Название: The Stalingrad TrilogyАвтор: David M. Glantz, Jonathan M. House
Издательство: University Press of Kansas
Год: 2009-2014
Формат: EPUB
Размер: 117 Мб
Язык: английский / English
The confrontation between German and Soviet forces at Stalingrad was a titanic clash of armies on an unprecedented scale—a campaign that was both a turning point in World War II and a lasting symbol of that war's power and devastation. Yet despite the attention lavished on this epic battle by historians, much about it has been greatly misunderstood or hidden from view—as David Glantz, the world's foremost authority on the Red Army in World War II, now shows.
1. To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April-August 1942
This first volume in Glantz's masterly trilogy draws on previously unseen or neglected sources to provide the definitive account of the opening phase of this iconic Eastern Front campaign. Glantz has combed daily official records from both sides—including the Red Army General Staff, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the German Sixth Army, and the Soviet 62nd Army—to produce a work of unparalleled detail and fresh interpretations. Jonathan House, an authority on twentieth-century warfare, adds further insight and context. Hitler's original objective was not Stalingrad but the Caucasus oilfields to the south of the city. So he divided his Army Group South into two parts-one to secure the city on his flank, one to capture the oilfields. Glantz reveals for the first time how Stalin, in response, demanded that the Red Army stand and fight rather than withdraw, leading to the numerous little-known combat engagements that seriously eroded the Wehrmacht's strength before it even reached Stalingrad. He shows that, although advancing German forces essentially destroyed the armies of the Soviet Southwestern and Southern Fronts, the Soviets resisted the German advance much more vigorously than has been thought through constant counterattacks, ultimately halting the German offensive at the gates of Stalingrad.
2. Armageddon in Stalingrad: September-November 1942
Armageddon in Stalingrad continues David Glantz and Jonathan House's bold new look at this most iconic military campaign of the Eastern Front and Hitler's first great strategic defeat. While the first volume in their trilogy described battles that took the German army to the gates of Stalingrad, this next one focuses on the inferno of combat that decimated the city itself. Previous accounts of the battle are far less accurate, having relied on Soviet military memoirs plagued by error and cloaked in secrecy. Glantz and House have plumbed previously unexploited sources—including the archives of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the records of the Soviet 62nd and German Sixth Armies—to provide unprecedented detail and fresh interpretations of this apocalyptic campaign. They allow the authors to reconstruct the fighting hour by hour, street by street, and even building by building and reveal how Soviet defenders established killing zones throughout the city and repeatedly ambushed German spearheads.
3. Endgame at Stalingrad: Book Two: December 1942 -February 1943
In Book Two of the third volume of his magisterial Stalingrad Trilogy, David Glantz continues and concludes his definitive history of one of the most infamous battles of World War Two, the Stalingrad campaign that signaled Germany's failure on the Eastern Front and marked a turning point in the war. Book Two finds Germany's most famous army—General Friedrich Paulus's Sixth—in dire straits, trapped in the Stalingrad kessel, or pocket, by a Red Army that has seized the initiative in what the Soviets now term the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army's counteroffensive, Operation Uranus, is well underway, having largely destroyed the bulk of two Romanian armies and encircled the German Sixth and half of the German Fourth Panzer Army. Drawing on materials previously unavailable or believed lost, Glantz gives a closely observed account of the final ten weeks of Germany's ill-fated Stalingrad campaign. In short order, the Red Army parried and then defeated two German attempts to rescue the Sixth Army, crushed the Italian Eighth and Hungarian Second Armies, severely damaged the German Fourth Panzer and Second Armies, and finally destroyed the German Sixth Army in the ruins of Stalingrad. With well over half-a-million soldiers torn from its order of battle, Hitler's Axis could only watch in horror as its status abruptly changed from victor to vanquished. This book completes a vivid and detailed picture of the Axis defeat that would prove decisive as a catastrophe from which Germany and its Wehrmacht could never recover.