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He's a Newsweek alumnus, and in fact this reads like a very long Newsweek piece. To a lesser extent, Churchill. The author seems to credit Churchill with having the most common sense, though the competition for that title wasn't very intense.The author writes well. "The Greatest Battle" is not a terrible book. But it should have been titled "The Events And Personalities, Major and Minor, Surrounding The German Invasion Of The Soviet Union". It has strengths and weaknesses, but especially weaknesses -- covers various events but much more so it covers characters, both major and minor - diplomats, government officials, military staff, reporters, spies, terrorists, the list is long. Ostensibly an account of the battle for Moscow, its principal failing is that it devotes curiously little attention to that subject. Trouble is, most of them had absolutely nothing to do with the battle for Moscow.- pays too little attention to military operational considerations - logistics, supply lines, numerical issues, actual battles- spends altogether too much time on eyewitness testimony of very minor players, many of whose qualifications to be included in the book at all seem to have been that they were still alive when the author was researching it, 63 years later.- good, if repetitive vignettes of Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt.
It becomes imminently clear that their respective megalomania, cold-bloodiness, and paranoia ruled the strategy just as it wreaked havoc, fear and horror upon the soldiers and citizens of both sides of this war. It puts us in Hitler's war room and in the Kremlin or in Stalin's Dacha when most of the key decisions were being made.At each important decision point throughout the manuscript, Nargorski compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler -- pointing out the similarities and differences in their personal lives, their idiosyncrasies, their decision making styles, their shared delusions and madness. Although (mercifully) the author does not get into the trenches of day-to-day warfare, he does introduce a ton of new declassified materials from Soviet KGB archives, from survivors, from participants and secondhand accounts of surviving relatives that tend to support and lend a very important human dimension to his thesis. If you are looking for battle details, this is not the book. However, what sets this version apart is not the history itself, but both the richness and the care with which he fills in the many missing details and the relaxed and entertaining way the author has for telling a story.As the prose unfolds, (some times repetitiously) the reader knows immediately that here is an author who knows how to tell a good story about history and knows where his audience's interests lie: Above all else, I wanted to know what the two key protagonists (Hitler and Stalin) were thinking as they went about their evil deeds. For us WW-II history buffs, this is more than just a tasty hors d'oeuvre.
But more than this, this author asserts, and then proceeds to prove that it was this battle, rather than the battle of Leningrad that was the greatest and most costly battle of all times and arguably the pivotal and most decisive battle of the Second World War. These two bloodstained world-class criminals who were engaged in the ultimate dance of two scorpions in a bottle -- joined at the hip by the infamous Munich Pact -- come alive in this manuscript. It is a new main entrée. And on this score, the book does not disappoint. But if you want the political background and human details, then this is an unimaginably rich chronicle of an important battle of WW-II: Five Stars Andrew Nargorski finally gives us the political background to the familiar story of one of the key battles for Russia, the battle for Moscow: arguably the most important battle of the war.
In any case, the shape of the story remains about the same as what we have already learned and understood it to be through other less detailed more militarily centered historical accounts.
It tells about Stalin's no-retreat order. There are a couple of maps and they are at very large scale: "Operation Barbarossa" and "Operation Typhoon", marked at army and front level.
These are interesting but few. The only descriptions of the battle itself are the fruit of soldier's -eye interviews with survivors.
This book might more accurately be titled "Events surrounding the battle of Moscow".Understand that the Germans never got into the city, so the battle itself was just west of Moscow.This book contains a lot of material about Stalin's purges, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the German invasion before the battle,events inside Moscow, the evacuation of government bodies (and even Lenin's body). It doesn't even contain a thesis about the geographic boundaries of the battle.
So the actual material on the actual battle might make one chapter, and a thin one at that. from Moscow, and events after the battle.
It even explains why there isn't much historical material available about the battle itself.But it does not contain an order of battle for either side or a comprehensive description of the operations during the battle.
The Frenchman, inevitably, wrote "The Sex Life of the Elephant". The Pole wrote "The Elephant and the Polish Question".A more honest title for Andrew Nagorski's book would have been, "The Battle of Moscow and the Polish Question".He spends a good deal less time and effort telling the story of the Battle of Moscow than he does berating Franklin Roosevelt for not negotiating some kind of "guarantee" for Polish control of the territory east of the Curzon Line - in return for Lend-Lease aid to Russia.And, in the final analysis, Nagorski adds nothing new to any of the general histories of the Eastern front.
The only thing new in Nagorski's peculiar little book is a collection of odd tales about individuals, many of which are largely irrelevant to the thrust of the narrative, and which he frequently drags on and on to include details about their lives long after the war.Don't bother. This is, in essence, a routine retelling of a story oft-told: Barbarossa got off to a late start because of the volte-face in Belgrade, and Hitler screwed up by sending troops from army group center south towards the Caucasus, and Richard Sorge told Stalin that the Japanese weren't going to attack Russia, so he could safely transfer "Siberian" troops to the Moscow front.
Ignace Jan Paderewski told different versions of the same joke. The German wrote a six-volume "Introduction to the Study of the Elephant".
Alexander Werth did a far better job. The version I heard was about the Frenchman, the American, the German and the Pole who were asked to write a book about the elephant.
The American wrote "Raising Elephants for Fun and Profit".
After reading it, I was so glad to have purchased and read it. This is quite simply one of the most interesting historical books I have read. This book is worth reading for that section alone. Being an amateur historian of Nazi Germany, Russia, and the "Great Patriotic War," I have already read Beevor, Glantz, etc. Another positive, is that Nagorski doesn't bore the reader with so many statistics and exactly what battles and lines were drawn up. The author has used at least as many Russian sources as German, if not more, and that makes for a very interesting book. If you wish for that, read Glantz.
Nagorsky's claim that this was the biggest turning point of the war and not the battle for Stalingrad met with skepticism at first. I had never read before any real account of the panic in Moscow. It may not fully explain the "Russian soul," which is probably not possible, but it does a magnificent job of getting into the minds of not only Stalin and his generals, but the other classes of people as well. However, he does a compelling job of making his case for that conclusion. Whether you have not read much, or even if you have read a great deal on the largest military conflict in history, this book is well worth reading.
I wondered why I should purchase this book. It did add a significant contribution to books already written on the German-Russian war. However, for sheer size in terms of men and material, the battle for Moscow was bigger.This book never bored me for a single page. This book ranks right up there with "Stalingrad" by Beevor, only the difference is that this is really the most comprehensive and balanced account of the Nazi attack toward Moscow. Of course both battles were turning points, and perhaps both equally important, especially for Russian morale.
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