Product Description

It was on the Eastern Front that Germany was bled white, and it was here that two-thirds of her armed forces stood and fought. This is the story of how a country seemingly brought to its knees by one of the finest armies the world has seen, survived and rebuilt itself to destroy that army.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #549086 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Customer Reviews

Generally good
This is good very readable history and nothing can take that away from it, I enjoyed it. I think the problem comes from what it was sold as. Both the jacket and the people who recommended it to me, suggest it is a completely new take on things - the back cover says it "presents a fundamentally new interpretation of events". I think from that perspective I was left disappointed. I have read widely on this subject so my existing personal interpretation is not based on any one or two previous books but I felt in terms of overall impression this added nothing new for me. I felt in an effort to redress the balance of German/Russian perspective it moved very quickly over the summers of 1941 and 1942 and overall is quite light weight. That said it is readable and balanced, but if you are already well read on this subject I don't feel it offers a dramatically new view on events.

Balanced military history of the Soviet-German conflict
Most people interested in this era tend to read books told from a German viewpoint with all its' attendant distortions (it's all Hitler's fault we lost, I didn't commit warcrimes etc). This book uses sources from both sides but gives a military hisotry from the Soviet view. This was the most terrrible conflict in history in terms of casualties. The prose is at times formulaic. If you want to know more than just the pure military history eg what did the average Soviet citizen fight for, then you probably need to read Richard Overy's "Russia's War". For a more extensive military and political history read Ericksons "Stalin's War With Germany".

Excellent coverage of 1941-45 operational history
The sheer scale of the conflict in eastern Europe and Russia comes across in this book. There just isn't enough space to write about just one battle and it's participants, the war was so huge in the east. Thousands of people, masses of military equipment move great distances in the space of a sentence and still this book has to be economic with the language used to describe events. Descriptions are good and the structuring of the work is fine. This is no Saving Private Ryan, but it does justice to the efforts of the Russian people to defeat Hitler. Of no small importance is the fact that this book writes from the Soviet point of view. The front is the western front and the enemy a defiler of the motherland. The credit the authors give to Soviet commanders skill in defeating the German army and it's allies is long overdue considering the pro-German bias of previous accounts.