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Текстом - снято с ProQuest + еще пучек его рецензий - этого добра навалом
Copyright Weider History Group May/Jun 2010
A retired U.S. Army colonel fluent in Russian, David M. Glantz writes data-rich tomes that synthesize his research in the recently opened Soviet archives. His goal: to debunk long-standing myths with what he calls "ground truth." His latest epics. To the Gates of Stalingrad and Armageddon in Stalingrad (both published in 2009, with a third volume due next year), recast history's biggest battle in a new light. For example, he and coauthor Jonathan M. House are the first historians to use archival material from the brutal Soviet secret police force, the NKVD, which was charged with maintaining discipline in the Red Army. "Its documents are surprisingly candid about declining morale, the amount of censorship, numbers of deserters, and so on," Glantz says, "a human dimension of the battle often speculated upon but never before documented."
What do you mean by ground truth?
I mean examining the records of both sides to finally strip away the myths and begin to restore reality. You can't reach judgments regarding political, diplomatic, economic, or social factors in the war as a whole unless you have reached sound decisions regarding how the war was conducted, to what end it was conducted, and so forth. Historians today are focused not on operational but social issues. But it all sits on the structure of military reality.
Why choose Stalingrad?
There have been hundreds of books on the batde, dating back to the early 1950s. Many early ones were German memoirs, or about specific Germans. In the 1980s and 1 990s, many were essentially derived from those sources plus a narrow base of Soviet sources, the predominant one being memoirs by Vastly Chuikov, who headed the Soviet Sixty-second Army; those are quite accurate and very good. But over time, all these books incorporated the same basic conclusions about the campaign as a whole and the battle for the city. And many of those conclusions are simply wrong.
For example?
One common perception is this: unlike in Barbarossa in 1 94 1 , where the Soviet army resisted the Wehrmacht and took immense casualties, during Blau in 1942 Stalin very quickly withdraws his forces and decides to trade space for time; once he gets back to a more defensible line, he launches a counteroffensive. That's flat wrong. From Blau's very beginning, Stalin's orders are to stand and fight. His strategy throughout the war is to attack everywhere at every time, in the belief that somewhere someone will break.
Does the Red Army attack on the road to Stalingrad?
Despite widespread belief otherwise, there's some horrendous fighting, generally caused by Soviet forces in counterattacks, counterstrokes, and even counteroffensives. The most important comes in July along the Germans' northern flank. Stalin commits a tank army as well as other new formations that didn't exist in 1941. There are major tank battles, 500 to 1,000 Soviet tanks.
What do these achieve?
In the first operations they're very poorly led, and so don't achieve that much - except that they bleed the Germans. The same thing happens at the end of July: two new Soviet tank armies appear at the bend of the Don River and launch counterattacks in support of the new Sixty-second Army. This huge tank battle goes on for nearly three weeks, and throws the German plan right out the window.
Why?
The number of Germans in the attacking infantry force is far smaller than in 1941, and many of the infantry units trailing in the panzers' wake are Romanians and Italians, who aren't really interested in dying for the fiihrer. So in 1942, although Russian armies are encircled and their fighting ability destroyed, the troops get out and either go to ground or rejoin the Red Army later.
What happens to the German plan?
As Sixth Army advances, it has to protect its flanks, especially along the Don. So an ever-smaller part of the army is committed forward. After they clear the bend in the Don, they mount an offensive to seize the city. This is probably the most important point in the Battle of Stalingrad. They plan to seize the city by crossing the Don and advancing to the Volga in two pincers headed by panzer corps: get them into Stalingrad from the north and south, and seize it without a fight.
What stops them?
As soon as they launch their attacks, the Soviets begin counterattacks. They're often suicidal and futile, but totally preoccupy the northern panzer corps and prevent it from turning any forces south toward the city. That leaves three German divisions in hedgehogs stretched along a 40-kilometer road. They never get into the factory district in the north end of the city, which becomes the site of the last battles. The southern pincer does what it is supposed to. But the Soviet reaction north of the city thwarts [Sixth Army commander Friedrich] Paulus's plan.
