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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 13:01:01 GMT
STALIN'S WARS: From World War to Cold War, 1939 - 1953
By Geoffrey Roberts
BRILLIANT STUDY OF THE WAR LEADER
A review by William Podmore, London, UK, 21 March 2007
This book is a very useful corrective to myths about the Second World War and the Cold War. It shows how the Soviet Union played a key role in winning the World War, defeating more than 75% of Hitler's divisions. As President Roosevelt said, “The Russian armies are killing more Axis personnel and destroying more Axis material than all the other twenty-five United Nations put together”.
Roberts concludes, “Stalin was a very effective and highly successful war leader ... [who] was indispensable to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany”. Churchill continually promised to help the Soviet war effort. For example, in August 1942, he told Stalin that by spring 1943 a million British and US troops would have opened a second front in Western Europe. But Churchill delayed the second front until June 1944.
Roberts argues, “Stalin worked hard to make the Grand Alliance a success and wanted to see it continue after the war”. The postwar Attlee government, on the other hand, worked hard to break up the Alliance, being more concerned to save the Empire than to keep the peace. Stalin said the Labour government was more conservative than the Conservatives in their defence of the British ruling class's imperial interests.
In 1947, President Truman adopted Labour's hostility to the Soviet Union and peaceful coexistence and launched the Marshall Plan. “For Stalin the Marshall Plan was the breaking point in postwar relations with the United States”. The Plan put Western European countries under US control, enabling the US state to interfere in their internal affairs. It led straight to the formation of the anti-Soviet Western bloc, which started the Cold War and split the world into two camps.
Stalin's policy of peaceful coexistence did not mean accepting whatever the imperialists did. Two years after US forces intervened in Korea, he said, “One must be firm when dealing with America ... It's been already two years. And the USA has still not subdued little Korea. ... They want to subjugate the whole world, yet they cannot subdue little Korea".
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 7:05:16 GMT
This Will Podmore review is from: Plans For Stalin's War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925-1941 (Hardcover) Lennart Samuelson
In this detailed book, based on newly opened Russian archives, Lennart Samuelson studies Soviet military and economic planning from 1925 to 1941. He shows how the Soviet leadership integrated defence into their general economic planning and decision-making, and how well the defence industries met military requirements.
With the first five-year plan, the Soviet Union developed an advanced industrialised civilian economy. The vital machine building, automobile, tractor, chemical and aircraft industries could be swiftly mobilised in case of war. Samuelson argues that this did not lead to what could be called a 'militarised economy', because the USA, France, Italy and Germany made similar preparations for the demands of total war.
He also discusses Soviet strategic thinking. In the 1918-21 War of Intervention, the armies of fourteen capitalist states invaded Russia, trying to overthrow the revolutionary Government. This naturally confirmed the Soviet leadership's belief that these states would inevitably attack the new socialist state again. The debate raged - could the Soviet Union defeat such an attack? In 1927, Marshall Tukhachevskii, then Chief of Staff, said that the Soviet Union would be defeated, "unless the European revolution will come to our rescue." In 1936, when he was Deputy Defence Commissar, he agreed with Trotsky that Nazi Germany would definitely defeat the Soviet Union. This consistent defeatism was hardly appropriate to a leading figure. Further, Tukhachevskii wanted the military, not civilians, to run military-industrial planning, a clear threat to the Party's leadership of the country.
Samuelson concludes, "With regard to industrial mobilisation, it [the Soviet Union] was certainly ahead of Germany - having adopted the best methods and techniques for preparing the economy in general, and industry in particular, for the test of wartime production conditions." He sums up, "The presently available data give on the whole a more balanced and well-equipped Red Army on the eve of Operation Barbarossa than in the historiography of past decades."
