Customer Reviews

Stalingrad 1942 (Campaign)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Stalingrad campaign, stretching over six months and covering operations by multiple army-size formations, is a very difficult topic to fit into Osprey's tight campaign size format. Given that Osprey has covered the first few days of the 1944 D-Day landings in four volumes (!), it would have made more sense to cover this huge operation in two volumes, with one covering the German offensive and the other the Soviet counter-offensive. Be that as it may, for an author to cram so much into such a tight space he must exercise great discipline in what he selects to put in. It would also be nice if the material selected includes some fresh information or perspectives. Alas, Peter Antill's Stalingrad 1942 provides neither. The author pretty much admits up front that he is only interested in summarizing/synthesizing existing secondary sources, so if you have other books on the Eastern Front this one won't add much but a couple of nice color plates.

The volume begins with a 6-page introduction that traces the origins of the campaign, but ends up wasting too much space on Barbarossa which cuts into the space to cover events occurring just before the Stalingrad campaign, such as the Soviet attack at Izyum and the German Operation Fredericus. By the time the author gets to these vital precursors, he is on cruise mode. The section on opposing commanders listing 9 German and 6 Soviet leaders was adequate, but I found it annoying that the author suggests that war crimes charges against men like von Manstein and others were trumped-up. They weren't - just read the Nuremberg transcripts. The section on opposing plans is fair enough on the German side, but clearly does not incorporate David Glantz's best research-to-date on Soviet plans. The section on opposing forces discusses some new German equipment and re-organizations for the campaign, as well as the inclusion of more Axis allies, but overall this section doesn't say much that is insightful. The orders of battle provided are very confusing, because no dates are provided. The OB is clearly not set at 28 June 1942 when Operation Blau began, since it has units that were not in 6th Army at that time. One unit listed under 6th Army, 14th Panzer Division, actually served in 6th Army, 1st Panzer and 4th Panzer Armies during the course of the campaign - so the OB is confusing.

Stalingrad 1942 has five 2-D maps (Eastern Front, May 1942; Operation Blau, June-November 1942; Operation Uranus, 19 November - 12 December 1942; Operation Winter Storm; Operation Little Saturn, 16 December 1942 - 1 January 1943) and three
3-D BEV maps (German assault on Stalingrad 14-26 September 1942, 27 September - 7 October 1942 and 14-29 October 1942). The BEV maps, with gridlines 3 kilometers apart, are too zoomed-out to be useful and Stalingrad itself appears as just a grayish smear. One of the 2-D maps on page 35 shows von Manstein leading the 11th Army across the Kerch Strait in July 1942; actually von Manstein was in vacation in Romania after the fall of Sevastopol (clearly the author did not read his memoirs), the 11th Army was sent to the Volkhov Front and the Kerch Straits were crossed on 1 September in conjunction with the 17th Army and a single division left there from von Manstein's old command. The three battle scenes by Peter Dennis (Foothills of the Caucasus, 13 August 1942; Assault on the Red October Steel Plant, 23 October 1942; Soviet troops approach Gumrak airfield, 23 January 1943), are probably the best part of this volume.

Having wasted valuable space covering Barbarossa in the introduction, the author then proceeds to hop over the first two months of Operation Blau in a couple of pages, providing much less detail on the Battle for Voronezh, the Soviet retreat and the vital German river-crossing successes that led to a quick advance on Stalingrad. The author gets in stride by the middle of the volume, most of which is a rather tedious exposition of division-level attacks around Stalingrad from August 1942 until the end in February 1943. There is no drama, no sense of crisis in this lifeless retelling. The author starts covering a bit on the Caucasus campaign - including a battle scene - then pretty much drops it cold to focus on the city fighting in Stalingrad.

