The Road to Berlin: Stalin`s War with Germany, Volume Two Paperback – June 10, 1999

This is a great book, but not one for the fainthearted. The sheer amount of information is amazing with exact attention paid to dates, times, numbers of troops, tanks, casualties etc. It's very dense reading, but also a very rewarding book that gives the definitive account of the war on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad. I don't see how any historian could better it for sheer scope and detail. Erickson is a consummate historian. It's a book that's demanding on the reader, but well worth persevering with. If you read it, along with his first volume, you won't need to read anymore about this conflict. Maps are included.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is serious about learning more, and in depth, of the war in Russia. It really leaves you with a strong impression of the titanic nature of this most incredible of all wartime struggles. A truly great book.

As for Volume one: It seems to me - a relative novice to the subject - that every shred of available material concerning this period of the conflict has been assembled in this one hefty tome. The information presented appears exhaustive and reliable.
But potential readers beware: This is not a study, a discussion or an interpretation of history. It is an exhaustive, and -- at the same time -- well-structured compilation of facts: It is a textbook suited to students of military warfare and of the machinations of the politics which brought about this confrontation.
There is, however, one drawback: The insufficient number of schematic situational maps. It is impossible -- for this reader at least -- to visualise the geography, the spatial relationships and the dynamics between the various military units involved in the respective operations without resorting to adjunct visual material: physical geographic and schematic situational maps.
Because the text offers such an unexpectedly complete, factual account of the events it merits -- to my mind at least -- a five-star-star rating nevertheless.
Helga Fiedler-Boehme

well done. this book provided a great insight into the last battles of WWII. Well documented, and well researched.

The definitive book (along with volume one) on the German-Soviet War, 1941-1945. A must read for any WWII buff or fan of the WWII era military strategy.

El producto llego rapido, la calidad del producto llego en perfectas condicionse. Estoy muy contenta del servicio y definitivamente volveria a usar el servicio...Gracias!!!

Dated material that is oddly disappointing. This is the second volume of Erickson's history of the Eastern Front, and this one seems to suffer more from over-reliance on Soviet sources than the first volume did. It also skips around quite a bit, and seems to ignore some fairly major operations undertaken by the Soviets during the latter half of the war. Of course it has to cover more time than the first one, but even so, it seems that there is a significant lack of thorough coverage -- even of operations that were well known to the west prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union (e.g., Kanev, and a number of fairly major operations in Ukraine). I actually found this book less useful than Road to Stalingrad, and it suffers from the same lack of maps as the first volume, making it even more difficult to follow given the lack of a unifying theme that allows the reader to easily follow the action. Like the first volume, there is very little coverage of Soviet war production, aerial operations or guerilla operations behind German lines. All in all, this volume hasn't aged as well as Volume 1 did, but is still a worthwhile read.

If you are looking for a general overview or even a general military history of the Great Patriotic War, this is not for you. Erickson was writing for military professionals who are intimately familiar with the political and military course of the War in the East and who sought a then-groundbreaking synthesis of Soviet military records that Erickson gained access to in the 70s.

This means that the level of writing is both dry and technical. General Oublensky transfers several regiments to support General Borisov's front reserve formation. General Dimitriov decides to order an elevated alert level for rear area anti-air defense despite Stalin's directives to avoid provocation. General Bulgarov requests new models of paper clips to support bulkier document files in Third Shock Army's records center. Etcetera etcetera. Most readers who do not themselves do this for a living will not find this edifying. Even battles are described in mostly arid bland institutional language that could well have been used to describe how one branch of a cosmetics company sold more shampoo than a competitor did. Erickson is clear and complete, but offers little insight and less elegance.

Erickson also does not bother with biographies or background. If you don't know Zhukov's and Stalin's earlier lives or careers, you will not find them here. if you want to know about the history of the Soviet Army in the 20s and 30s, you will not find it here. If you do not know why the T-34 was better than the Panzer Mk IV, you will not learn that info here.

You also will not find virtually any maps. You will need a separate atlas, online research, or a photographic memory to figure out where the various actions described are occurring. Vol II has a few ugly poorly done maps, Vol I none at all.

Finally, Erickson has more or less adopted the institutional perspective of the archives he used and the view of his Soviet military hosts. Everything that went wrong with the Soviet Army was Stalin's fault, not the fault of the political or economic system underpinning that Army. Basically Khrushchev's view circa 1960, this perspective has seen more than a little criticism in recent decades.

So what was/is the big fuss about these books? Erickson was the first English language historian to be granted significant access to the Soviet military archives. The view he presents contradicts and corrects what was the standard Western view from the 50s to the 70s, which was that the Russians won through quantity, and / or that Germany was defeated mainly by Hitler's stupid mistakes and the Russian winter. Erickson (quite rightly) presents in his unglamorous tedious way an important contrary theory; mainly that the Soviet Army won by tactical and strategic excellence, by superior resource management, and by the competence and experience of its generals. This is undoubtedly closer to the truth than the defensive self-justifications for failure presented by German generals in their memoirs after the war that was the initial source of the Western view of the conflict. Truth is ultimately vital, and Erickson's efforts, flawed as they were, did more to reveal and propagate this significant historical truth than any works on the subject before or since.

By way of comparison, as we can all agree the Model T was a brilliant historical paradigm changer, few of us would want to drive around in one today. Same deal here. The research presented by Erickson has been assimilated, amplified, and synthesized with other sources by a more modern generation of historians. These successors are also generally more readable, provide better background material, and even have lots of maps. Those wishing a general history of the conflict can look to Overy's "Russia's War". A superlative military history of the conflict can be found in Glantz's "When Titans Clashed". And further access to the newest generation of Soviet records can be found in "Absolute War" by Chris Bellamy. All of these, especially Glantz, are both better written and offer a full synthesis of Erickson's material in less mind-numbing picayune detail. All of them provide better background and biographical info on key figures in the war. They all have better maps. And finally, they all focus on other more modern sources from German and SSR sources above and beyond the archives used by Erickson. They are all considerably briefer as well - Overy and Glantz clock in at less than 350 pages, and Bellamy is at about 800 pages.

Who need to read Erickson? Graduate students writing theses on related subjects, officers in training seeking in-depth analysis of staff and command systems in the Eastern theater, completists, insomniacs. Most other readers can bypass these weighty tomes and read the other surveys mentioned above. That option will take less time, will give a more complete "horizontal" picture of the conflict, and will have a lesser chance of boring you to sleep than these historically significant though clunky shelf holders.