Where does that leave him?
With one infantry corps - the only force he has to reduce the city. It has three infantry divisions in it, and a few other supporting groups - only one-third of Sixth Army. Since he can't get into Stalingrad with his armor, he goes in from the west on foot - block by block, street by street. He does try to lead attacks with armor, until each of those panzer divisions is worn out. By the time he's in the center city and trying to get into the north, German armor is gone and he's in a slug match. By October 1942, his regiments are battalions, divisions are regiments, and Sixth Army is probably a corps.
What is the Soviet strategy?
To feed just enough troops into the city to keep it from falling. They are sacrificial lambs. Divisions that come in with 10,000 men have 500 the next day. Many divisions are fragments. The 13th Guards, always described as an elite force, was destroyed two months before; they're sent in half-trained and one-third equipped. The 284th Rifle Division, popularized in the film Enemy at the Gates - only one of its three regiments has rifles. It's like Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope. It was so brutal that Stavka, the Soviet high command, forbade A. I. Eremenko, Stalingrad front commander, and his commissar, Nikita Khrushchev, from crossing the river into the city: Stavka was afraid they'd develop an affinity with the poor troops dying there and decide to abandon it.
How do the Germans react?
For them it becomes a meat grinder. Every division they send in is weakened, so they have to pull new ones off the flanks. According to Sixth Army's loss figures, most divisions go in rated combat-ready. Within a week, they're rated either as weak or exhausted. The attrition rate is phénoménal· The Luftwaffe's rubbling of the city only exacerbates things. In early November, they run out of divisions. It's a true war of attrition.
How do they maintain the offensive?
They take all the engineer battalions out of Army Group B, which makes the final attack on November 1 1. So they have nobody to defend the Don, except Italians and Romanians. Hungarians are already Ln the line. Army Group B's left flank is an allied army group. The Soviets understand that weakness from their intelligence, and that's where they launch their counteroffensive.
What kind of leader was Stalin?
The myth is that Stalin micromanaged the first year, then at about the time of Stalingrad began deferring to his commanders, and thereafter the commanders fought the war under his general guidance. That's wrong. He was hands-on throughout. In 1941, his stubbornness and insistence on fighting back cost him a lot, but also ensured that Hitler's key assumption - that the Red Army would dissolve once it was smashed - didn't happen. By 1942, after Leningrad and Moscow, Stalin and Marshal Georgi Zhukov think alike. They understand that even if you have to ruthlessly expend manpower, resistance will wear down a numerically weaker opponent. That tactic cost probably 14 million military dead - the price of defeating a more experienced, battleworthy, savvy Wehrmacht.
Copyright Society for Military History Jan 2009
Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War. By Chris Bellamy. London: Pan Macmillan, 2007. ISBN 978-0-333-78022-0. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Select bibliography. Notes and references. Index. Pp. xxxix, 813. £30.00.
Chris Bellamy, in this substantive volume, has unleashed his considerable talents as a Soviet military analyst, skilled journalist, and accomplished historian to recount the often sordid but always complex and captivating history of the Soviet-German War (1941-1945), a war he aptly describes as the "most hideous land-air conflict in history." He has done so to good effect. After decades of postwar neglect caused by a near total absence of archival materials on the war, at least from the Soviet side, a state that permitted mystery and myth to dominate, this sad situation changed for the better when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Thereafter, thanks in part to the Russian Federation, which permitted the doors of its military archives to swing open, albeit slowly, and in part to a new generation of historians who were both willing and able to exploit these formerly forbidden sources, the world can finally ponder the war's immensity with some conviction that it is at long last perceiving its real causes, course, and consequences.
