Also, Soviet intelligence was leagues ahead of Germany's in terms of training, application, and sophistication (something the CIA knows all too well from the ensuing Cold War), and this helped lead to ultimate victory.
Glantz also points out that this genius for cloak and dagger inherent within the Russian-Soviet armed forces led to the false notion that the Red Army was a massive behemoth, endlessly supplied with manpower and machinery. Even as early as 1942 there was severe manpower shortages. And even if industrial numbers (more than likely fudged in order to keep a Commissar off ones back) were higher than those of Germany, Soviet weaponry was never as well made as German. And while Soviet weaponry, more simply made, was easier to maintain, the quality of production ensured a breakdown rate equal to the Germans. Also, by the mid point in the war, the fore mentioned arms race between the two sides was generally won by the Germans, and their superior weaponry, and still tactics and training, ensured Soviet armor losses especially were often catastrophic even in victory. Even though the quality of the German armed forces degraded overtime, so too did the quality of training of the Red Army as well as the need to simply have men armed and at the front was paramount. And Lend Lease, something still winced at by Russians to this day, was a huge aid to the Soviet war economy and force structure, without American logistical support, it is doubtful the Red Army could have maintained the offensives that they could, and they might have even turned out as only partially mechanized as their foes.
Still, as this book points out, the Red Army did indeed win the war, despite all their flaws.
All in all this is an excellent one volume summary of the Eastern Front from the Soviet perspective, an updated, shorter version of John Erickson's massive two volume study 20 years before Glantz's.
This book has been recently updated and revised, so you should be able to find it easily at a bookstore near you.
A first rate work of military history and analysis. Highly recommended.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, and the opening up of state archives in Moscow and the former Soviet states, a clearer picture of the gigantic clash of titans that transpired in Eastern Europe and the expanses of Russian Eurasia began to take shape. Glantz dug into these archives, and the end result was this excellent work.
No other state in the Second World War paid as high a price for ultimate victory as did the Soviet Union. Tens of millions of civilians, and upwards of 20-29 million military personnel were lost in the battle for survival against Nazi Germany and her European allies.
Both sides were led by autocratic tyrants, and both sides were imbued with an entirely pitiless ideology that guaranteed that, once the clash of arms began, the blood would rise to the bridles.
The near total devastation exacted upon the Soviet Union and the near complete tearing to pieces of the Red Army in 1941 by the surprise German invasion was the most damaging invasion in human history. In a period of six months the Germans battled to the gates of Moscow, killed or took prisoner millions of Soviet soldiers, occupied the richest, most fertile, and most populace regions of the Communist state, and came within a hairs breadth of dominating Eurasia.
However the Soviets survived the horrendous onslaught, and in the wintry snows the Soviets counterattacked, driving away the exhausted, emaciated, strung out, and thoroughly spent forces of the Wehrmacht and their allies from the gates of the ancient city of Moscow.
In 1942 the Germans absorbed and ultimately crushed the Red Army offensives, winning at Kharkov at the Second Battle of Kharkov one of the most glorious victories in the annals of arms, and then went on to launch another massive offensive, this time into the south and the Caucasus. Again, however, the Soviets, despite horrendous losses, managed to hold out, learned from their adversaries, and at Stalingrad turned the tide. The loss of the Allied forces to Germany in the Stalingrad operation was key to Soviet victory, it weakened politically Hitler's alliance, and sapped the will of her allies, leaving Germany to do the vast majority of the fighting from here on out.
Although the Germans recovered in the late Winter, early Spring, including winning yet another crushing triumph at Kharkov, they went on to bash their Panzer forces, and the mythos of Blitzkrieg, into oblivion at the huge Battle of Kursk in July. From then on the Soviets launched a series of well planned, well timed, and well executed offensives that drove to Berlin itself, and ended the war.
Glantz covers the entirety of the conflict, including a concluding bit on the Soviet offensive into Manchuria, northern China and northern Korea at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific Theater. He also dis-spells some myths along the way.
