This book is unlike Glantz's books on Kursk, Kharkov, or Mars in that it is a slim, larger-sized hardback with a lot of photos and color maps. He also doesn't go into a large amount of detail. This scope makes it a lot easier to understand - while I understood battles that Erickson (in "The Road to Stalingrad") describes but I was confused about. Also, it's a good primer before jumping into "The 900 Days" by Salisbury.

Although the Leningrad encirclement and the battle around the city was one of the biggest tragedic drama in WW II. it has been a relatively neglected subject . Mr.Salisbury's book was the only one which sheded the light on this tragic human conflict in English speaking nations.Daivd Glantz's "900 days of terror "is the one which can be equalled to Mr. Salisbury's "the 900days"
Since I read "When titians clashed" , I 've become a fan of Col.Glantz's eastern front sagas . this one is somewhat less scholarly than his previous books (in particular ,the ones published from Frank Cass pub)however, It is suprisingly readable,informative and well-balanced.col Glantz also provides the OB of Soviet forces,exhaustive notes and valuable date on casualties.there are also many unpublished pictures and wonderful maps
I've heard that Col.Glantz's next book from Kansas university press would also be the one on the Battle of Leningrad. I hope it will be published soon.

This book sheds light on a relatively unknown (for me, anyway) part of the war on the Eastern Front. As well as the indepth text (which one is always assured of when David Glantz is the writer), two other things place this book ahead of the rest. First, the maps (one can easily lose track of what is happening when it comes to Russian place names); second, the photographs, which are mostly new and not the same old tired images. There are also exhaustive chapter notes and appendices. For anyone wanting to know what really happened at Leningrad in World War II, this book is a must. Well done Mr Glantz

An excellently researched and balanced study of small unit actions. Best I've ever read with credit being given to both sides. The author accompanies the narrative with dozens of good maps and leads the reader very smoothly through a rather complicated entanglement of fighting on the Russian front. Highly recommended.

The book describes Soviet deception methods and results for every major battle 41-45. In every case,detailed (down to division) maps showing reality and german assessments are provided. It is invaluable for reference and it gives very interesting insights on German defeats.

Soviet Military Intelligence at examines the development of the Role of Military Intelligence during World War II. It looks at the theory that the Red Army started with as the war began and moved on to its slow improvemnt as the war progressed. By mid 1944 the Red Army Intelligence Organs are at thier wartime best and this foundation could be seen for the remainder of the war and on into the Soviet/Russian Army of Tosay.

Must read for Intelligence Proffessionals and those interesed in the German-Soviet battles of WW2.

This book is for the serious student of military history only. If you want a very detailed study of the battle of Kharkov, told mainly from the Soviet side, complete with orders of battle and a day-by-day retelling of the battle from the divisional level then this book is for you.

I very much enjoyed Glantz's "Clash of Titans," which is probably the best single volume history of the war in the East, and I was hoping this book would contain more of Glantz's excellent analytical scholarship only more sharply focused on a single battle. "Kharkov 1942" is definetly analytical; but the majority of the book is not original scholarship. It's mostly Glantz's translation of a Soviet study of the battle which explains its very dry style. Glantz fleshes out some details, and mentions some parts of the battle that were ignored for political reasons. Glantz really does not provide much of his own analysis on the battle. Where he does provide analysis is on the Soviet study itself. "Kharkov 1942" is as much of a study of how lost battles of "The Great Patriotic War" were viewed within the Soviet political system as it is a study of the battle itself.

The book attempts to describe the battle of Kharkov by using both Soviet and Germans sources. Particularly interesting is the use of a hitherto-classified Soviet study of the battle, written a few years after the war. Both what the study says and what it ommits are very revealing. This book is a masterpiece in its genre and recommended to anyone with an interest in the Eastern Front, but I confess I would like both a more thorough OB, like the one in "Operation Mars", his other book, and better maps.

Simply put, Col. Glantz is THE leading authority on the Eastern Front. I simply could not put this book down when I got it last year, and I find myself periodically returning to it, gleaning new information. Highly recommended.

