Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Modern War Studies) (Hardcover)

by David M. Glantz (Author)
Key Phrases: tank division, ground combat forces, mechanized division, Red Army, Soviet Union, General Staff (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Germany's surprise attack on June 22, 1941, shocked a Soviet Union woefully unprepared to defend itself. The day before the attack, the Red Army still comprised the world's largest fighting force. But by the end of the year, four and a half million of its soldiers lay dead. This new study, based on formerly classified Soviet archival material and neglected German sources, reveals the truth behind this national catastrophe.

Drawing on evidence never before seen in the West, including combat records of early engagements, David Glantz claims that in 1941 the Red Army was poorly trained, inadequately equipped, ineptly organized, and consequently incapable of engaging in large-scale military campaigns--and both Hitler and Stalin knew it. He provides a complete and convincing study of why the Soviets almost lost the war that summer, dispelling many of the myths about the Red Army that have persisted since the war and soundly refuting Viktor Suvorov's controversial thesis that Stalin was planning a preemptive strike against Germany.

Stumbling Colossus describes the Red Army's command leadership, mobilization and war planning, intelligence activities, and active and reserve combat formations. It includes the first complete order of battle of Soviet forces on the eve of the German attack, documents the strength of Soviet armored forces during the war's initial period, and reproduces for the first time available texts of Soviet war plans. It also provides biographical sketches of Soviet officers and tells how Stalin's purges of the late 1930s left the Red Army leadership almost decimated.

At a time when the war in eastern Europe is being blamed on a fallen regime, Glantz's book sets the record straight on the Soviet Union's readiness, as well as its willingness, to fight. Boasting an extensive bibliography of Soviet and German sources, Stumbling Colossus is a convincing study that overshadows recent revisionist history and one that no student of World War II can ignore.

This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.

About the Author
David M. Glantz is founder and former director of the U.S. Army's Foreign Military Studies Office. Among his many books are The Battle of Kursk and When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (both with Jonathan M. House) and Zhukov's Greatest Defeat: The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0700608796
• ISBN-13: 978-0700608799
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #342,662 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sideways Glantz at Suvorov, May 14, 2003

By	Db Katz (Johannesburg, Gauteng South Africa) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Suvorov book "Icebreaker" elicited a response in the form a book titled "Stumbling Colossus" by non other than David Glantz a prolific heavy weight author who specialises on the Eastern Front. Glantz's book claims to obliterate the Suvorov myth by proving that the Red Army in 1941 was beyond putting up a reasonable defence let alone launching a surprise attack. Unlike Suvorov he bases his work on recently declassified Soviet documents and reams of statistical data.

One would have expected Glantz to tackle Suvorov head on and take apart his book paragraph by paragraph. To the frustration of many a reader this does not happen and it appears that he talks past Suvorov for most of the time. Nevertheless he succeeds in proving to the reader that the Soviet War machine was in no fit state to even consider any pre-emptative strike and therefore due to this one fact the whole of Suvarov can therefore be consigned to the rubbish bin. It is as if a child asks the question "What would happen if the moon fell down?" and the father answers that this can never happen.

If Suvorov book raises one question that begs a direct answer from Glantz, it is to why the Red Army, assuming that it had adopted a defensive posture with over a year to prepare this strategy, had not done a better job of it. In fact it seems that the Red Army performance at the opening of Barbarossa bordered on nothing less than gross negligence. The onus was on Glantz to illuminate on the strategy that the Red Army was trying to achieve, rather than suggest that they had no strategy at all. The Suvorov thesis that an army in an offensive mode deployed offensively can offer up nothing but a poor defence if surprised, seems attractive in a vacuum created by a lack of other evidence

Glantz's book is by no means an easy reader. His books are about as much fun as reading a technical manual. His writing style reveals very little of the author or his viewpoints, but instead stick to a rigid presentation of the facts as revealed in copious amounts of Russian documents he has examined. However his contribution to the study of the Eastern front is immense and writing style aside he has made a massive contribution to our understanding of this epic struggle. This is not a book for the layman as it takes a dedicated few, hungry for the knowledge to wade through copious amounts of dry statistics

