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162 of 181 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read for WWII buffs., February 21, 2000
This incredible book belongs on the shelf of any student of World War II. It is easy to read, concise, and scholarly. If you don't know much about the Soviet-German conflict, this is an ideal place to start. If you have read widely on the subject, be sure to add this to your collection. It is excellent for both those looking for a quick read or for those who want a starting point for further research. The notes at the end of the book list an impressive number of sources. So many Americans, even those who are avid readers of military history, are very uninformed about the Russian Front. Anti-Soviet attitudes and the preponderance of books written from the German point of view have combined to present an often false and distorted version of history. In the minds of many, the Red Army was completely dependent on American military aid and survived only because of its "inexhaustable" manpower. The Soviets could only win by throwing more men into battle than the Germans had bullets to shoot them with, and were just barely holding their own prior to D-Day. According to popular imagination, the Russian winter is what really stopped the Nazis. As bad as these misperceptions are, even worse are the schools of thought which suggest that the Soviet Union was as guilty as Germany for the start of the war or that Hitler's invasion was a defensive move against an impending Soviet attack on Germany. Col. Glantz has proven himself to be the preeminent Western author on the Soviet military in general and its pivotal role in the Second World War in particular. Against all the myths, he presents the facts. Tenacious Soviet resistance, combined with overextended German supply lines, halted the Blitzkrieg at Moscow and Leningrad. Long before D-Day, the Red Army had made Hitler's defeat inevitable by gutting the Wehrmacht in the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. During the same time as the Normandy fighting, the Soviets' "Bagration" offensive inflicted 500,000 casualties on the Axis and drove the last of the invaders from their territory. From 1941 until mid-1943, the Red Army confronted 80-90% of Germany's total armed forces. At no time in the whole war did it ever face less than 60%, not even during the heaviest fighting on the Western Front (Normandy, Arnhem, or the "Battle of the Bulge"). Germany's Axis partners on the Russian Front included not only the Italians but the whole armed forces of Romania, Hungary, and Finland, as well as contingents of pro-fascist volunteers from all over Europe. Proper credit is finally given to the Soviet military leadership, as well. Red Army commanders often displayed outstanding generalship after the harsh lessons of '41 and '42, mastering the art of strategic deception and mechanized warfare on a level matching, even exceeding, that of their best German or Allied counterparts. Names like Zhukov, Vasilievsky, Rokossovsky, Konev, and Vatutin deserve a place alongside Rommel, Guderian, von Manstein, and Patton. Glantz does not claim that the Soviet Union defeated Germany on its own. American Lend-Lease supplies and the Allied bombing campaign were important, though not decisively so, to the Soviet war effort and are given their just due here. However, 80% of Germany's combat losses were sustained on the Russian front, inflicted by Soviet forces equipped almost entirely with Soviet-made weapons. Had Germany honored the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact, or had the Red Army been defeated, the Anglo-American forces would have faced an enemy that was 4 times, that is 400%, stronger than it was historically. How many more Americans would have died under these circumstances? How many atomic bombs would need to be dropped on Hitler's Europe in order bring about victory. As we honor our own veterans with movies and memorials, let us not forget the 11 million Soviet soldiers and the at least 15 million Soviet civilians that died in World War II.