In this respect, Bellamy's fresh single-volume history of the war is a welcome addition to other fine books written on the subject during the last ten years. Doing justice to his mentor, John Erickson, whose landmark trilogy on the Soviet High Command and wartime Red Army paved the way for historians in this field long ago, Bellamy has exploited a host of archival materials and combined them with materials from a multitude of sound books on all aspects of the war to produce an admirable synthesis describing what is known and pondering what is still unknown about the war. Most important, he has done so with the linguistic austerity and artistry of a jeweler's eye and a dry tongue-in-cheek humor that makes the book extremely readable for historian and layman alike.
Bellamy's treatment of the war is conventional; a straightforward chronological narrative, primarily of the military course of the war but with necessary contextual excursions into the war's vital political, diplomatic, economic, and social dimensions. In short, his exposition displays those features that indeed made the Soviet-German War the "absolute war" he ascribes to it in the book's title. Embracing as it does most of the war's many "forgotten" facets, in every respect his narrative is fresh, comprehensive, and "cutting edge." Furthermore, his deft integration of non-military aspects of the war into an austere yet surprisingly complete narrative of the raw military struggle provides the reader with orderly understanding of what otherwise might be undue confusion.
The only fault readers might find with this book is its concentration on the first two years of the war (June 1941-July 1943) at the expense of the war's final two years (August 1943- May 1945). Although this criticism is valid to some extent, the coverage in Bellamy's book is understandable, since analysis of the war based on the clarity offered by new sources has yet to extend fully to this period. Indeed, this very state of archival research offers the author prospects for publication of a new edition several years hence. In the meantime, this book will likely remain one of the most comprehensive, readable, and thoroughly enjoyable books on this important subject.
David M. Glantz
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Copyright Society for Military History Oct 2008
And Their Mothers Wept: The Great Fatherland War in Soviet and Post Soviet Russian Literature. By Frank EUis. London: Heritage House Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-905912-10-1. Bibliography. Notes. Appendixes. Index. Pp. x, 511. £19.99.
One of the most profound tragedies in modern historiography has been the longstanding absence of an accurate and unbiased study of what actually occurred on Germany's Eastern Front, the most extensive, complex, and brutal theater of military operations during World War II. For more than sixty years after war's end, the Soviet Union, arguably the most important participant in the Allies' ground war against Hider's Germany, cloaked its military in a dense veil of secrecy in the name of state security and to protect the reputation of its Red Army and its senior commanders. Fortunately, this tragedy ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. Since this time, in the name of truth and objectivity, its successor, the Russian Federation, has begun releasing the fetters on their military archives, thus permitting historians in the East and the West to describe the war with greater candor and accuracy.
This new wave of historical "glasnost'" [publicity, implying clarity] has produced tens of fresh studies investigating virtually every dimension of the war with unprecedented accuracy. Collectively, in addition to dispelling the war's mysteries and refuting its myths, these archival releases and the books derived from them promise to revolutionize our understanding of the Soviet Union's role in the world war, in general, and the conduct of its self-styled Great Fatherland War, in particular, in a process that is likely to extend far into the future.
Unlike most new histories, which address primarily military themes, Frank Ellis's And Their Mothers Wept, stands at the forefront of a new genre - history with a human face which describes the everyday lives of Red Army soldiers and Soviet citizens as they endured the terrible privations of total war. Like Catherine Merridale's book, Ivan's War, which describes life and death throughout the war from the perspective of common Red Army soldiers, and Antony Beevor's twin studies, Stalingrad and Berlin, which convey the same images, albeit in narrower context, Ellis's new book is social history at its best.
Exploiting the vast Soviet and Russian literature on the war, juxtaposed against a broad range of hitherto unobtainable archival sources, Ellis shapes an elaborate and entirely credible mosaic of warfare from the human perspective. Eschewing a chronological approach, the author studies the human side of the war topically, beginning with an exhaustive survey of Soviet wartime literature, then turning to works written by veterans and soldiers' declassified letters, and finally by analyzing the work of wartime journalists and Russia's finest war novelists. Understanding, however, that context shapes and often warps content, Ellis wisely adds two chapters containing declassified NKVD reports on Red Army discipline and morale, in this case, associated with the battle for Stalingrad. As a fillip to this fine book, Ellis includes appendices with verbatim translations of the Soviet Union's infamous disciplinary Orders Nos. 270 and 227 ("Not a Step Back!) of August 1941 and July 1942, together with materials on the infamous counterintelligence organ SMERSH (Death to Spies) and Stalin's employment of blocking detachments (to prevent unauthorized retreat) and penal units.
