Thunder on the Dniepr....

[Orzel Bialy]

OK...my wife (being one of the best in the world ) got me three books for X-Mas, God Bless her! lol
The first was the history of SS Das Reich...the second was a WW2 battle Atlas....and the third was Thunder on the Dniepr.

Has anyone read "Thunder" yet? I'm only half way through the first chapter and I'm getting the feeling it's a bit full of BS in some ways.
I mean, I understand that it's attempting to tell the Russian version of the opening phases of Barbarossa...simply because the world has tended to always trust the German accounts of the operation....chiefly because those documents and data were accessible.
Anyway...I get the feeling just this far in that the author is laying the ground work for saying that the Russians had planned/expected the campaign to unfold exactly (well, along similiar lines perhaps) as it did.
If so, this guy needs his head examined in my book.
Any comments???

[Grenadier]

Thunder is an update of Fugate's earlier "Operation Barbarossa", which I found quite revealing from the German viewpoint. Fugate postulates that the 4 weeks spent argueing and the deceptions of Halder and Bock to keep Hitler placated and still keeping Moscow their hidden objective from him illustrates the flaws in the original plan. Fugate also postulates that Stalin deliberately sacrificed Budenny's command at Kiev as part of a grand scheme o hold on until the weather broke and stopped German movement.

Thunder uses a map found by the Germans in 1941 and also described in a US Army pamphlet of German oficer interviews regarding Eastern Front combat experiences along with a Russian colonel, Dostovievsky(sp) to advance the theory that the deployment of the Soviet 2nd echelon behind the Dnieper at Vitebsk and Gomel shows that Pavlov was also a sacrificial lamb and that Stalin did not plan to hold on the frontier but to withdraw behind the Dnieper and cut offf the German attack from the flanks. It was the speed of the German advance and the failure of Pavlov to hold out longer than a week that threw the Soviet plan off kilter

[Orzel Bialy]

I just was having a hard time believing that anyone...Stalin most of all...would be willing to let go of the expanded Western borders he desired so much...no matter what the depth of the "sacrificial territory" was rumored to be.

Guess I'll just keep reading on and see where it goes.

Thanks for the little insight there Grenadier.

[tracer]

It can be argued that any historical text contains some amount of 'slant'. A good example is Alan Clark's "Barbarossa" which many critics have accused as having a pro-German (ubermensch) theme. From the limited titles I've read, I find John Erickson's "The Road to Stalingrad" and "The Road to Berlin" to be the least objective. The 5 books I got this Christmas are all first-hand accounts of Wehrmacht soldiers, so I'm naturally expecting a German bias. Thanks for the heads-up on 'Thunder', I'll be sure to check it out.

If anyone's interested, "Panzer Commander" by Colonel Hans von Luck is a good read. He was the commander of Rommel's recon batallion in the 21st Panzer division and saw action in almost every German theater of the war: Poland, France, Russia, North Africa, Italy, Normandy, the defense of Berlin and finally 5 years in a Soviet POW camp.

[Jakub]

I read the stuff - in Polish it is "Blietzkrieg on Dniepr" - the author is Fugate.

I am also of the opinion that it is in some way a bullshit... but it also can be treated as a different point of view.

What I didn't like was that "handing dogs" on German generals (Guderian) and too much of praising Zhukov, no matter what he did (true, was Russian one of the best )

In general the book presents a different point of view on early years of war. Maybe the war games should be more explained.
I would rather recommed Alan Clarke's book - Barbarossa