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57 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great primer on the military history of the Eastern Front, June 13, 2001
David M. Glantz's "When Titans Clashed" is a comprehensive but not overlong operational history covering the entire Russo-German conflict from 1941-45, plus an interesting chapter on the Soviet operations in Manchuria against the Japanese Army. It's exhaustive, it's readable, it's filled with maps, it does include all the recent archival material worth being included, it's balanced even taking in account the focus on the Russian point of view. What could you ask for more? Well, a couple of things, but more of this later. "When Titans Clashed" is a book that has already been dissected in every possible way, and is, if not a clear-cut best seller, definitely a popular. So I'll just underline the three main reasons why it a mandatory text for anyone even remotely interested in the subject, the first being that colonel Glantz does his own job, and not someone else's. In other words, he's a military expert, and this is an operational, and not political, social or human dissection of the conflict. Richard Overy's "Russia's War" aimed at being all that, and failed. Sticking to his guns, Glantz gives to this (not too big) book a greater level of detail,. Of course, we still need a good political, human and social history of the war - while Robert Thurston's "The People's War : Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union" is a fine social study of wartime Russia, it may be a bit too difficult for the casual reader. But Glantz's focus was on military operation, and this book is just that - a military history. Second. Glantz comes from old guard: i.e., he works mainly on primary/archival sources, and he knows how to separate gold from garbage. WWII history is a tricky business, and Eastern History (given the political sensitivity of the campaign's outcome) is even more so. Again, a comparison with Overy (who ended up giving credit to such debatable authors as Sokolov and gave readers sensation they could have spent much better your money on the secondary resources he continuously cited) may be useful. Glantz attitude towards the material is level headed and inspired by old fashioned positivism (there's a very useful appendices dealing with comparison of forces and losses). And he never assumes, giving even more authority to the basic thesis of this book - it was Russia who won the war, and not Germany that lost it, and Russia won because it learned how to outfight, outmanoeuvre and outsmart the Nazi army, in a long and (extremely!) bloody process, ending in 1945 with the Red Army being a even better military machine than the Wehrmacht was in 1941. Glantz gives you a lot of food for thought to support his view, especially on the "numbers" issue. More controversially but not polemically, colonel Glantz maintains also that while the Red Army broke Hitler's back, what the Allied did in the West was important - but basically more aimed at containing Russia's success rather than at speeding up Nazism's demise. The third reason why you should buy "When Titans Clashed" is that it may be the first divulgative book on the Great Patriotic War (of course, I don't include Erickson's "Roads" in the "divulgative" department) giving the second part of the war - the one after the Red Army began to win - its due. On this respect, the post-Kursk operational history is given a extensive treatment, and some of the bits - like those on the Vistula-Oder operation - are absolutely compelling. Also, much coverage is given to the massive Bagration/Ukraine twin offensives, and, last but not least, we've finally a clear overview of the Battle For Berlin, a topic that often becomes the focus for some horrendous inaccuracies. Not that "classics" like Moscow, Stalingrad or Kursk aren't properly treated - it's just that they're finally taken into the big picture. All summed up, this approach gives to "When Tytans Clashed" an unprecedented freshness. However I've two complaints, and the first it's in the editing department: its way better than that of Glantz's books of the early 90's, but it could have been improved; there are still too many repetitions (I've seen the word "aftermath" at least 10.000 times) and some confusing bit. For instance, you get three different tables detailing forces and strength ratios involved in Bagration - and you end up not knowing which of these was final. I'm being picky here, but this book deserved a better post-production job. My second gripe is that, for being so objective towards the main topic, when it comes to his pet subjects Glantz seems to loose focus and control. For instance - we do know now that Operation Mars was basically a failure but, in the context of the late 1942 strategic situation, was this failure so substantial as he maintains? After all, tying down massive German reserves was pivotal on the German debacle at Stalingrad: Zhukov may have botched operationally here, but as the overall strategic situation goes, it's possible that "Mars" outcome didn't change much. I repeat here what I wrote elsewhere: "When Titans Clashed" doesn't supersede Erickson's "Road To Stalingrad" and "Road To Berlin" - it complete these two masterpieces, and provides finally a operational history of the Russian Front that his both up-to-date and accessible. Neither it fills the long-empty slot for an up-to-date and accessible - and balanced - operational history on the German side (the last feasible being Earl Ziemke trilogy back in the early 70's). But it's a great book, and you'll do yourself a big favour buying it.
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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
very good book that uses previously secret soviet data, February 11, 2000
Every new unbiased book about the Eastern Front should be welcome, as quite a few western historians tend to discount its significance and/or relate from the german point of view. A good example is much over-praised, in my opinion, Harper Military Encyclopedia, that assigned less than 20% of its WWII in Europe pages to the soviet-german front (where, ironically, Nazis lost about 80% of its troops). David Glanz had the luck of being able to use recently-opened soviet archives, and he did a pretty good job combining soviet and german materials. The book is well-balanced and covers every major operation from 1939 to 1945. I also liked how the book tracked the development of soviet military art and improvement of the Red Army with the course of the war. Among shortcomings I would name a lack of statistics re the german side - detailed losses, war production and so on. Also, numbers of german combat strength in 1943-44 seemed somewhat underestimated (compared to other sources I've seen).
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