Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic, November 16, 2003
This is as good as Joel Hayward ''Stopped at Stalingrad''. Beevor has assembled rich and useful material, assembled it to form solid arguments, and written it in a lively style. It's great.
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17 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Tasteless pro-German account of the battle, May 30, 2007
Typical Beevor. This book reads more like an excuse to recount tales of Soviet brutality than a serious attempt at a history of the most important battle of the 20th Century and the bloodiest battle ever fought.
Beevor's style and approach to history are truly dishonest. He deflects potential criticism by setting the record straight early in the book: Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 with the intention of killing or enslaving the entire population. He then proceeds to tell the story of Stalingrad mostly in terms of Soviet atrocities and German suffering and heroism -- juicy stuff that gets you published and on the Best Seller list nowadays, but not exactly a sound historical approach. I found myself constantly flipping back to the beginning of the book to make certain that Beevor fully understood what the Soviet-German war was really about. All that is bad enough in itself, but Beevor's accounts of Soviet atrocities are mostly anecdotal in nature, poorly referenced and questionably researched, all of which casts serious doubt as to their truth and accuracy. The accounts of Soviet mistreatment of German prisoners are grossly misleading. The truth is that all of the railroads running into and out of Stalingrad had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the battle. The Soviet Union was itself slowly starving, and generally lacked the means to care for 100,000 prisoners at Stalingrad in the middle of winter, when most of them were already close to death as a result of the 3-month seige. Nor does Beevor emphasize the fact that over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity.
Beevor also fails to impress upon the reader the real story of the battle: tremendous self-sacrifice on the part of the Soviet soldiers and civilians and brilliant strategy on the part of Soviet generals Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Koniev. The Soviet counter-offensive in November, 1941 was one of the most stunning reversals of fortune in the history of war but very little credit is given to the Soviets for pulling it off. The impression that one gets from the book is that the Germans lost the battle because of Hitler's meddling and the Soviets did nothing to win it.
In summary, Beevor's book lacks balance, does little in the way of introducing new evidence or insight into the battle, and is poorly documented. No one doubts that the Stalin regime did some terrible things, or that the German soldiers suffered, but to tell the story of the Battle of Stalingrad primarily in those terms is to fail to tell the real story. The best English-language books on the subject are still John Erickson's The Road to Stalingrad and William Craig's Enemy at the Gates.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tragic epic, January 4, 2007
A good account of the battle of Stalingrad. The first hundred or so pages are a very good summary of the war on the Eastern Front. The men who suffered in the trenches are the real heroes of the story. Toward the end the book became overly tactical. For instance I still do not understand what happened to cause the Germans to be closed into a pocket,thus bringing about the collapse of the Axis forces around Stalingrad. But then, why and how did the German counter-attack fail? Those troops caught in "Fortress Stalingrad" (as the Nazi regime propaganda called it) were not adequately supplied by the Luftwaffe and when ran out of ammo, food and supplies had to surrender. Only less than 10% returned home after the end of the war. When you read stories like this and imagine the fate of any brave and unfortunate soldier, who grows up in Nazi Germany, does his duty for his country and volunteers to go to war only to be consumed in the cauldron and the "black hole" of war, you can't help but stare in awe and fear at the collective and cosmic pattern woven by the political, social and historical forces at play. The individual's will and resolve, desires, hopes and aspirations are made null and dissolved into this abyss. Fate is not the right word. But how shall we describe the HUGE and beyond any human understanding horizon into which millions of men walked to their death?
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