Although no longer truism's, largely because of Glantz's work, unless you deeply study military history, you would still be beholding to the notion that the German Army (Wehrmacht) and the Waffen-SS were the most high tech, highly industrialized, mobile force on the planet. While certainly true that, even up till the very end, the Germans were operationally and tactically better than all their foes (Glantz will oppose this somewhat, but the Red Army never got to the Germans level in tactics, and only certain commanders were as good operationally), they were woefully deficient at the highest levels, and their reliance on operations and tactics to cover for their multitude of strategic sins eventually led to their damnation. Also the Germans were never as mechanized as their foes, and often their weaponry was, up until 1943, of inferior quality than their foes.
While the Soviets outproduced the Germans throughout the war, many of their early disasters can be blamed on obsolete and poorly produced equipment in the early months of the war. It wouldn't be until late in 1942 that the Red Army began producing, in sizable quantities, equipment comparable to the Germans'. And even then, it began a technology race that the Germans were always able to stay a bit ahead of their foes in. However, superior Soviet industrial methods (such as total mobilization for war of all facets of their nation, something Germany wouldn't do until after Kursk, when it was too late to save them) as well as lack of raw materials and, most importantly, fuel lessened the impact the better later war German weaponry had on the battlefield.
Glantz also showcases how the Red Army learned from their opponents. And how, in supreme irony, the two sides began to switch roles as the war wore on.
Initially the Germans were the best trained, best led, most dynamic, most flexible armed force on the planet. And while the Red Army would never, and during total war could never, take the time to train their men and officers to the German standards, those who survived the early battles, and the many subsequent disasters to befall the Soviets even till the end of the war, (the Germans always punished mistakes, just ask Monty) the Red Army began to mirror the qualities of the Wehrmacht of 1940-41. The role of political Commissars was reduced, field commanders were allowed more discretion and flexibility and personal initiative, and the 'book' was more often than not thrown out the window in favor of what would work.
While Stalin was always a detrimental source of interference into STAVKA (Red Army General Staff) planning (often a source of calamity), he learned to intrude less and less, to trust his own commanders and allow them to win victories. Ironically, Hitler would mold the German armed forces into a near mirror image of the Soviet armed forces, more and more, as the war wore on. Political officers of the Nazi party were introduced into the Wehrmacht to watch over the shoulders of the German offciers. The OKH and OKW (German Army General Staffs) began to be filled with incompetent yes men, much like the STAVKA was early on, and the few who voiced their dissent, such as von Manstein and Guderian, were simply put out to pasture in favor of men who would blindly follow Hitler's dictates.
However, as this work makes clear, the Germans lost the war far more than simply because of Hitler's interference. As mentioned previously, the Germans were masters of tactics and operations, however in terms of strategy they were sorely lacking. Their Generals could win battles even against long odds, however they lacked the competent General Staff, as of old, who could turn battles won into overall victory. Also, Soviet intelligence was leagues ahead of Germany's in terms of training, application, and sophistication (something the CIA knows all too well from the ensuing Cold War), and this helped lead to ultimate victory.
Glantz also points out that this genius for cloak and dagger inherent within the Russian-Soviet armed forces led to the false notion that the Red Army was a massive behemoth, endlessly supplied with manpower and machinery. Even as early as 1942 there was severe manpower shortages. And even if industrial numbers (more than likely fudged in order to keep a Commissar off ones back) were higher than those of Germany, Soviet weaponry was never as well made as German. And while Soviet weaponry, more simply made, was easier to maintain, the quality of production ensured a breakdown rate equal to the Germans. Also, by the mid point in the war, the fore mentioned arms race between the two sides was generally won by the Germans, and their superior weaponry, and still tactics and training, ensured Soviet armor losses especially were often catastrophic even in victory. Even though the quality of the German armed forces degraded overtime, so too did the quality of training of the Red Army as well as the need to simply have men armed and at the front was paramount. And Lend Lease, something still winced at by Russians to this day, was a huge aid to the Soviet war economy and force structure, without American logistical support, it is doubtful the Red Army could have maintained the offensives that they could, and they might have even turned out as only partially mechanized as their foes.
Still, as this book points out, the Red Army did indeed win the war, despite all their flaws.
All in all this is an excellent one volume summary of the Eastern Front from the Soviet perspective, an updated, shorter version of John Erickson's massive two volume study 20 years before Glantz's.