This poignant but justifiably raw exposé goes a long way toward lifting the veil from the human dimension of combat in the most brutal theater of what was arguably the most terrible of the Twentieth Century's wars. It is a "must read" for those interested in the Soviet-German War, in particular, and World War II and military history, in general.
David M. Glantz Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Copyright Society for Military History Jul 2008
Death of the Leaping Horseman: 24. Panzer-Division in Stalingrad, 12th August-20th November 1942. By Jason D. Mark. Sydney: Leaping Horseman Books, 2003. ISBN 0-9751076-0-7. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Glossary. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvii, 541. $80.00 Australian (paper).
Island of Fire: The Battle of the Barrikady Gun Factory in Stalingrad, November 1942-February 1943. By Jason D. Mark. Sydney: Leaping Horseman Books, 2006. ISBN 0-9751076-3-1. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Glossary. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 641. $100.00 Australian (hardcover).
An Infantryman in Stalingrad: From 24 September 1942 to 2 February 1943. By Adelbert Holl. Translation by Jason D. Mark and Neil Page. Sydney: Leaping Horseman Books, 2005. ISBN 0-9751076-1-5. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Index. Pp. xi, 249. $50.00 Australian (hardcover).
An Artilleryman in Stalingrad: Memoirs of a Participant in the Battle. By Dr. Wigand Wüster. Translation by Torben Laursen, Jason D. Mark, and Harold Steinmüller. Sydney: Leaping Horseman Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9751076-5-2. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendixes. Index. Pp.vi,255. $50.00 Australian (hardcover).
Over sixty years have passed since the end of World War II, arguably the twentieth century's most terrible of wars. During the ensuing half century, hundreds of historians representing every nation that took part in the struggle have striven mightily to describe accurately the causes, course, and outcome of the war as a whole, as well as its conduct in its many theaters of military operations. Nowhere has this process of identification and analysis been more difficult than when studying the war on Germany's Eastern Front, the Soviet-German War (1941-1945), or, as Soviets and Russians have styled it, their Great Patriotic War. Despite decades of intensive and careful study, the absence of extensive and credible archival materials, particularly on the Soviet side, has prevented comprehensive description and analysis of the war's countless battles and military operations.
In the case of the Soviet Union and, to a far lesser extent, its successor Russian Federation, the sad reality has been that, for political, ideological, and military reasons, if not pride alone, the official historical "establishment" and its constituent historians have frequently ignored or deliberately concealed the most unpleasant or unseemly aspects of their nation's wartime military record. Applicable to numerous battles that have been totally or partially "forgotten," this blanket statement also pertains to vital aspects and details of many "well-known" battles, even those bearing such familiar names as Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Belorussia, and Berlin.
Ignoring these constraints and weaknesses, Soviet and Western historians alike have penned numerous histories of the war, including surveys of the war as a whole and studies of the war's most famous or infamous battles and military operations. Quite naturally, because Stalingrad proved to be a vital turning point in the war, it has been the subject of many of these books. This process began in 1958 when Marshal of the Soviet Union V. I. Chuikov, who commanded the Red Army's 62nd Army during its defense of Stalingrad, published his seminal memoir about the battle. The publication of Chuikov's memoir in English translation in 1964 opened what would ultimately become a flood of books about the famous battle. Thereafter, tens of Western historians, drawing heavily on Chuikov's memoirs, wrote their own exposés of Stalingrad, however, without understanding that, although exquisite in its detail and accurate in the main, since the Soviet general wrote the book without benefit of full archival access, through no fault of his own, the book contained numerous factual errors. And, in the absence of new archival releases, these errors lived on in all subsequent histories of the battle.