This recent addition to the study of the Eastern Front of WWII provides a detailed look at the Soviet actions in the spring and summer of 1943 preparing for the action around the Kursk salient. The translation of the Soviet General Staff Study, there is not as much propaganda included as one might expect; rather, this is an internal look at the battle shortly after its completion that was meant to provide a guide to other Red Army units of the lessons of Kursk. The study forthrightly identifies failures in engineering, aviation and anti-tank gunnery.

With eleven chapters, 33 maps and 40 tables covering force ratios, kilometers of trenches dug, ration of weapons to kilometer of frontage, relative combat power projection assessments, this study reads like a scientific text. In fact, after Stalin's purges of the officer corps in the later 1930's, the Soviets were forced to search for a scientific approach to the art of war, because they had so few generals and colonels who could practice the intangibles.

The description of the preparations for the battle is the strength of the book. The intelligence staff, and operational planners, correctly identified the most likely thrust of the German offensive as early as March. Evaluating the force structure remaining after the surrender of the 6th Army's surrender at Stalingrad, and the known German tactics, the staff was able to predict the attack on the northern and southern flanks of the salient, and begin preparing a defense in depth. The focus of effort was the engineering work, and propositioning of ammunition and fuel for the fight. The force was also restructured to provide a very heavy mobile counterattack force that comprised almost 1/3 of the total force structure available, and almost 80% of the available tanks.

The Germans used new tanks, the 'Tigers', and new self-propelled assault guns together with integrated air in a new attack grouping at Kursk. This grouping penetrated Soviet defenses, and caused general havoc in the front two lines, but it lacked sufficient combined arms combat power to achieve a rupture of the lines that would allow an exploitation force through. In general terms, the Germans should have attacked with infantry to clear through the minefields, obstacles, automatic weapons and mortars, and then allowed the assault grouping of tanks and self propelled guns through. The integration of air directly with the assault groups was very effective, but the Soviets mention that the result of so much German air against the front lines was almost total freedom of movement from the rear for operational and even strategic reserves.

The actual fighting of the battle is not exhaustively covered in this book; if you are looking for tank on tank details from Prohkorovka, this is not the book for you. If you want to get a sense of the level of detail required to successfully plan modern combined arms combat, this is a must read.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best volume ever produced on the fateful Battle Of Kursk, probably real turning point of WWII and one of the most misunderstood and overlooked battles in recent history. It is - more or less - a straightforward translation of the general study on the battle that the Soviet General Staff (under a collective authorship) wrote in 1944. Guess what? It is a technical, sometimes brutally candid account of the battle as seen from different point of view: the Gernman plans and offensive, the Soviet defense, the aerial battle, the artillery, and - of course - the tank manouvers. Even if the style is - naturally, given the origins of this volume - often dry and matter of fact, it is nonetheless a mandatory read for every Eastern Front enthusiast. It is all here - countless first hand infos on the battle, hour-by-hour accounts of the action, loads of maps (albeit not always well readable), details on tactis and strategy... the only thing missing is the dreaded "human angle", but given that personal accounts are - often - just an excuse for melodrama and manipulation of the reader, if you're serious on history I'll not miss it a bit. It astonishing how balanced and objective this study is (possibly because it was for "internal circulation", and not for the general public) and it make some sort of ironic comparison with the lack of anything like that on the German side - the OKW study on the battle looks like it was written by von Manstein's lawyer! All in all - another invaluable service by col. Glantz to the dwindling community of Eastern Front historians...

I found the translation of the Soviet General Command Staff Study "The Battle for Kursk 1943" to be the best source of material on this pivital battle of WW2. Glanzt and Orenstein have done a masterful job in retaining the truely important information, while filtering out the the Soviet propaganda that usually creeps into Soviet material.

The serious student would be well advised to pay paticular attention to the sections dealing with air operations, engineering support, and command and control sections.

The maps and tables detailing positions and correlation of forces were paticularly informative.

The only critism that I would offer is that the maps need to be expanded. Althought the editors did a good job, in relation to other military histories, they could greatly improve their work with the addition of a large fold-out map detailing the area under study.