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 7:08:05 GMT
This Will Podmore review is from: Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (European History in Perspective) K. McDermott
Stalin's single purpose was, as Professor Richard Overy has noted, "to preserve and enlarge the revolution and the state that represented it." His policies were forged in war and revolution. How could World War One's slaughter of Russians be stopped? How could the counter-revolutionary war of 1917-21 be defeated? How could a feudal peasant society be modernised? How could the kulaks be defeated? How could the fifth column linked to Hitler be defeated? How could Hitler's invasion be defeated? How could the Soviet Union be rebuilt after the war's devastation? Capitalism caused all these problems; liberalism compounded them. Stalin's answer was class war - war against the warmongers. How else could Russia have survived these lethal threats?
So, without a capitalist class, without profits from exploiting people in other countries, without investment by foreign firms, and without foreign aid, the Soviet people built an economy that transformed their country from the backward semi-colonial land of the tsars into the world's second industrial, scientific and military power. They collectivised agriculture and created an iron and steel industry, tractors, machine tools, agricultural machinery and aircraft. They brought electricity to the whole country and built coal and oil industries. There was no unemployment, and people had free housing, free education and free health care: children got free vitamins. The late Lord Bullock, not the friendliest witness, wrote, "the achievement of the Russian people on the economic front, under the Soviet system and Stalin's leadership, was remarkable."
The supreme test was the Second World War. Soviet forces inflicted 90% of Nazi Germany's military casualties. As Albert Seaton wrote of Stalin, "he must be allowed credit for the amazing successes of 1944", which are "among the most outstanding in the world's military history."
General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, judged that Stalin had `a military brain of the very highest order'. The veteran American diplomat Averell Harriman wrote of Stalin's "high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and the surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing, at least in the war years. I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders." Henri Michel, the French historian of the war, wrote, "The Soviet victory was the Red Army's victory, but it was also the victory of the Soviet economy and of the Bolshevik regime ... finally, this victory was Stalin's victory."
As they say in Russia, Stalin found the country a wreck and left it a superpower; Gorbachev found it a superpower and left it a wreck. Without Stalin's leadership of the Soviet Union, Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union, then occupied Britain and won the war, so we owe Stalin and the Soviet people a huge debt.
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 7:16:05 GMT
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 7:40:49 GMT
The Year of Stalingrad [Paperback]
Alexander Werth (Author)
Sunday Times war-correspondent Werth spent four years in the Soviet Union during WW2. He traveled widely, interviewed Russian officers and enlisted men, civilians and German prisoners. His diary entries and description of why and how the Russians managed to turn back the Nazi invasion make this a fascinating book to read.
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Russia at War: 1941-1945 by Alexander Werth (Paperback)
Alexander Werth left Russia as a teenager and was a journalist for the Times. He spoke both Russian and English fluently,and in addition to this he had a natural talent for journalism (some of his work is included in the Faber anthology of great reportage) So,in short,a lucid and talented writer, who spoke and wrote both Russian and English like a native, and was actually present in the Soviet Union at the time! Why, Oh why, is this book out of print?
Soviet soldiers inspecting ovens at Madjanek. The eye witness accounts sent into the Times were not printed. Deemed unbelievable.......Soviet Propaganda?
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 8:15:38 GMT
Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe by Mark Mazower . Reviewer William Podmore.
In this remarkable study of Nazi rule over Europe, Mark Mazower shows the full horror of Nazism and its lack of any redeeming feature. Its anti-human philosophy could end only in utter destruction.
Mazower notes that the British-French Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini was `a disaster for the Czechs and a catastrophe for all those hoping to stem the German drive to war'. The British state then gave the Czech reserves of $100 million to the Nazis after they seized Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
The Nazis set up colonial-style regimes giving Hitler unfettered executive power. Their colonial autocracy, brutality and racism denied equality and national sovereignty.
The Nazi occupiers consumed a growing part of Europe's shrinking output, through exploitation, dismantling and destruction. Predatory, never self-sufficient, never autarchic, they increasingly depended on imports and on foreign labour. Their rule brought `plunder and genocide'.
The Nazis carried out mass murders throughout Eastern Europe. Hitler told his senior commanders that he wanted the `physical annihilation' of the Polish population. In their invasion of Poland, the Nazis massacred 50,000 Poles and 7,000 Jews. By contrast, Soviet policy in Poland "did not aim to get rid of any particular national or ethnic group in toto. Its purpose was social revolution, not national purification."