This book has been recently updated and revised, so you should be able to find it easily at a bookstore near you.
A first rate work of military history and analysis. Highly recommended.
June 22, 2020
In the US and in Western Europe, we often have little familiarity with the scale and horror of the fighting on the Eastern Front in WW II. In this magnificent book, David Glantz and Jonathan House provide an in-depth analysis of the decisive theater of the war by tracing the evolution of Soviet military thought, doctrine, and organization from the pre-war years through the end of the conflict.
Among the fascinating insights provided in this book is the fact that Soviet military thinking on maneuver warfare was at least as advanced as that of the Germans during the inter-war years. Soviet officers, in particular M. N. Tukhachevsky, developed the concept of “deep operations” or “deep battle.” Their ideas compared favorably with the more well-known German thinking that most know as “blitzkrieg.” Few think of the Soviets as being on the same level as the Germans when it comes to military theory, but it is easy to argue that the Soviets were at least their equal.
How then does one explain the horrific Soviet losses and general incompetence at the outset of Operation Barbarossa? The answer lies with Stalin’s bloody purges in the 1930s. The murder of the most promising and independent thinkers among the Soviet officer corps deprived the Red Army of its best and brightest commanders when the Germans attacked. Rebuilding the Soviet Military’s competence and confidence between 1941-43 proved to be a long and costly endeavor.
Glantz and House’s work also highlights that it was the Soviets who developed what we today know as “operational art.” The size forces necessary to conduct the penetrations and encirclements envisioned by Tukhachevsky (and later perfected by officers such as G. K. Zhukov) demanded an intellectual framework to manage the challenges of distance and logistics. Hence, we see the Soviets give birth to operational art as a bridge to link together tactical action with strategic objectives on the battlefield.
Other myths are examined and debunked in these pages. Not the least of these is the exaggerated tactical superiority of German units through to the end of the war. For example, the ability of Wehrmacht divisions to halt the attacks of Soviet corps and armies is largely explained by the manpower shortages that the USSR was suffering from nearly as much as their German opponents. Red Army units were almost always severely under-strength, making the odds much closer to even when compared to the German counterattacking formations, despite the difference in echelon designation. The common image Soviet hordes backed by endless reserves of manpower turns out to be false. While Moscow increasingly enjoyed numerical superiority by 1943, that superiority was not as vast as many commonly think.
By the final years of the war, Soviet commanders were highly experienced and extremely competent. The Red Army suffered horrifically to gain that competence from 1941-43. They carried the majority of the load in fighting the Wehrmacht, an accomplishment that, despite the oppressiveness of Stalin’s regime (and of Communism more generally), is worthy of praise.
Among the fascinating insights provided in this book is the fact that Soviet military thinking on maneuver warfare was at least as advanced as that of the Germans during the inter-war years. Soviet officers, in particular M. N. Tukhachevsky, developed the concept of “deep operations” or “deep battle.” Their ideas compared favorably with the more well-known German thinking that most know as “blitzkrieg.” Few think of the Soviets as being on the same level as the Germans when it comes to military theory, but it is easy to argue that the Soviets were at least their equal.
How then does one explain the horrific Soviet losses and general incompetence at the outset of Operation Barbarossa? The answer lies with Stalin’s bloody purges in the 1930s. The murder of the most promising and independent thinkers among the Soviet officer corps deprived the Red Army of its best and brightest commanders when the Germans attacked. Rebuilding the Soviet Military’s competence and confidence between 1941-43 proved to be a long and costly endeavor.
Glantz and House’s work also highlights that it was the Soviets who developed what we today know as “operational art.” The size forces necessary to conduct the penetrations and encirclements envisioned by Tukhachevsky (and later perfected by officers such as G. K. Zhukov) demanded an intellectual framework to manage the challenges of distance and logistics. Hence, we see the Soviets give birth to operational art as a bridge to link together tactical action with strategic objectives on the battlefield.
Other myths are examined and debunked in these pages. Not the least of these is the exaggerated tactical superiority of German units through to the end of the war. For example, the ability of Wehrmacht divisions to halt the attacks of Soviet corps and armies is largely explained by the manpower shortages that the USSR was suffering from nearly as much as their German opponents. Red Army units were almost always severely under-strength, making the odds much closer to even when compared to the German counterattacking formations, despite the difference in echelon designation. The common image Soviet hordes backed by endless reserves of manpower turns out to be false. While Moscow increasingly enjoyed numerical superiority by 1943, that superiority was not as vast as many commonly think.