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stumbling Colossus: Russia Wins Despite Stalin, June 8, 2002

By	Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In STUMBLING COLOSSUS, David Glantz captures a moment in time critical in understanding how the world wound up the way it did. From the time that Stalin became undisputed leader of the Soviet Union as First Secretary, his singular goal was the exportation of communism as the world's sole political system. During the late 1920's through the late 1930's Stalin built up a huge war machine that, as primitively equipped as it was, still had to be respected as the brute power he had intended it to be. With the emergence of Nazism, Hitler quickly and illegally rebuilt the German Army to the extent that year by year, Stalin came to be increasingly intimidated by it. As Glantz points out, Hitler was not the only cause for concern to Stalin. The Japanese were making threatening noises in Manchuria, and Stalin had somehow to factor in his paranoia this Japanese expansion into Soviet territory. To complicate matters from Stalin's perspective was his own paranoia. To put matters bluntly, Stalin did not trust his own military. Comrade First Secretary Stalin tended to see more snakes in his own garden than in Hitler's. He determined to remove any potential threat to his own iron grip on power. Glantz writes that "After the expulsion from the Soviet leadership of Commissar of War, L. D. Trotsky, who had been the principal defender of the 'military experts,' and the rise to power of I. V. Stalin, the cleansing of the army began."
This 'cleansing' began in 1937 and continued until the very day that German divisions rolled into Russia. The bag of officers purged was appallingly high. Any officer over the rank of colonel in the Red Army had a one in three chance of facing a firing squad or a tenure in one of Stalin's gulags. It did not take a rocket scientist for the survivors to figure out that their best chance to avoid the fate of their predecessors was to become spineless 'yes-men' who could advance in rank only by cringing before Stalin's bizarre refusal to face reality: that Hitler truly planned to take the Soviet Union as his own and to exterminate the greater mass of the Russian people.
It is here, on the point of deciding the culpability for Russia's poor intitial performance of the war, that scholars are divided. There are the mainstream historians who place the disgraceful state of readiness of the Red Army squarely on Stalin's unwillingness to antagonize the Wehrmacht before he had cleaned up his own messy situation both in Manchuria and in his recognizing that his military was not able to fend off,let alone launch a pre-emptive strike in 1941 or 1942. Reviewer Michael Petukhov insists that Glantz's book is less reliable than the ones written by fellow countryman Viktor Suvorov, whom Petukhov supports by writing in his own recent review that "Stalin was actively preparing the offensive against Nazi Germany sometime in July of 1941." I am not sure what criticism Petukhov intends toward Glantz's thesis that Stalin and Stalin alone was responsible for the near defeat of the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942. If Petukhov insists that Stalin's generals ought not to have worried due to the massive size of the Red Army, then perhaps the inner lesson of Glantz's book suddenly takes on a crystal clarity. When any army corps of generals has to look over its shoulders towards a leader who rewards creative thinking and constructive dissent with disgrace and death, then the stumbling of their military colossus takes on a reverberating of aftershocks that lingers even until today.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Reference on the Red Army, March 11, 2001

By	R. A Forczyk (Laurel, MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is an essential reference on the state of the Red Army on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. Although a bit dry in tone, there is a wealth of information in these pages. Excellent maps and statistical data on the Soviet Army Order of Battle in 1941. The author uses recent Russian archival material to provide an unprecedented look into the Red Army just prior to Barbarossa. His assessment is that the Red Army was caught in the throes of rapid expansion, with most units at 60-70% strength. The purges further diluted the pool of available military leadership. Units on the front-line were short of ammo, fuel and key equipment. Finally, the Red Army staff misjudged the German main effort - which they expected in the southwest along the Kiev axis - and thus further weakened the defenses of Leningrad and Moscow. In the long run, the main Soviet success was their ability - albeit initially slow - to tap the full human resources of the USSR and to field replacements to fill the huge losses of 1941. However once again, the Russian fascination with quantity rather than quality cost them dearly. Stalin would have done better with 80-90 well-trained, well-equipped divisions than 170+ poorly-trained, poorly-equipped divisions.