Mazower notes, "the cult of force and the racial geopolitics that the Nazis took so seriously turned into a programme of extermination on a scale which had no precedent." On 12 December 1941, Hitler told his Gauleiters, "The world war is here, so the annihilation of Jewry must be the necessary consequence."
Mazower writes, "The rising power in the Agriculture and Food Ministry, Herbert Backe, was a long-time advocate of de-industrializing Russia. His goal was to weaken the urban working class which Stalin had built up and turn the country back into the wheat supplier for western Europe that it had been before the Bolsheviks seized power." The Nazis aimed to cut off Moscow and Leningrad from the grain-producing Ukraine and leave them to starve.
But the Soviet Union fought back and played the main part in defeating Hitler's armies. Mazower points out that Operation Bagration was "not only the most effective Soviet offensive of the war but perhaps the most overwhelming and devastating single military assault in history."
After the war, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland expelled Germans. Mazower observes, "the idea that the Powers could turn expulsions on and off at will takes little account of the real driving force behind them - the immense popular hatred towards the Germans that existed in the regions they had occupied as the war came to an end."
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Post by dodger on Sept 12, 2013 7:38:49 GMT
Excellent study of Zhukov, November 13, 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (Hardcover)
This is a very useful biography of Georgy Zhukov, the greatest general of the Second World War, by Geoffrey Roberts, author of Stalin's wars and Victory at Stalingrad. Roberts is professor and head of the School of History at University College Cork.
In August 1939, Zhukov defeated Japanese forces at the battle of Khalkhin-Gol in Mongolia, a victory which stopped the Soviet Union facing a two-front war.
Roberts explains Stalin's actions before the invasion of the Soviet Union: "Stalin also feared that premature mobilisation could accelerate the outbreak of hostilities with Hitler. `Mobilization means war', he told Zhukov, mindful of the precedent of the July Crisis of 1914 that led to the First World War" when Germany declared war on Russia in reply to Russia's mobilisation.
Roberts also explains Hitler's early successes: "German military successes ... were to be expected from a combat-hardened army that had conquered Poland, France, and most of the rest of Europe."
Zhukov led the Yel'nya offensive in August-September 1941, the Red Army's first major victory over the Wehrmacht, which delayed the Nazis' advance on Moscow for several vital weeks. Later, he saved Leningrad from capture, and stopped the Nazi advance on Moscow.
He played a key role in the Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad. "Stalingrad was the beginning of the end for Hitler's Axis alliance." Soviet forces there routed Hitler and his allies who lost 50 divisions and suffered 1.5 million casualties.
Zhukov conducted the battle of Kursk. He also coordinated Operation Bagration, which shattered Hitler's Army Group Centre, and he led the final assault on Berlin. Like Oliver Cromwell, Zhukov never lost a battle.
Roberts concludes, "If Zhukov was the greatest general of the Second World War - in the sense that he made a decisive contribution to all the war's significant turning points - it was not through his efforts alone. He was a member of a Soviet High Command that collectively performed brilliantly. Arguably it was Stalin's management of his generals that mattered as much as their individual talents, skills, and exploits. By using his leadership and authority to create a coherent group of powerful and often clashing personalities, Stalin elicited the best from their individual and collective talents, and inspired and demanded a loyalty that held them together through disaster and triumph."
As Zhukov wrote of Stalin, "He could find the main link in a strategic situation which he seized upon in organising actions against the enemy, and thus assured the success of offensive operations. It is beyond question that he was a splendid Supreme Commander-in-Chief."
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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 6:44:23 GMT
Over-rated and superficial, September 4, 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: The Second World War (Hardcover)
Antony Beevor has won an undeserved reputation as a historian. His book on Stalingrad plagiarised John Erickson's far better books on the war on the Eastern Front, and his book on the war in Spain plagiarised Hugh Thomas' book.
On the big questions of the Second World War, Beevor reveals his out-dated prejudices. He has never a good word to say about our allies, the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. He relies on Jon Halliday and Jung Chang for `correcting' his account of Japan's war on China.