By the final years of the war, Soviet commanders were highly experienced and extremely competent. The Red Army suffered horrifically to gain that competence from 1941-43. They carried the majority of the load in fighting the Wehrmacht, an accomplishment that, despite the oppressiveness of Stalin’s regime (and of Communism more generally), is worthy of praise.
December 7, 2023
(Još jedan) opšti pregled rata na istoku. Možda je u nekom trenutku previše. Glantz je cenjen vojno-istorijskim krugovima; ja volim i opštu i vojnu istoriju, ali neki delovi ovde nekako liče na... katalog brodova u Ilijadi. Suvoparno, ne ulazi u opise bitaka ili njihovih posledica, već se bavi vojnom organizacijom, logistikom... Tu je i jedna gomila brojeva i tabela, do vojnika tačno, a to u formatu audio-knjige zvuči prilično zamorno.
Opet, ima zanimljivih detalja koji menjaju pogled na istoriju. Sovjeti su, na primer, sredinom 30-ih imali veliku prednost u vojnoj organizaciji i tehnici. Ta prednost se gubi do početka rata i prelazi na stranu Rajha, ali već 1941. je prozvodnja tenkova i aviona veća u SSSR nego na teritoriji Nemačke, bez obzira što je bilo u toku veliko premeštanje sovjetske industrije na istok.
Iznenađuje i kreativnost u organizaciji Stavke. Crvenu armiju svi nekako zamišljamo kao skup loše organizovanih, nekreativnih i loše opremljenih jedinica, koje su jednostavno imale dovoljan broj vojnika koje (bez oružja, poput onog filma o bitci za Staljingrad) šalju u smrt. Autor u više navrata govori upravo suprotno - kreativnost odluka sovjetskog štaba u promenama 1941. ima veliki uticaj na ruske uspehje 42/43. Brza mobilizacija. Genijalni kontra-napadi Žukova, Timošenka i Jeremenka - čak i kad izgledaju neuspešni, dovoljno oslabljuju nemačke armije i tako zaustavljaju njihovo napredovanje narednih meseci. Tu je i jedno celo poglavlje o važnosti konja za rat na istoku - i ne samo konja, već i logistike oko prevoza stotine i stoine tona hrane za konje, svaki dan. Čime dopremiti svu tu hranu, pogotovo kad vojska svakodnevno napreduje kroz stotine kilometara nepreglednih ruskih stepa?
Opet, ima zanimljivih detalja koji menjaju pogled na istoriju. Sovjeti su, na primer, sredinom 30-ih imali veliku prednost u vojnoj organizaciji i tehnici. Ta prednost se gubi do početka rata i prelazi na stranu Rajha, ali već 1941. je prozvodnja tenkova i aviona veća u SSSR nego na teritoriji Nemačke, bez obzira što je bilo u toku veliko premeštanje sovjetske industrije na istok.
Iznenađuje i kreativnost u organizaciji Stavke. Crvenu armiju svi nekako zamišljamo kao skup loše organizovanih, nekreativnih i loše opremljenih jedinica, koje su jednostavno imale dovoljan broj vojnika koje (bez oružja, poput onog filma o bitci za Staljingrad) šalju u smrt. Autor u više navrata govori upravo suprotno - kreativnost odluka sovjetskog štaba u promenama 1941. ima veliki uticaj na ruske uspehje 42/43. Brza mobilizacija. Genijalni kontra-napadi Žukova, Timošenka i Jeremenka - čak i kad izgledaju neuspešni, dovoljno oslabljuju nemačke armije i tako zaustavljaju njihovo napredovanje narednih meseci. Tu je i jedno celo poglavlje o važnosti konja za rat na istoku - i ne samo konja, već i logistike oko prevoza stotine i stoine tona hrane za konje, svaki dan. Čime dopremiti svu tu hranu, pogotovo kad vojska svakodnevno napreduje kroz stotine kilometara nepreglednih ruskih stepa?