The ridiculously short bibliography for such a well-covered subject has only 19 references, including three websites and two articles from the regurgitative World War II magazine. Amazingly, solid works such as John Erickson's The Road to Stalingrad, Joel Hayward's Stopped at Stalingrad, von Bock's memoirs and Von Manstein's own Lost Victories are not listed, leading the reader to question the amount of effort that went into this volume. In several places, the author also makes mistakes about weaponry: on page 49 the photo caption says this is a "German PAK 36 3.7 cm anti-tank gun" but it is clearly a box trail IG 18 7.5 cm infantry gun.

The aftermath section is too high-level, trying to explain why the Germans lost the war in Russia, instead of merely trying to explain why they lost this particular campaign. Although German losses are mentioned, the catastrophic nature of this defeat is not fully explained -the Germans lost a lot more than merely an army, but a huge chunk of their offensive capability. Soviet losses are not mentioned at all, despite the availability of this information. Overall, if all you want is a Cliffs Notes type summary of Stalingrad, then this is your book.

In the Osprey series, there are a number of campaigns that are written in multiple volumes. With what the author tried to cover in this single volume - the Kharkov counter offensive, Operation Blue including the run by AGA for the oil fields in the Caucasus, Voronezh, the battle at the Don bend, the seize of Stalingrad, Operation Uranus, Winter Storm, Ring and Little Saturn- there should have been a second volume.
The author has tried to cram too much into these 90 pages and as such has diluted every aspect of this book. In the six page introduction, the author spends most of his time reliving Operation Barbarossa. To do justice to the main theme, the seige, the intro should be three pages and the coverage of Barbarossa two or three paragraphs with the remainder covering Manstein's assault on the Crimea and the German counteroffensive in the Kharkov area as background info. The author decides to put these two events in the section "Opening Moves" which is not the best choice. What should have been covered in Opening Moves is Operation Wilhelm and Fredercus II which started June 10th. These were the important offensive operations by 6th Army and 1st PzA to encircle the Southwestern Front between the Northern Donets and Oskol Rivers to relieve any flank attacks when Operation Blue started. Though inflicting heavy casualties on the Soviets in these two operations, the Soviets were able to withdraw just in time to avoid total destruction. This is the beginning of the Soviets changing their "stand and fight" policy to one of withdrawal when its warranted. These two operations were never mentioned in the book and is a major fault.
Moving on, the author spends 2 pages on a Chronology that covers 1939 to 1967. Its another example of poor utilization of space. A one page list would have been ample. Opposing Commanders was good but Opposing Forces and especially Opposing Plans, while providing some useful information, are unfocused and lack clarity of purpose with regards to the Stalingrad campaign.

Because of the inefficient use of space in the early chapters as well as covering post Stalingrad events and spending five pages on Aftermath, the author leaves himself with insufficient space for the actual assault with regards to the fight for a bridgehead on the Don near Kalach and Stalingard. Greater details could have been provided, giving the reader a better understanding of the scale and brutality of the battle. The author includes Operation Uranus, Winter Storm and Ring but compounds the space problem by adding Operation Little Saturn which comsumes another two pages. The author also brings up List's drive to the oil fields in the south but leaves it hanging for want of space.
Though there are five 2-D maps, I would like to comment on the three 3-D maps which all depict the Stalingrad condition at different times - Sept 26th, Oct 7th and Oct 29th. These maps had the potential to be a major aid in following the text but instead were very disappointing. First, the scale was way off, showing too much unnecessary territory and shrinking Stalingrad to an inconsequentiality. It made it very difficult to read troop movements, the sections of the city and to follow the narrative. The maps were further degraded by showing important parts of the city in the crease where you can't see anything. If the map displayed just the city over those two pages and made allowance for the crease, these maps could have been great. On the last note on the maps. In the 2-D maps, the German symbols were blue and the Soviets were red but in the 3-D maps the colors were reversed.

The author was given three stars for not doing his homework, for using his space unwisely, for emphasizing Barbarossa too much and lacking clarity in battle specifics (during early June, at Voronezh and at the Don Bend). I give Osprey Publishing one star for trying to cover this pivotal battle in one volume.

