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A Review by Benjamin Schwarz

The clash between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was the largest and most ferocious war in history. The main scene of the Nazis' defeat, the Eastern Front claimed 88 percent of all German casualties in the Second World War, and the death of as many as 35 million Soviet civilians and 14.7 million Soviet soldiers. The armies struggled over vast territory, in a seemingly unremitting series of battles of unprecedented scope: in a single battle, at Kursk (the largest in history), at least 1.5 million Soviets and Germans fought. The Red Army's 1944 Operation Bagration, a stunning sequence of multi-front strategic offensives, remains a feat unmatched in the history of warfare. In short, the Russo-German war constitutes the most important chapter in world military history. Astonishingly, however, the number of authoritative books in English on any aspect of the Soviets' "Great Patriotic War" can be counted on two hands. They include John Erickson's sweeping two-volume history (The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin), and the more recent works by the editor of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, retired U.S. Army Colonel David M. Glantz, now indisputably the West's foremost expert on the subject. Glantz is fully exploiting perhaps the most significant development ever in military historical scholarship — the opening of the enormous Soviet archives. He has already written a masterly general operational history of the Eastern Front, and a huge and detailed account of the Battle of Kursk, along with other studies. This more than 600-page book meticulously chronicles the operational history of the Battle of Leningrad — the nearly three-year German siege of the city, and the Soviets' often disastrous attempts to lift it — which cost the USSR close to two million civilians and soldiers. Glantz is a sober scholar and a painstaking researcher. His books are definitive, though very heavy going. They will be an essential resource when the epic struggle in the East finally finds its Tacitus or its Parkman.

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