November 1, 2024
David M. Glantz, historiador, coronel retirado del ejército de los Estados Unidos, director del ..."The Journal of Slavic Military Studies" y tal vez uno de los mayores expertos occidentales sobre las operaciones y tácticas del Ejército Rojo durante la Gran Guerra Patriótica (aquí no se hablará de Segunda Guerra Mundial); publicó en 1995 "Choque de Titanes - La Victoria del Ejército Rojo sobre Hitler", apoyado especialmente por la primera oleada de material desclasificado que salía a la luz gracias a la caída de la Unión Soviética. Sin embargo, la documentación que fue apareciendo durante los siguientes 20 años ha sido colosal, por lo que Glantz decidió reeditar su libro, actualizado con toda la información recabada de la marea de desclasificaciones de los últimos tiempos.
"Choque de Titanes es tal vez el más completo texto sobre el frente oriental de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ese que enfrentó a la imbatible Wehrmacht de la Alemania nazi, contra un bisoño pero aguerrido Ejército Rojo, que fue aprendiendo cada vez más de las derrotas para mejorar progresivamente su tácticas, armamento y entrenamiento. Esta maravilla de libro nos guiará desde los albores del Ejército Rojo - las tropas de choque de la Revolución de Octubre de 1917, su transformación en ejército en la guerra civil rusa de 1918; la Guerra de Invierno Finlandesa de 1939; hasta que Hitler abriera la caja de Pandora el domingo 22 de junio de 1941 invadiendo la Unión Soviética. Glantz, con gran pericia y un excelso detalle operativo, nos describirá todo el trasegar de la guerra en el frente oriental - pasando por la batalla de Moscú, el cerco de Leningrado, la operación Blau alemana con destino a la conquista del Cáucaso; los puntos de inflexión de la guerra con la batalla de Stalingrado, la destrucción del Sexto Ejército alemán, la Operación Urano y la batalla de Kursk; las contraofensivas soviéticas que iniciarían en 1943 y que desembocarían en el caída de Berlín el 2 de mayo de 1945 y la derrota del Tercer Reich. Glantz incluye además un capítulo final con las muchas veces olvidada operación en Manchuria, donde el Ejército Rojo se enfrentó al ejército imperial japonés en agosto de 1945 antes de su rendición definitiva.
El único punto en contra para este libro radica -irónicamente- en una de sus mayores fortalezas. Se trata de un estudio que se centra en lo operativo y militar, y que deja de lado la narrativa y la prosa más engalanada y fluída de otros historiadores como Beevor, Kershaw o Hastings. La narración de Glantz puede resultar árida y estéril, mientras bombardea con cifras de muertos, equipo, tanques y movimientos de tropas. Es un libro que no se antoja ideal para quienes se acerquen por primera vez a la "Gran Guerra Patriótica" y a los teatros de operaciones orientales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pero resulta casi como una golosina para quienes ya acumulen lecturas sobre este tema.
Tal vez la mayor contribución de Glantz con este libro sea la de resaltar como muchos occidentales - producto de un discurso ideológico maniqueo de Guerra Fría - olvidaron rápidamente las enormes contribuciones y los profundos sacrificios que hizo el pueblo soviético a la victoria aliada sobre el nazismo. Producto de ello, el autor con cifras en mano permite reivindicar el esfuerzo soviético de guerra (con 29 millones de bajas militares), planteando incluso como las cifras relativas de bajas de la Wehrmacht , los aliados del Eje y las tropas de las SS, permiten concluir que el Frente del Este fue el principal teatro de guerra alemán, así el cine y la literatura nos planteen - erradamente- que El Alamein, Normandía o las Ardenas fueron los golpes definitivos de la caída de Hitler. Las pérdidas totales de la Wehrmacht hasta el 30 de abril de 1945 ascendieron a 11.135.500 hombres, incluidos 6.035.000 heridos. De estos, casi 9 millones cayeron en el Este.... no más preguntas, su Señoría...