Early in his book he writes, "The Japanese had recently been taken aback by Communist forces in northern China launching a series of attacks." And, "The Communists managed to push back the Japanese in many places, cut the Peking-Hankow railway, destroy coal mines and even carry out attacks into Manchuria. This major effort, using their forces in more conventional tactics, cost them 22,000 casualties which they could ill afford."
These conclusions contradict his later claim (made after talks with Halliday and Chang?) that "Communist supporters such as Edgar Snow had managed to persuade readers in the United States that Mao's forces were fighting hard while the corrupt Nationalists were doing little, when in fact the opposite was true."
Beevor writes of "the Great Leap Forward which killed more people than in the whole of the Second World War ... the seventy million victims of a regime that was in many ways worse than Stalinism". Is it too much to ask that he checks the facts, rather than just repeat Chang and Halliday's absurd lies?
Beevor writes, "Relations between the western Allies and Stalin were bound to be fraught with suspicion. Churchill especially had promised far more military supplies than Britain was able deliver [sic]. And the American President's disastrous assurance to Molotov in May that they would launch a Second Front before the end of the year did more to poison the Grand Alliance than anything else. Stalin's paranoid tendencies persuaded him that the capitalist countries simply wanted the Soviet Union to be weakened while they waited."
Churchill had of course backed Roosevelt's promise. After the facts that Beevor cited, it seems a little rude to call Stalin paranoid for noticing these same facts and drawing the correct conclusion.
Beevor ends by trying to blame Hitler and Stalin equally for the war. He calls the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany two `totalitarians', ignoring the crucial difference that the Soviet Union did all it could to prevent the most terrible war in history, while Nazi Germany did all it could to start it. Beevor is too mean-minded and hidebound to acknowledge that without Stalin and the Red Army we would all be living - if at all - in Hitler's concentration camps.
This is not so much a history of the Second World War as a stream of anecdotes, verging all too often on war porn.
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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 6:57:47 GMT
Fine study of the Soviet war effort, October 23, 2009
By William Podmore
This review is from: Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (Vintage) (Paperback)
Chris Bellamy, Professor of Military Science and Doctrine at Cranfield University, has written a thorough history of the war on the Eastern front. He judges that the Soviet Union's war with Finland "did achieve some territorial expansion, which may have saved Leningrad in 1941."
Hitler's Chief of Staff, Colonel-General Franz Halder, called Soviet deployments in June 1941 `purely defensive'. Right up to the invasion, the British government thought that Germany was just using military pressure to intimidate the Soviet Union, and it expected more German demands, or an ultimatum, not an invasion.
It was, as Bellamy points out, `a totally unprovoked and unconditional attack'. Molotov said, "Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten. Victory will be with us." In the first days, "German accounts are unanimous about the unexpected strength and savagery of the Soviet resistance across most of the front." As Halder said, the Red Army "simply do not know when they have been defeated."
Bellamy applauds Stalin's key decision to shift 2,593 industrial enterprises east, `probably his most crucial decision' and emphasises, "The hard definition of intellect. Priorities." He refutes Khrushchev's lies about Stalin's behaviour after the invasion, and details his demanding work schedule, commenting, "if anyone deserved a break, it was Stalin. But, it transpired, the country could not do without him."
Germany's first great defeat was the Battle of Britain in 1940. The Battle of Smolensk July 1941 fatally delayed the German advance. Germany's first great defeat on land was the Battle of Moscow, September 1941-April 1942. Bellamy rates the Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad, Operation Uranus, in November 1942, as `the greatest encirclement of all time'. He observes that Operation Bagration, in June 1944, "underlined a cardinal principle of war. The enemy's main forces must be the main objective. And the enemy's main force had been destroyed."
Bellamy praises "the Russians' record of resilience, fighting spirit, tactical ingenuity and innovation, and operational and strategic leadership." He notes, "Without the tight political and security control exercised through and by the NKVD, neither Leningrad nor the whole country might have survived."
