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66 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A book full of missed opportunities, 4 Aug 2007
This book aims to present the Second World War from the Soviet perspective by using documents from formerly closed Soviet archives and memoirs only recently published in their full length (ie those written by Zhukov and Rokossovsky, respectively).
While the non-Russian reader can only welcome such an attempt, Prof. Bellamy's book suffers from some major shortcomings, one of which is the apparent inability of its author to read German language sources. Some errors (German ambassador von der Schulenburg is misspelled as "Schulenberg" throughout the book) could have been avoided.
But the major shortcomings are in the material presented for the Soviet side. Bellamy avoids discussing the Soviet pre-war military strategy and doctrine in a separate chapter, even though he rightly writes about the entirely offensive deployment and strategy vis-à-vis Germany. When military strategy is discussed, however, he erroneously attributes the Soviet's doctrine on the eve of the war to Svechin ("Strategy") instead of to Vladimir Triandafillov ("The nature of operations of modern armies") and Isserson.
Another major topic that is missing in this book is the Soviet Order of battle on June 22, 1941. Strangely enough, the well known German Order of Battle is given in the book, but no details about the Soviet deployment along the German, Hungarian and Romanian border. This is a very disappointing fact, especially because one would have wanted to compare the striking similarities in the deployment of the opposing forces. For very detailed information about the Soviet Order of Battle I can only refer the reader to the detailed works of Charles Sharp and Craig Crofoot for the ground forces and to Christer Bergström's about the Soviet Air Forces.
Overall, this book is not bad, but full of missed opportunities.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive rush job, 19 Aug 2008
Good: A thorough presentation of the events leading to war, and the ideologies and personalities involved. A good overview to non-initiated. Although there are other books written with similar reach, most of them have been written before the opening of Soviet archives and are thus deprived of some important sources.
Bad: A somewhat chatty writing style, not very useful maps. A couple of gross factual errors regarding the Finnish participation in the conflict left me doubting the accuracy of the entire book. Bellamy takes the estimate of Finnish casualties in the Winter War from Soviet sources, and based on that hardly neutral source he claims that almost twice as many Finns were killed in that war as very thorough Finnish official statistics say (Russians say 48,000 and Finns 26,000). The name, date, and the place of death is known for almost all Finnish casualties, most of the bodies were brought home for burial, and there is no way 22,000 extra deaths could have been hidden.
Bellamy also says that in 1941 there were 150,000 Finnish troops mobilized against Russia, when in fact general mobilization had almost been completed by June 22nd when Russians airplanes attacked Finland and by July Finland fielded 470,000 troops (from a population of 3,7 million).
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bellamy pulls out all the stops, 13 May 2008
Having read many books on the eastern front conflict I found this book fresh and yet somehow very familiar. Nothing too new here but the style of the author means the 700 odd pages zip by as the various phases of the conflict are explained and expanded on with plenty of diagrams and maps. No phase is as given as much space as say Clarkes' Barbarssa or Beevors' Stalingrad but then when covering the whole campaign that would be asking something. All in all a great read, newcomers to the conflict will learn loads, those just interested in the period who have read other works will not learn too much new but will come back to this book as it really does a good job of covering a lot of ground.
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