ORIGINAL: Pelton
ORIGINAL: Walloc
ORIGINAL: chuckles
Having read Paul Carells "Hitler's war on Russia" It is interesting to note that it contains no references to supply problems.
Best Regards Chuck.
Smile, well i was spot on 3 4 months ago then, wasnt it. As I said then ill say it again. I strongly suggest u read some books that isnt based on die hard nazi with an agenda based on 1970s history view of eastern front. Alot has happend and been researched and written since.
Yes, i also have read the book. One should get as broad a perspective as possible. The more varied u read the more one can put the extrems in each end into perspective. This is a book from one end of the extrems.
Kind regards,
Rasmus
I agree Walloc. Hitler vs Stalin is a good one based on allot of data that it new. aka after the wall came down.
I think one of the old school ideals is that if you simply tell the tale based on historical data from "both sides" and not just one your labeled a Nazis freak.
This is part of our politics now which has infected every part of our lifes.
What ever you do ignore the message and kill the messanger.
Pelton
Walloc's point is that there is a lot of material that is *ahem* biased. The German generals were busily (a) blaming someone else why burnishing their own reputations, (b) trying to avoid the hangman's noose at Nuermberg. So the first wave of German works tend to blame Hitler as he helped with both goals. Then came a wave of stuff from outright Nazis like your mate Carrell. By the 60s they weren't going to get hung no more, so we get Hitler/Nazis were geniuses let down by effete generals.
On the Soviet side, the key driver was the various shifts between Stalin, Kruschev, Brezhnev. In first phase (say 45-55), it was all great Stalin and some commanders like Koniev got it in the neck - particularly over the disaster on the Reserve Front at the start of October 1941. The Kruschev era saw a well calibrated poke at the Stalin version and people like Zhukov got it for being too pro-Stalin. Koniev, who hated Zhukov had great fun with this theme. With the fall of Kruschev, say post-65, then his mistakes came up for criticism [1]. Across all this, poor Kirponos was always held to blame for the Kiev disaster.
Across this were the twists of post war Soviet military strategy where each was justified by pulling instances out of the Great Patriotic War. So both Kruschev's assumption that any war would be thermonuclear and the post-65 variant of assuming a conventional phase saw a lot of rewriting history.
So read any Soviet material in the period 45-75 in those lights.
But both German and Soviet historians produced work of merit across this period (I'd say initially more the Germans). By the late 70s Soviet histories of the GPW are actually pretty good and by the 80s they were opening their archives. Some Western historians such as Erickson actually had access to the Stavka day diaries as well as the Front reports in the late 70s - which is why his conclusions still hold up. There has obviously been a lot of work since on the archives but in many ways the state of historical research in Russia seems to be in reverse as Putin is not exactly into being open.
[1] - if you want chapter and verse I can take you through the controversy that exists over who had planned the Stalingrad counteroffensive.