He writes, "the socialist victory in the 1945 general election owed something to the upsurge of pro-Russian, and therefore, at that time, pro-communist - certainly socialist - feeling among the British people during the war. After all, the British people had faced the Germans alone for a year in 1940-41, and the Russians had held them and knocked them back, pretty well alone, apart from the limited support the western Allies could send, in 1941-2."
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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 8:03:26 GMT
First bomb casualty on Britain in WW2
The first German bomb to land on Britain landed in a field in the Shetlands on October 16 1939…….a rabbit supposedly gave his life for his country!
Nothing would stand in the way of a good story--even the shock revelation that the rabbit had been purchased, at local butcher, by furtive news hacks...from the mainland. In precious little time bombs would be dropping for real. No surprise to us that truth was the first casualty of the war.
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Post by dodger on Sept 16, 2013 10:54:44 GMT
From Goebbels' diary: May 1943.
"The Fuehrer recalled the case of Tuchachevsky and expressed the opinion that we were entirely wrong then in believing that Stalin would ruin the Red Army by the way he handled it. The opposite was true: Stalin got rid of all opposition in the Red Army and thereby brought an end to defeatism."
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From Himmler's Posen speech:
"When -- I believe it was in 1937 or 1938 -- the great show trials were being held in Moscow, and the ex-Czarist officer and later Bolshevik general Tuchachevski and other generals were shot, we were, at that time, all over Europe, even in the Party and the SS, of the opinion that the Bolshevik system, and therefore Stalin, had made one of its most serious mistakes. We were absolutely mistaken in this judgment of the situation. We can state this, once and for all, in a spirit of full respect for the truth. I believe that Russia could not have withstood the two years of war -- it is now in the third year of war -- had it retained its ex-Czarist generals."
...
"The winter of 1941-42, with its consequences, was, on the one hand, the work of Fate, which hit us hard for the first time; on the other hand, however, it was the work of the political commissars, the "politruks", whose severity and relentlessness, whose fanatical, brutal will drove the raw material of the Slavic, Mongolian mass man to the front, and didn't let him get back out again."
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A private and public assessment of previous blunder. A wish that was father to the thought. Proved inadequate as a method of analysis. Fate as it was deemed, stark reality, as you and I may view it, demolished that contrivance. It was a field of vision shared by all European leaders too. All had neglected the unpleasant job of cleaning out their own stables, with predictable results.
The Emperor Frederich the Great once boasted he had " ten cooks in his army and 20,000 spies." Stalin knew his history. Many had forgotten theirs.
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Post by dodger on Sept 17, 2013 14:13:23 GMT
Indispensable to any study of World War Two, 16 Sep 2013
This review is from: Stalin's Correspondence with Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman 1941-45 (Hardcover)
This fascinating collection of documents gives us an unparalleled insight into the how the Grand Alliance was conducted and maintained, despite all the difficulties involved.
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Post by dodger on Sept 19, 2013 23:20:34 GMT
Red Phoenix Rising: The Soviet Air Force in World War II (Modern War Studies)
by Von Hardesty
Edition: Hardcover
Price: £29.92
Excellent study of the Soviet Air Force during World War Two., 19 Sep 2013
This review by Will Podmore
Von Hardesty is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum, and Ilya Grinberg is a professor at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. They have written a superb account, based on wide research, of the Soviet air force during World War II.
In the first week of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Nazi forces destroyed about 4,000 Soviet aircraft, yet, "the Soviets possessed a remarkable capacity to strike back under extreme pressure."
The authors note, "For the VVS [Soviet Air Force] in August 1941, there were signs of resiliency - even renewal. Indeed, the Nazi blitzkrieg had achieved dazzling tactical victories, but in a strategic sense, the enemy had been denied a clear and decisive victory. ... The Soviet military - and the VVS - fought desperately, even in the face of enormous losses. The VVS remained severely weakened and disorganized, but it persisted as a viable force. ... Like Britain in 1940, the enemy had not destroyed Soviet airpower, although it had inflicted severe punishment. As long as the VVS survived, there was the hope of renewal and perhaps ultimate victory."