STALINGRAD, 1942
PETER ANTILL
OSPREY PUBLISHING, 2007
QUALITY SOFTCOVER, 96 PAGES, $18.95, ILLUSTRATIONS, PHOTOGRAPHS, MAPS, ORDER OF BATTLE


The capture of Stalingrad was important to Hitler for several reasons. It was a major industrial city on the banks of the Volga River (a vital transport route between the Caspian Sea and northern Russia) and its capture would secure the left flank of the advancing German armies as they moved into the Caucasus. Finally, the fact that the city bore the name of Hitler's nemesis, Joseph Stalin, would make the city's capture an ideological and propaganda coup. Stalin realized this and ordered anyone that was strong enough to hold a rifle be sent out to war. He was under tremendous constraints of time and resources. Many believed that the siege of Leningrad lasted too long due to his diversion of forces from Leningrad to Stalingrad. During the Russian Civil War, he played a prominent role in the defense of Tsaritsyn (as Stalingrad was then known), from the White forces. Also, the Red Army, at this stage of the war, was less capable of highly mobile operations than the German Army. The prospect of combat inside a large urban area, which would be dominated by short-range small arms fire and artillery rather than armored and mechanized tactics, minimized the Red Army's disadvantages against the Germans. Various scholars have estimated the Axis suffered 850,000 casualties of all types (wounded, killed, captured, etc.) among all branches of the German Armed Forces and its allies, many of which were POWs who died in Soviet captivity between 1943 and 1955. It is estimated that 400,000 Germans, 200,000 Rumanians, 130,000 Italians, and 120,000 Hungarians. Of all the German POWs taken at Stalingrad, only 5,000 returned to Germany in 1955. All of the rest of the POWs died in Soviet captivity. The Germans were also harsh on Russian POWs. In addition, as many as 50,000 ex-Soviet POWs who had become Hiwis or auxilaries to the Germans; were either killed or captured. According to archival figures, the Red Army suffered a total of 1,129,619 casualties: 478,741 men killed and captured while 650,878 sustained wounds. These numbers, however, include a wide scope of operations. Also, more than 40,000 civilians died in Stalingrad and its suburbs during a single week of aerial bombing as the German Fourth Panzer and Sixth Armies approached the city; the total number of civilians killed in the regions outside the city is unknown. In all, the battle resulted in an estimated total of 1.7 million to 2 million Axis and Soviet casualties. One of the most monumental and widely discussed battles in the history of World War II, Stalingrad was Hitler's first major defeat on the Eastern Front, and acted as a catalyst for his eventual downfall. The illustrations and maps that are featured in this book help to unravel the detail of units directions, priorities, deployments, and the tactical failures that led to the day-by-day war of attrition that lasted nearly for five months. While STALINGRAD, 1942 is a good overview of the battle, it is not a detailed one. While there are some mistakes in this book as noted by the previous reviewers, this is still a good primer in regard to this all too imporant battle of World War II.


Lt. Colonel Robert A. Lynn, Florida Guard
Orlando, Florida

and just repeats 1970's era information. 2006 saw the release of Jason Mark's "Island of Fire" which filled in an important hole in previous history books...the German's final November offensives just prior to the November 19 encirclement, and 2007 gave us "Stalingrad" by Jones which is in my opinion the most important book to appear on this subject in several generations (it corrects 'facts' & Cold War Soviet pushed mythology of the battle & tells us what was really happening in the Soviet minds & trenches during the battle). This book was obsolete before it even hit the shelves. Really sad as it was a great opportunity to give more exposure to the battle.

This book is a good general history of the Stalingrad campaign. Whilst more time could have been spent on the actual battle in the city itself the book still provides a good overview of the whole campaign that lead to the encirclement and destruction of the 6th Army.

Given it is only 64 pages I think it is a good buy for the money.