GREAT WAR BOOKS: Stalingrad: A Fateful Siege by ANTONY BEEVOR

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943
by
ANTONY BEEVOR

Excerpts From The Book

" 'When the (German) retreat started on 20 November, we (Soviet POWs) were put instead of horses to drag the carts loaded with ammunition and food. Those prisoners who could not drag the carts as quickly as the Feldwebel wanted were shot on the spot. In this way we were forced to pull the carts for four days, almost without any rest.' "

"Anger at the (prison camp) conditions led to (German) prisoners scraping handfuls of lice off their own bodies and throwing them at their (Soviet) guards. Such protests provoked summary execution."

Reviews

Battle-scarred and shell shocked: how else to describe my condition after 460 pages of blood, sweat and tanks? Antony Beevor’s book documenting the siege of Stalingrad is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. What with bombing raids, grenade attacks, hand-to-hand combat — to say nothing of frostbite, typhoid and malnutrition — I’m lucky to have escaped with my life. It’s received a crouching ovation from critics and sold half million in the UK alone

BCBookreviews

Antony Beevor's thoughtfully researched compendium recalls this epic struggle for Stalingrad. No one, least of all the Germans, could foretell the deep well of Soviet resolve that would become the foundation of the Red Army; Russia, the Germans believed, would fall as swiftly as France and Poland. The ill-prepared Nazi forces were trapped in a bloody war of attrition against the Russian behemoth, which held them in the pit of Stalingrad for nearly two years. Beevor points out that the Russians were by no means ready for the war either, making their stand even more remarkable; Soviet intelligence spent as much time spying on its own forces--in fear of desertion, treachery, and incompetence--as they did on the Nazi's. Due attention is also given to the points of view of the soldiers and generals of both forces, from the sickening battles to life in the gulags.
Many believe Stalingrad to be the turning point of the war. The Nazi war machine proved to be fallible as it spread itself too thin for a cause that was born more from arrogance than practicality. The Germans never recovered, and its weakened defenses were no match for the Allied invasion of 1944. We know little of what took place in Stalingrad or its overall significance, leading Beevor to humbly admit that "[t]he Battle of Stalingrad remains such an ideologically charged and symbolically important subject that the last word will not be heard for many years." This is true. But this gripping account should become the standard work against which all others should measure themselves.

Jeremy Storey

Saturday, 21 June 1941, produced a perfect summer’s morning. Many Berliners took the train out to Potsdam to spend the day in the park of Sans Souci. Others went swimming from the beaches on the Wannsee or the Nikolassee....In the Soviet Embassy...an urgent signal from Moscow demanded "an important clarification" of the huge military preparations along the frontiers from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

British historian Antony Beevor begins his narrative quietly, steadily, uneasily. Moving briskly between rapidly intensifying German and Russian scenes, Beevor provides some of the historical context for the events leading toward the terrible battle of Stalingrad.

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GREAT WAR BOOKS: D-DAY: The Battle for Normandy by ANTONY BEEVOR

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

by ANTONY BEEVOR

What They Say About The Book

Washington Post

At one point, during the fierce battle for the town of Saint-Lô, Beevor quotes a medic: "It's such a paradox, this war, which produces the worst in man, and also raises him to the summits of self-sacrifice, self-denial and altruism." Two pages later he quotes a French gendarme appalled by looting by soldiers and civilians alike: "It was a great surprise to find it in all classes of society. The war has awakened atavistic instincts and transformed a number of law-abiding individuals into delinquents."

As Beevor says, there was a sharp contrast between the Allied foot soldiers and their German counterparts. The most fanatical of the latter (and "fanatical" is indeed the word), especially those in the SS and its Hitler Jugend offshoot, had been brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda machine into believing that the fate of the fatherland was in their hands, and they fought with that uppermost in mind. The British soldiers by contrast had been at war for five years and were exhausted by it. Americans and Canadians were not fighting for land they could call home and thus were motivated primarily by the group loyalty so essential to military morale.

Telegraph

The Canadian major is quoted as saying, “The thing that shocked me was the 51st Highland Division. The Scotties threw their weapons and equipment away and fled.”

Mr Beevor said: “The fighting was indeed ferocious, far more than has been recognised, and that was one of the main themes of my book.

“But many of its battalions were badly shaken, and it took several weeks and a new commander, before its fighting spirit was restored.

“The 51st Highland Division went through a bad patch, but its morale and fighting ability was rapidly restored in late July as I emphasise in my book.”

Viewpoints

What makes Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy worth reading isn't revisionism (at least not of the distortion-of-history type) but rather the inclusion of previously unavailable first-person accounts and, perhaps more important, a keen awareness of two seldom-discussed factors: the Germans' true motivation for fighting a seemingly losing battle and the price the French people paid in blood for their liberation. (Beevor points out at the end of the D-Day chapters that some 3,000 French men, women and children died on June 6, 1944, twice the number of GIs killed on Omaha Beach.)

Timesonline

Beevor is harder on the British than the Americans, perhaps because with all their experience of war to date they should have known better. And it is significant that the dustjacket shows US troops landing, not British: the Americans were preponderant on D-Day itself and became ever more so in the build-up that followed. Indeed, the book is in many ways the classic story of “young stag, old stag”. But, most important of all, from the author of Stalingrad and Berlin, the Downfall, is the re-evaluation of the “second front”, of late seen increasingly as a sideshow to the great events in the east: “The ferocity of the fighting in northwest France can never be in doubt. And despite the sneers of Soviet propagandists, the battle for Normandy was certainly comparable to that of the eastern front.”

Daily Mail

Don't worry if you do not survive the assault,' was how one British officer's pep talk to troops ahead of the Normandy landings went, 'as we have plenty of back-up troops who will just go in over you.' 

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