David M. Glantz is a retired army officer who spent most of the latter part of his career studying the Soviet army. He founded and then headed the army's study group that concentrated on the Soviet army (with the fall of Communism the center now devotes itself to the Russian army, and associated armed forces of nearby countries). He's now retired, and has been producing a book every two or three years on the Soviet army during the Second World War. The present volume is in many ways his most ambitious, an attempt to retell the whole of the battle of Leningrad, from the initial German attempts to capture the city through the lifting of the blockade almost three years later.

Glantz has several strengths as a historian, and a few weaknesses. His principal strength, and this can't be overstated, is his access to Soviet archives that no one else has gotten into since the war ended. One of his previous books, Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, recounts a large battle on the Eastern front in late 1942 that doesn't appear in many histories of World War II, because the Soviets successfully suppressed knowledge of it. There aren't any whoppers of that magnitude here, but there is a wealth of detail concerning operations, intentions, and forces that hasn't appeared elsewhere.

On the other hand, Glantz isn't Hemingway, or even Harrison Salisbury. His prose is rather wooden, and workmanlike, fine for retelling a story of a battle, but not much as literature. It's OK for the first 300 pages, but this book stretches to 470 pages of text, and it gets a little wearing. In other words, if you aren't *very* interested in the subject, I would recommend going elsewhere. On the flip side, if you *are* interested, there's more information here than you'll find anywhere else, and it's clearly presented and intelligently analyzed.

As an aside, you'll notice that all of the references above are to Glantz as a historian of the Soviet side of things. There are (of course) references to the Germans here, and to their dilemmas and opportunities, but the emphasis is on the Soviets. In most instances, the book only tells you what the Germans are doing to provide context for the actions of the Soviet army. He does provide a brief history of the city prior to the war, and some account of the privations of the citizens of the city during the war, but this has been done elsewhere, and better. I suppose if he didn't provide anything like this, he'd be criticized for its absence, but frankly it seemed a bit out of place.

Given that, this is one of the best books on the Eastern Front to appear in a good long while, and if you're as interested in this field as I am, it's a worthwhile addition to your library.

The opening chapters of the Battle for Leningrad describe the desperate counterattacks that the Russians made against the German invaders. According to Glantz these attacks stalled the advance of the German armies and prevented Leningrad and Moscow from capture. The second part of the book descibes the failed Soviet counteratttacks to relieve the city. Glantz believes that these attacks failed because they were dispersed and the Russians falied to combined artillery,air, and infantry effectively. The final section of the book details the lifting of the seige of Leningrad and how the Russians managed to operate more effectively by using deception and cordinating with other fronts in conducting offensive operations. However the Russian adavnce was slow because the terrain around Leningrad does not favor the massive tank armies that Russians usually employed on their offensives, but rather they had to rely upon the infantry to achieve a breakthrough. Glantz concludes his book by stating that although the Leningrad Front was a minor front it made the Germans commit ground forces to Leningrad that could have used to capture Moscow and Stalingrad. This is a book is a detailed military history of the battle and I would reccomend this book to military history buffs, but not your average reader since he or she might get bored and confused with the different army groups and fronts. This book emphasizes the military operations and glosses over the civilian suffering during the seige of Leningrad. If one is interested in the civilian view of the seige of Leningrad. I would reccomend "The People's War," edited by Robert W.Thurston.

The sheer scale of the conflict in eastern Europe and Russia comes across in this book. There just isn't enough space to write about just one battle and it's participants, the war was so huge in the east. Thousands of people, masses of military equipment move great distances in the space of a sentence and still this book has to be economic with the language used to describe events. Descriptions are good and the structuring of the work is fine. This is no Saving Private Ryan, but it does justice to the efforts of the Russian people to defeat Hitler. Of no small importance is the fact that this book writes from the Soviet point of view. The front is the western front and the enemy a defiler of the motherland. The credit the authors give to Soviet commanders skill in defeating the German army and it's allies is long overdue considering the pro-German bias of previous accounts.

This is now the best one volume history of the German campaign on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. One of the authors is one of the leading specialists on the subject and has written a large number of volumes about different aspects of the war on the Eastern Front. The book is easy to read and has numerous maps that support the text.

The reason for the book is that prior to the opening of the Russian archives most historians depended on German material for understanding the campaign. That material was seriously flawed in a number of respects. The first problem was that for the entire war the Germans had very poor intelligence about the size and disposition of Russian forces. The second problem was that a large number of the memoirs of German Generals were self serving and inaccurate.

