| From a review on Amazon.com, "Alan Clark's classic study of the Eastern Front remains the best book on the subject, 'the greatest and longest land battle which mankind has ever fought.' The author, first a historian and later Margaret Thatcher's secretary of state, suggests that the Russians would have won the war on their own, without American intervention." The scale of this war dwarfs even the war in Europe. The Russians lost over ten million soldiers in each of the first two years, and nine million the next, and at the end of the war they were stronger than ever and stronger than any other army, including ours. I used to think we saved Western Europe from the Germans, but we really saved it from the Russians. I also read When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler, by David Glantz, which repeated the staggering story but in a drier way, much more oriented to military unit events, whereas the Clark book describes a lot of the dynamics between Hitler and his generals and between the generals themselves. |