When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Modern War Studies)

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When Titans Clashed provides an overview of the most titanic armed struggle in history, the murderous fight between the German Axis forces (large numbers of Italians, Romanians, Hungarians and Bulgarians were involved) and the Soviet armed forces. The numbers of men and arms employed and ground into mincemeat are simply staggering. Even if the Wehrmacht had available to it all of the men facing the Allies in France, it still would have lost the battle, as the Red Army had more than 6.5 million men in the fray in 1944 (3 times more than the Axis), according to Glantz, and the Soviet military production had long since outstripped that of the Axis. Col. David Glantz has made a name for himself in the military history community by bringing to light battles and campaigns, unknown largely in the West (though perhaps still remembered by some in Germany), that took place in the Eastern Front during WWII. In this book Glantz teamed up with Jonathan House to write a succinct, yet still detailed, overall history of the Eastern Front. What makes this book so unique, at least at the time 20 years ago when it came out, was it's focus on the Soviet side of the equation. Good read on the war in the Eastern Front and the emergence of Soviet operational art to defeat Germany. As an American it’s easy to look at WW2 through an ethnocentric lens that predominantly highlights western actions as the ultimate cause of Hitlers demise (Normandy, Battle of Bulge, etc). To place these battles in a common strategic context, Soviet soldiers began to think of a new level of warfare, midway between the tactics of individual battles and the strategy of an entire war. This intermediate level became known as Operational Art (operativnaia iskusstva). Operational Art may be thought of as the realm of senior commanders who plan and coordinate operations of large formations within the context of a strategic operation or an entire campaign, that is, a series of actions culminating in the achievement of a strategic objective. In 1927, Svechin summarized this theoretical structure: "Tactics make the steps from which operational leaps are assembled, strategy points out the path."

Editions of When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped

However both these experiences gave some experience to the Russian's and they learned a few things as well but it also caused Germany to seriously underestimate their foe, a judgement that never changed throughout the war to their detriment. Overall it felt like indeed a great summary of the war, and I think the reputation for slaying the "unwashed Soviets hordes" myth is well deserved, but at the same time it was surprisingly dry and boring for large chunks of it with some small and frankly surprising mistakes. For context I've been interested in the subject of WW2 for a long time now, and read quite a bit on it, including some of the Russian stuff, both post and pre Perestroika, and the book still had some interesting ideas I haven't seen elsewhere before.Condition: New. KlappentextrnrnIn the twenty years since When Titans Clashed was published significant new sources of information on the Soviet-Nazi war have come to light and are now incorporated into this new and expanded edition. So Glantz wrote a book from the Soviet side, using new sources from the Russian archives etc. While it's undoubtedly great to have the 'other' view, the book suffers in two aspects: On first publication, this uncommonly concise and readable account of Soviet Russia’s clash with Nazi Germany utterly changed our understanding of World War II on Germany’s Eastern Front, immediately earning its place among top-shelf histories of the world war. Revised and updated to reflect recent Russian and Western scholarship on the subject, much of it the authors’ own work, this new edition maintains the 1995 original’s distinction as a crucial volume in the history of World War II and of the Soviet Union and the most informed and compelling perspective on one of the greatest military confrontations of all time. However Grantz does a phenomenal job showing how much of the brunt of the war effort the Red Army incurred. The following excerpt from his concluding chapter provides a good description..

When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Modern

Samuel Eliot Morison Prize previous winners". Society for Military History . Retrieved December 25, 2017.The equivalence with Verdun was not lost on German and Soviet soldiers who fought at Stalingrad. As they described the “hell of Stalingrad” in their private letters, some Germans saw themselves trapped in a “second Verdun.” While Stalin was always a detrimental source of interference into STAVKA (Red Army General Staff) planning (often a source of calamity), he learned to intrude less and less, to trust his own commanders and allow them to win victories. Ironically, Hitler would mold the German armed forces into a near mirror image of the Soviet armed forces, more and more, as the war wore on. Political officers of the Nazi party were introduced into the Wehrmacht to watch over the shoulders of the German offciers. The OKH and OKW (German Army General Staffs) began to be filled with incompetent yes men, much like the STAVKA was early on, and the few who voiced their dissent, such as von Manstein and Guderian, were simply put out to pasture in favor of men who would blindly follow Hitler's dictates. On the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion of 1944, a US news magazine featured a cover photo of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was labeled the man who defeated Hitler. If any one man deserved that label, it was not Eisenhower but Zhukov, Vasilevsky, or possibly Stalin himself ... over three million German troops fought in the East, while less than a million struggled elsewhere ... German armed forces’ losses to war’s end numbered 13,488,000 men, of these 10,758,000 fell or were taken prisoner in the East.” Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk, 10 July–10 September 1941 Volume 1, Helion & Company, 2010; ISBN 1906033722 June 22. 1941 - the most destructive conflict in history began when 3.5 million Germans and Axis allies launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. The ensuing struggle saw what was a peak form Wehrmacht, fresh from its conquests of continental Europe, utterly and categorically destroyed by the Red Army over 4 years of brutal, Herculean campaigns of the Eastern Front.