Early histories of the war have seen the reason for the failure of the Russian campaign as a result of operational failures. That is that certain mistakes were made in the conduct of the campaign. A common theme of histories during the 60's and 70's was a belief that if the Barbarossa offensive had been run differently or if the attacking forces in operation Blue had not been separated victory might not have been achieved.

This book shows clearly that by the end of the campaign in 1941 the Germans were in serious trouble. They had suffered massive casualties and the forces they could muster in 1942 were far below the army that had started the campaign in both men and equipment. The Russians although they had lost close to three million men had by the end of 1941 built up a force equivalent to the Germans. From that time on they were able to edge ahead in production of equipment and achieve a material preponderance over the Germans. In fact it was probably the failure of the Russian Kharkov offensive that made it possible for any offensive operation in 1942 to succeed.

In summary the reason for the failure of Barbarossa was not due to operational problems but due to problems with strategy. In 1941 Germany put into the campaign an army of about three million men. Its level of production of tanks and aircraft remained low. In 1944 it was able to increase its army to the level of ten million and to raise tank and aircraft production. By 1944 it was to late as the Russian forces had reached the top of their fighting potential. The forces put into the field in 1941 were not adequate and the Germans were to suffer from massive supply problems. The basis of the commitment of three million men in 1941 was something that the German armed forces felt adequate to complete the conquest of Russia in five weeks. It was only later in the war that the Germans began to realize the potential of their enemy. Again this is territory that Glantz has discussed in his excellent book Stumbling Colossus.

This book lays to rest a number of old mistakes and historical errors. One of the authors has written another volume on Operation Mars so that the book is able to show that this was a serious defeat for the Russians, a defeat that had previously been written out of history. In addition there is a careful discussion of the Stalingrad campaign which explains in detail that the reason for the defeat are complex and involved the poor logistic situation of the sixth army. The levels of supply made the prospect of a break out from Stalingrad unrealistic. The book also contains an excellent appendix which outlines the level of troop commitment to the eastern front by the Germans and their casualty levels. It clearly shows the importance of the Eastern Front in the defeat of Germany.

It is impossible to praise this work to highly as it is readable well organized and logical.

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.

This book starts off with a brief look at the Eastern front situation and the opposing armies leading up the battle and the reasons it was fought.

The authors then lead us into the preparations taken by both sides and how the Germans continually delayed the offensive. The Russians, well aware of the German plans were able to plan and create an intricate network of defensives and they were defenses of depth that finally frustrated and prevented the Germans from gaining any momentum. The Germans were also forced to continuously probe the Russians for potential weak spots. Unfortunately for the Germans there were none.

The authors make a point that the German High Command placed too much faith in their new technically advanced tanks (Panthers & Tigers) and were continuously forced to divert forces to protect their flanks that were under constant counter attack.

The accounts of the battle are very detailed and at times it is easy to get lost in the description of movements of the vast number of units.

Glantz & House make good use of personal accounts, unit's history accounts and even memoirs of the leading participants such as Mainstein. Their conclusions in regards to the battle are hard to dispute after such a detailed and comprehensive research which brings together both Russian and German sources of information. Recommended reading.

The crux of this volume is new Soviet archival material on STAVKA decision-making but there is actually little new here. At less than 300 pages, this is somewhat short-shrift to a major battle. There is no discussion of air operations or partisans. Very limited profile of commanders and their forces, but excellent order of battle information. The Germans placed their faith in the 407 heavy tanks available (102 Tigers, 200 Panther and 105 Ferdinands) but they split them up too much; they should have massed their best weaponry in one sector. It is no surprise that ArmeeGruppe South made much better progress; they had much more artillery support (Center relied mostly on assault guns in direct fire mode), and much better engineer support (South had about eight corps-level engineer battalions but Center had no corps-level engineers). Glantz asks and answers several key questions: did Hitler really push Zitadelle (no, Zeitzler, Kluge and others pushed it beforehand but then blamed Hitler later), could the attack have succeeded in May (unlikely, given the weather and the disparity in forces) and what if the Germans had eschewed the attack and opted for a mobile defense (this would have bought them time, but there was no consensus for this strategy so it was highly unlikely to be adopted. It would also have required Hitler to relinquish command in the east to a CinC). Maps ok but uses cumbersome abbreviations. No terrain analysis.