Other factors further complicated the historian's task of accurately reconstructing what precisely did occur at Stalingrad. Foremost among these was the spirit of pacifism dominant in German historiographical circles, if not society as a whole, which inhibited full exploitation of the vast amount of German archival materials pertaining to the war. Simply put, emphasis on more seemly social aspects of the conflict relegated military detail to utter obscurity. As a result, in addition to falling victim to the absence of documentation on the Soviet side and often deliberate obfuscation of what took place militarily during wartime, by virtue of "intellectual neglect," readers have also been denied access to necessary detail from the German perspective. Ironically, yet more important still, the general inaccuracy of most existing military histories of the war, in particular, the existence of tens of so-called "forgotten battles," casts serious doubt on all judgments regarding the war, whether political, strategic, economic, or social in nature.
Happily, however, two recent changes promise to remedy this problem, at least in part. First, largely due to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent emergence of its successor, the Russian Federation, political change has loosened the fetters long inhibiting research in the Soviet archives, by doing so permitting tens of thousands of pages containing new and more accurate information to inform the research and analysis of historians studying the Soviet-German War. Second, individually and collectively, the four works cited above represent the beginning of a virtual revolution in the historiography of the war, a revolution that promises to restore long-lost facts about the war and, in so doing, establish a basis of fact sufficient to justify proper and accurate analysis of the war's many dimensions.
The young Australian historian, Jason D. Mark, who authored two of the books cited above and edited and helped translate the other two, has begun this revolution virtually single-handedly by revolutionizing our understanding of the battle for Stalingrad city. Although he begins this process by focusing narrowly on the fight for Stalingrad city amidst the immensity of German Operation Blau, Mark's painstaking analytical techniques and keen attention to detail, while never overlooking necessary broader context, point the way to sounder scholarship on the war as a whole.
The first of these books, Death of the Leaping Horseman, whose tide is derived from the shoulder-patch image of the famed 24th Panzer Division, which fought and perished in Stalingrad, demonstrates how one resurrects lost historical detail by painstaking collection and study of documents combined with hundreds of interviews with those who survived the battle. Exploiting long-lost or ignored German archival records and these written and oral personal recollections, Mark carefully reconstructs 24th Panzer Division's fight in the city literally day-by-day and hour-by-hour during the critical period from September through November 1942. Neglecting no fact as insignificant, the author also takes care to put a human face on those who led and those who did the actual fighting. What results is an astonishing and often poignant unit history which utterly smashes preconceived notions about the terrible but momentous fight in Stalingrad city.
The second of Mark's studies, Island of Fire: The Battle for the Barrikady Gun Factory in Stalingrad, which takes its name from "Liudnikov's Island," a center of resistance in Stalingrad's factory district defended stoically by Colonel I.I. Liudnikov's 138th Rifle Division, is essentially tactical in its nature. Also groundbreaking in its attention to detail, in addition to German sources, this volume also exploits the recently released archival records of Chuikov's 62nd Army and its divisions and brigades that fought in and around the Barrikady Factory. For the first time, therefore, Mark has been able to strip myth and mystery from the struggle for the sake of "ground truth."
The final two books in this foursome, the memoirs, An Infantryman in Stalingrad and An Artilleryman is Stalingrad, simply flesh out this thorough treatment of the subject of Stalingrad. Credible in their own right as memoirs, by virtue of his introduction, extensive explanatory notes and appendixes, maps and documentary illustrations, coupled with carefully selected photographs, Mark shapes a revealing mosaic of the events, whether momentous or mundane, these soldiers faced and endured during their long ordeal fighting in the city.
Some readers may criticize these books in two minor respects: first, because they contain too much detail and, second, because the author identifies German military forces by their German designation, such as 24. Panzer-Division, and numerical designation, such as II./Grenadier-Regiment 131. I reject both criticisms as unwarranted. First, as each and every researcher should inherently understand, accurate detail is the only valid basis for sound judgments in all other matters, however lofty they may be. Lack of this detail renders all such judgments unfounded and of dubious validity. Second, reflecting his accuracy in other respects, Mark's use of German force designations remains true to his sources, and the similarity of the German language to English precludes misunderstanding.