They point out, "The ultimate fate of the VVS - as well as the larger Soviet military - would rest on the State Defense Committee's crucial decision, in early 1941, to evacuate Soviet war industries to the East. The herculean effort to transplant more than 1,500 industrial enterprises beyond the Ural Mountains at the height of the German invasion marks one of the Soviets' most impressive wartime achievements." Ten million people were involved; by 1942, they were producing 25,000 aircraft from the rebuilt factories.
The authors observe, "Moscow - unlike Paris two years before - stopped the advance of Nazi Germany. For the Soviet Union, as well as the Allied cause itself, this was indeed a momentous turning point in the war."
They note, "The Soviet use of airpower played a major role in the outcome of the battle at Stalingrad. ... Stalingrad demonstrated the elaborate requirements for the conduct of large-scale air operations: administrative centralization; the creation of large, mobile air armies for rapid deployment; close coordination and liaison with ground forces; and the mobilisation of logistical support. For the first time, the VVS command structure administered four air armies and five ADD divisions over a vast area in a five-month air campaign, shifting from strategic defense to a coordinated air offensive and air blockade."
They remark that, at the Kuban River in the North Caucasus, in April-May 1943, "Here, for the first time, the VVS displayed a rapidly evolving organizational efficiency, ever-shifting air tactics, numerical superiority, and clever employment of its vast air reserves." "In this crucible of combat, a new quasi-independent logistical arm with viable command and control systems slowly took shape. The elements required to support an air army consisted of technical supply, airfield construction, motorized transportation, fuel, and medical service. The overriding priorities became efficiency, discipline, and coordination ..."
By 1945 it had become the world's largest operational-tactical air force, with a strong and unified command. Adolf Galland, who commanded Luftwaffe fighter operations, judged, "The technical quality of the Soviet Air Force [had] improved considerably, and by the end of the war Soviet personnel and equipment was roughly equal to the Luftwaffe."
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Post by dodger on Oct 1, 2013 19:34:59 GMT
Very useful study of World War Two, 1 Oct 2013
This William Podmore review is from: The Great Crusade: A New Complete History of the Second World War (Paperback)
Willmott, a lecturer at Sandhurst, has written a remarkably comprehensive one-volume history of the Second World War. He noted, "the air offensive made a significant contribution to victory." He pointed out, "The Allies could not bomb without causing civilian casualties, and they could not afford to deny themselves an offensive that imposed a second front upon the Wehrmacht a full year before the invasion of north-west Europe."
Willmott observed, "in military terms, the capture of Warsaw was probably beyond Soviet resources in August and September: the 1st Belorussian Front alone sustained 123,000 battle casualties in July and August."
Willmott remarked, "American policy was geared to the reality that the defeat of Germany could not be achieved without Soviet power being brought into eastern and central Europe and sought to ensure that that this did not prevent continuing cooperation between the Allies, not to prevent such an emergence of Soviet power." He added, "eastern Europe was neither Britain's nor America's to abandon and betray: it did not lie within an Anglo-American power of gift." Of the 1945 Yalta conference, Willmott observed, "the Americans had much the better of the bargains struck at this conference. The United States yielded nothing that the Soviet Union did not already have or could take for herself without seeking American agreement ..."
Willmott commented, "Soviet terror, though not justified, was at least understandable in light of Germany's behaviour in eastern Europe since 1939."
He judged, "In terms of scale the Nazi-Soviet conflict was unprecedented, and it was infinitely more important in deciding the outcome of the Second World War than any other theatre, perhaps even more important than all others combined."
Willmott concluded, "The point that emerges from any detailed examination of the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front in 1942 is that the Wehrmacht was outfought at every level ..." The official US army history stated of the Bagration campaign, "in executing the breakthroughs Soviet forces showed elegance in their tactical conceptions, economy of force, and control that did not fall short of the Germans' own performance in the early war years."
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Post by dodger on Oct 7, 2013 17:39:22 GMT
words and testimony of the workers themselves....
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