"Choque de Titanes es tal vez el más completo texto sobre el frente oriental de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ese que enfrentó a la imbatible Wehrmacht de la Alemania nazi, contra un bisoño pero aguerrido Ejército Rojo, que fue aprendiendo cada vez más de las derrotas para mejorar progresivamente su tácticas, armamento y entrenamiento. Esta maravilla de libro nos guiará desde los albores del Ejército Rojo - las tropas de choque de la Revolución de Octubre de 1917, su transformación en ejército en la guerra civil rusa de 1918; la Guerra de Invierno Finlandesa de 1939; hasta que Hitler abriera la caja de Pandora el domingo 22 de junio de 1941 invadiendo la Unión Soviética. Glantz, con gran pericia y un excelso detalle operativo, nos describirá todo el trasegar de la guerra en el frente oriental - pasando por la batalla de Moscú, el cerco de Leningrado, la operación Blau alemana con destino a la conquista del Cáucaso; los puntos de inflexión de la guerra con la batalla de Stalingrado, la destrucción del Sexto Ejército alemán, la Operación Urano y la batalla de Kursk; las contraofensivas soviéticas que iniciarían en 1943 y que desembocarían en el caída de Berlín el 2 de mayo de 1945 y la derrota del Tercer Reich. Glantz incluye además un capítulo final con las muchas veces olvidada operación en Manchuria, donde el Ejército Rojo se enfrentó al ejército imperial japonés en agosto de 1945 antes de su rendición definitiva.
El único punto en contra para este libro radica -irónicamente- en una de sus mayores fortalezas. Se trata de un estudio que se centra en lo operativo y militar, y que deja de lado la narrativa y la prosa más engalanada y fluída de otros historiadores como Beevor, Kershaw o Hastings. La narración de Glantz puede resultar árida y estéril, mientras bombardea con cifras de muertos, equipo, tanques y movimientos de tropas. Es un libro que no se antoja ideal para quienes se acerquen por primera vez a la "Gran Guerra Patriótica" y a los teatros de operaciones orientales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pero resulta casi como una golosina para quienes ya acumulen lecturas sobre este tema.
Tal vez la mayor contribución de Glantz con este libro sea la de resaltar como muchos occidentales - producto de un discurso ideológico maniqueo de Guerra Fría - olvidaron rápidamente las enormes contribuciones y los profundos sacrificios que hizo el pueblo soviético a la victoria aliada sobre el nazismo. Producto de ello, el autor con cifras en mano permite reivindicar el esfuerzo soviético de guerra (con 29 millones de bajas militares), planteando incluso como las cifras relativas de bajas de la Wehrmacht , los aliados del Eje y las tropas de las SS, permiten concluir que el Frente del Este fue el principal teatro de guerra alemán, así el cine y la literatura nos planteen - erradamente- que El Alamein, Normandía o las Ardenas fueron los golpes definitivos de la caída de Hitler. Las pérdidas totales de la Wehrmacht hasta el 30 de abril de 1945 ascendieron a 11.135.500 hombres, incluidos 6.035.000 heridos. De estos, casi 9 millones cayeron en el Este.... no más preguntas, su Señoría...
January 6, 2021
Good read on the war in the Eastern Front and the emergence of Soviet operational art to defeat Germany. As an American it’s easy to look at WW2 through an ethnocentric lens that predominantly highlights western actions as the ultimate cause of Hitlers demise (Normandy, Battle of Bulge, etc).
However Grantz does a phenomenal job showing how much of the brunt of the war effort the Red Army incurred. The following excerpt from his concluding chapter provides a good description..
“On the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion of 1944, a US news magazine featured a cover photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was labeled the man who defeated Hitler. If any one man deserved that label, it was not Eisenhower but Zhukov, Vasilevsky, or possibly Stalin himself ... over three million German troops fought in the East, while less than a million struggled elsewhere ... German armed forces’ losses to war’s end numbered 13,488,000 men, of these 10,758,000 fell or were taken prisoner in the East.”
Hence, as more than one German veteran observed, “war in the West was proper sport, while war in the East was unmitigated horror.”
However Grantz does a phenomenal job showing how much of the brunt of the war effort the Red Army incurred. The following excerpt from his concluding chapter provides a good description..