David Glantz writing the definitive assessment of the Battle for Kursk? Sounded like a dream come true. After all, colonel Glantz is the leading authority (along with the now much less active John Erickson) on the Eastern Front topic. After all, he wrote such amazing in-depth analysis on several EF campaign (from a much needed Soviet perspective) like "From Don To Donets" or "When Titans Clashed" - this one probably the best one-volume general history of the Russia's war. After all, Glantz did a wonderful job on demolishing (hard numbers at hand) a lot of Cold War fabricated myths on how good (and unlucky) were Nazi Generals, and how dumb (and lucky and faceless) where the Soviets. So, when "The Battle of Kursk" landed in my hands, I felt a comprehensible shiver of anticipation. The first thing I must say consider is that - probably following many complaints for the very dry style (someone called it a "syntactical slog") of his previous work - col. Glantz finally decided to team with someone providing him with a much needed editing work. Not to say that Mr. House's collaboration solved all the problems: we're treated here and there with repetitions and convoluted passages, and, yes, the style is still a bit on the dry side. For instance, nearly every quote from a primary source describing the actual firefight is preceded by the same "A quote for a (German/Soviet) account vividly depict the intensity of the battle", or a variation of the same. And the maps - ok, a bit more time spent on polishing and editing them would have helped immensely. But these are really minor issues. As far as the content goes, "The Battle Of Kursk" is (nearly) the definitive thing. Glantz manages to put order in the former chaos, and gives us a perspective that, if not new as the dust jacket's notes would make us believe, is possibily the current state-of-art on the subject. Ten years ago, the battle for the Kursk salient (fought between July 5th and 16th 1943) was, thank to the then mandatory uncritical reading of German literature on the subject and a complete disregard for Soviet sources, alternatively known as a footnote at the Stalingrad campaign, as the last significant German offensive effort in the East, as the largest tank battle ever fought, as another evidence of Hitler's strategical ineptitude, the demonstration that if Germany's military brains had free hands they could have won., an Herculean effort almost doomed from the beginning by Soviet espionage, bad timing and many other things. So, Kursk became another lost opportunity for the ubermenshen to revert the Stalingrad disaster and win the war. Also, the whole battle ended up focused on the Prokorovkha maelstrom, giving to that single episode a bigger importance of what was in reality. Not really a battle, but rather a confused collation of events that historians seemed uneasy to define as the turning point of WWII or just another "big" battle.. "The Battle Of Kursk" convincingly demonstrates that Kursk was a Soviet victory AND a German defeat - because Soviet strategy was more sound (even if their execution of the same was often flawed) and German strategy was wrong - based on a very rigid framework of incorrect assumptions, and leading to some big operational mistakes. It shows also that, if the southern portion of the German assault pushed deep in the Soviet defensive belt, its management was faulty at least, especially after the crucial 10th July decision to shift the axis of the attack from North (towards Oboyan) to NE (towards Prokorovkha), a huge mistake that was NOT a pre-planned move (as German memoirs made us believe in the past), but the result of an incorrect assessment of Soviet forces position and conditions. Also, it somehow manages to de-emphasizes the importance of Prokorovkha itself: if the 12th July battle was indecisive (Soviet Guards 5th Tank Army failed its mission to destroy the II SS Pzkrp, but made any further German dream of "operational freedom" unrealistic), continuous combat on the 13th, 14th and 15th show us that Manstein was 1) overestimating the real effect the 12th July battle had on the Soviets and 2) continuing operations in spite of Hitler (correct) belief that Citadel had failed. So - here goes the big deal - Hitler DIDN'T called off Citadel prematurely against Manstein's will (another much discussed myth), but the 16th July ends of the southern offensive was inevitable, facing mounting losses, Soviet pressure on the flanks and Soviet operations in the north. Just a couple of days more, and 4th Pz Army would have been crushed beyond recovery. The bottom line is that German generals lost Kursk most in their own - and not because of Hitler's meddling. It must be said that, beyond this, Glantz simply confirm what was known in the past by anyone serious in the subject, and there's no shocking revelation based on some untapped primary source. Even the "numbers" issue it's a bit of an anticlimax: Glantz chooses a conservative approach taking for granted archival numbers for both sides. But, if we're now confident about Soviet initial numbers and losses, the same cannot be said for the Germany's, especially as far as the SS corps is concerned. In my humble opinion, the numbers here should be drastically increased, but, as they said, who am I to contradict colonel Glantz? Also, a bit more courage underlining German troubles at the command level would have been welcome..

