Retreat from Moscow
A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A gripping and authoritative revisionist account of the German Winter Campaign of 1941–1942
Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as its first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy’s strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative.
Hitler’s strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, and the German army succeeded. The Soviets as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center, yet not a single German unit was ever destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army’s offensive attempting to break German lines in countless head-on assaults led to far more tactical defeats than victories.
Using accounts from journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us directly into the Wolf’s Lair to reveal a German command at war with itself as generals on the ground fought to maintain order and save their troops in the face of Hitler’s capricious, increasingly irrational directives. Excerpts from soldiers’ diaries and letters home paint a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer battled frostbite nearly as deadly as Soviet artillery. With this latest installment of his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel completes a military history of the highest order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Military scholar Stahel (The Battle for Moscow) draws on German military records, diaries, letters, and memoirs to recreate the Battle of Moscow in this vivid revisionist history. Describing the Soviet counteroffensive that forced Germany to retreat in January 1942 as a "Pyrrhic victory," Stahel contends that the Germans were able to thwart the Red Army's strategic goals and better prepare for spring and summer fighting. He combines a soldier's-eye view of the campaign with analysis of high-level strategic planning, and reveals the tensions and contradictions between the German Army's philosophy of empowering subordinates to take initiative and the Nazi Party's ideology of obedience. Stahel credits German field marshal G nther von Kluge with preserving the Army Group Center despite Hitler's amateurish interference in military planning, and takes Soviet commanders to task for overextending their forces and losing six times as many soldiers as the Germans. Stahel wrangles a staggering amount of primary source material into a cohesive narrative and writes clearly and efficiently. The depth of analysis and sheer volume of information may be overwhelming for generalists, but readers with a deep interest in the subject matter will deem this an invaluable resource.