Together, these two scholarly studies and two personal memoirs form a fresh, balanced, accurate, and credible view of a battle whose nature, ferocity, and impact have eluded past historians. In addition to relegating previous histories of the battle in Stalingrad city to the "dustbin of history," Mark has also established new standards regarding how to go about research on the war's many other battles and operations and the war as a whole. These books are "must-buys" by anyone interested in the military history of the Soviet-German War.
A retired U.S. Army colonel, David M. Glantz is chief editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies and one of the first U.S. members of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Natural Sciences. He has written more than eighty books on the Soviet (Red) Army and the Soviet-German War, 1941-1945.
Copyright Society for Military History Oct 2008
And Their Mothers Wept: The Great Fatherland War in Soviet and Post Soviet Russian Literature. By Frank EUis. London: Heritage House Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-905912-10-1. Bibliography. Notes. Appendixes. Index. Pp. x, 511. £19.99.
One of the most profound tragedies in modern historiography has been the longstanding absence of an accurate and unbiased study of what actually occurred on Germany's Eastern Front, the most extensive, complex, and brutal theater of military operations during World War II. For more than sixty years after war's end, the Soviet Union, arguably the most important participant in the Allies' ground war against Hider's Germany, cloaked its military in a dense veil of secrecy in the name of state security and to protect the reputation of its Red Army and its senior commanders. Fortunately, this tragedy ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. Since this time, in the name of truth and objectivity, its successor, the Russian Federation, has begun releasing the fetters on their military archives, thus permitting historians in the East and the West to describe the war with greater candor and accuracy.
This new wave of historical "glasnost'" [publicity, implying clarity] has produced tens of fresh studies investigating virtually every dimension of the war with unprecedented accuracy. Collectively, in addition to dispelling the war's mysteries and refuting its myths, these archival releases and the books derived from them promise to revolutionize our understanding of the Soviet Union's role in the world war, in general, and the conduct of its self-styled Great Fatherland War, in particular, in a process that is likely to extend far into the future.
Unlike most new histories, which address primarily military themes, Frank Ellis's And Their Mothers Wept, stands at the forefront of a new genre - history with a human face which describes the everyday lives of Red Army soldiers and Soviet citizens as they endured the terrible privations of total war. Like Catherine Merridale's book, Ivan's War, which describes life and death throughout the war from the perspective of common Red Army soldiers, and Antony Beevor's twin studies, Stalingrad and Berlin, which convey the same images, albeit in narrower context, Ellis's new book is social history at its best.
Exploiting the vast Soviet and Russian literature on the war, juxtaposed against a broad range of hitherto unobtainable archival sources, Ellis shapes an elaborate and entirely credible mosaic of warfare from the human perspective. Eschewing a chronological approach, the author studies the human side of the war topically, beginning with an exhaustive survey of Soviet wartime literature, then turning to works written by veterans and soldiers' declassified letters, and finally by analyzing the work of wartime journalists and Russia's finest war novelists. Understanding, however, that context shapes and often warps content, Ellis wisely adds two chapters containing declassified NKVD reports on Red Army discipline and morale, in this case, associated with the battle for Stalingrad. As a fillip to this fine book, Ellis includes appendices with verbatim translations of the Soviet Union's infamous disciplinary Orders Nos. 270 and 227 ("Not a Step Back!) of August 1941 and July 1942, together with materials on the infamous counterintelligence organ SMERSH (Death to Spies) and Stalin's employment of blocking detachments (to prevent unauthorized retreat) and penal units.
This poignant but justifiably raw exposé goes a long way toward lifting the veil from the human dimension of combat in the most brutal theater of what was arguably the most terrible of the Twentieth Century's wars. It is a "must read" for those interested in the Soviet-German War, in particular, and World War II and military history, in general.
David M. Glantz Carlisle, Pennsylvania