So - how's "The Battle Of Kursk"? An absolute must for any WWII enthusiast, an enjoyable work of scholarship even if somehow flawed style-wise, and a much needed ray of light in a still confused topics. Buy it!

Indica claramente paso a paso el curso de la operacion Marte, los esquemas hacen seguir con la maxima claridad y facilidad como se desarrollaron las distintas batallas. El analisis es pormenorizado de cada frente haciendo un estudio detallado dia a dia de las distintas zonas de operaciones. MUY RECOMENDABLE.

David M. Glantz, a military officer and expert on the Eastern Front in the Second World War, has written an excellent operational summary of the virtually unknown Operation "Mars" (the operation was such a disaster that the Soviets suppressed records of it until recently), the Soviet attempt to pinch off the German 9th Army in the Rhzev salient in November-December 1942. Even readers familiar with the Eastern Front will find their beliefs altered by his book. As Glantz clearly demonstrates, the well-known Operation Uranus counterattack at Stalingrad was actually a strategic deception for the main effort near Moscow. Soviet Marshal Zhukov wanted to destroy ArmeeGruppe Center but he ordered the Stalingrad attack to precede Operation Mars in order to divert German attention and reinforcements to the south. Unfortunately for him, the Germans did not become diverted and their defenses remained steady. Unlike the 6th Army at Stalingrad, the German 9th Army was well entrenched and had powerful mobile reserves. Zhukov's attack was a spectacular failure despite larger forces being used there than in the Stalingrad counteroffensive. The Soviets failed primarily because they could not breach the German defenses quickly and the Germans (Field Marshal Model) did a superb job of shifting mobile reserves around to meet each crisis in turn. Severe winter weather actually degraded the Soviet artillery preparation (poor visibility limited observed fires), which undermined the initial breakthroughs. Amazingly, Zhukov continued to order frontal assaults for three weeks, even though the offensive was obviously failing to achieve its objectives in the first four days. Soviet losses in the three week offensive on this front totaled at least 100,000 killed, 235,00 wounded and about 1,800 tanks. German counterattacks cut off and eliminated three Soviet corps (one tank, one mechanized, and one rifle). After the Stalingrad operation succeeded and Operation Mars failed, Soviet historians erased all mention of Zhukov's attack and instead re-wrote history to make it appear that Stalingrad always was the main effort. The only deficiencies in this account that keep it from being outstanding are: (a) only marginal information is provided on the air campaign over the salient, (b) there is no detailed information on German forces defending the salient prior to Zhukov's attack (e.g. discussion of mobile reserves available, logistics, status of defenses, obstacles), and (c) no real assessment of Soviet units as to quality, equipment, training, prior experience, etc. Maps are decent in terms of quantity and quality although use of acronyms instead of map symbols clutters maps and makes them difficult to read (e.g. "6GCD" for 6th Guards Cavalry Division). However, if you want to learn something new and important about the Eastern Front, read this book.

This is one of the rare books able to capture the "flavour" or the russin front fighting. There aren't heriocal defence or fanatical attacks but only histories of men, mugik or landser, forced to fight a war decided from leader withour remors and without any knowledge of modern warfare. All the reports reported in this books demonstrate above any doubt that History is a delicate tissue built from the single men's daily adventures. Inside the book, readers will find a fine report of the stategical basis for the campaign and of the mental status of the two operative leaders and how their decisions and their orders were able to obtain an heavy influence on the ebb & flow of the single fightings and on the entire operation. This is a real study of military history and you'll se no winner no loser but only professional soldiers that make their job.