“On the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion of 1944, a US news magazine featured a cover photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was labeled the man who defeated Hitler. If any one man deserved that label, it was not Eisenhower but Zhukov, Vasilevsky, or possibly Stalin himself ... over three million German troops fought in the East, while less than a million struggled elsewhere ... German armed forces’ losses to war’s end numbered 13,488,000 men, of these 10,758,000 fell or were taken prisoner in the East.”
Hence, as more than one German veteran observed, “war in the West was proper sport, while war in the East was unmitigated horror.”
March 4, 2025
Great high-level overview of the German-Soviet War from the perspective of the Stavka. Contains little to no perspectives from the ground because that is not what this book is about. 95% of the time Glantz is talking about formations the size Corps, Armies, or Fronts/Army groups. Lots of details on the planning of various Soviet operations throughout the war. Surprisingly accessible and readable, though the details of different armies moving from one place to another along a particular axis can get confusing at times. Has several good maps but really needs more of them. Also contains useful statistical tables to give a good idea of the raw numbers involved.
An interesting thing that the book implies is that German victory may have been impossible. Barbarossa went pretty much as well as could be hoped for, and their advance was not limited by Soviet resistance as much as logistical constraints. The Red Army performed abysmally in 1941 despite many smaller units fighting doggedly. Their performance would only improve as the war went on, meanwhile German effectiveness continuously dropped.
A testament to the achievements of the Red Army during the war.
An interesting thing that the book implies is that German victory may have been impossible. Barbarossa went pretty much as well as could be hoped for, and their advance was not limited by Soviet resistance as much as logistical constraints. The Red Army performed abysmally in 1941 despite many smaller units fighting doggedly. Their performance would only improve as the war went on, meanwhile German effectiveness continuously dropped.
A testament to the achievements of the Red Army during the war.
August 9, 2017
A great and very well written history and analysis from the prewar to Berlin and a Manchurian bonus of the Soviet experience in the WWII, friendly for the casual reader with an interest in the topic, heavy on the research, notes, statistics and bibliography; about 54% of the book is the narrative of what happened and the rest of the book is dedicated to support material. In my edition, the notes were placed after the narrative and that helped the flow but when I finally arrived it was hard to remember or connect them with their parts, this is fabulous for a casual reader and perhaps practical for a dedicated one.
October 2, 2023
“Ni shagu nazad! Not one step back!” - Order No. 227
June 22. 1941 - the most destructive conflict in history began when 3.5 million Germans and Axis allies launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing struggle saw what was a peak form Wehrmacht, fresh from its conquests of continental Europe, utterly and categorically destroyed by the Red Army over 4 years of brutal, Herculean campaigns of the Eastern Front.
Glantz’s work provides an overview of major events, as well as the background and motivations of various actors. It dispels the myth of German superiority, and shows how the Red Army evolved into a lethal instrument of war. It also tells of the immense human cost and contribution of the Soviet Union toward the defeat of National Socialism and Fascism. Over 30 million military losses - a quarter of those deaths, along with untold millions of civilians. This is a story that deserves to be told.
The unstoppable force met the immovable object.
The immovable object bent and bled, but was not broken.
The unstoppable force was shattered.
June 22. 1941 - the most destructive conflict in history began when 3.5 million Germans and Axis allies launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing struggle saw what was a peak form Wehrmacht, fresh from its conquests of continental Europe, utterly and categorically destroyed by the Red Army over 4 years of brutal, Herculean campaigns of the Eastern Front.
Glantz’s work provides an overview of major events, as well as the background and motivations of various actors. It dispels the myth of German superiority, and shows how the Red Army evolved into a lethal instrument of war. It also tells of the immense human cost and contribution of the Soviet Union toward the defeat of National Socialism and Fascism. Over 30 million military losses - a quarter of those deaths, along with untold millions of civilians. This is a story that deserves to be told.
The unstoppable force met the immovable object.
The immovable object bent and bled, but was not broken.
The unstoppable force was shattered.
December 3, 2022
3,5
For ww2 enthusiasts only
For ww2 enthusiasts only
February 22, 2023
11/10 excelente libro sobre el frente oriental
May 3, 2025
Such a well informed read! This book gives oit a lot of information about everything (or most of) what was going on in the Eastern Front of ww2, mostly from the Soviet perspective.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 134 reviews