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Best book on Eastern front?

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#21
Nestor Makhno said:
Beevor's Stalingrad book would benefit from a new edition where he went through some of the newly-released archival materioal and got rid of all the apocryphal cold-war-filtered (by both sides) bollox.
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Agreed.

Bolt said:
Sounds like a good book. Have anyone read it?
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Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed I enjoyed a lot, it's mainly about the fighting from September to November and corrects a lot of the mistakes made by other authors about famous events/people of the battle of Stalingrad. It has a lot of first hand testimony and really gives you a great idea of what the Russian soldiers had to endure. Brilliant book in my opinion, never boring either.


The Osprey books are also very good and have great illustrations. Unfortunately, the books on Stalingrad and Berlin are pretty bad due to the poor writing and research by Peter Antill. Most others you won't go wrong with.
 
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#22
I have alot of book of first hand accounts. Through, those who where published during the cold war period might lack a bit. ( thos on the russian side , through ) but gave an intresting insight. "Ivans War" is very good.

I found many on used book sales and doubt that some of them get a reprint.
There was a intresting one called "Saat im Sturm", writen by a ex-SS member who was 17 around that time. Intresting read through. "Roter Schnee" is good too.

I have them all in german, apprently. So no linkage possible. I got "Saat im Sturm" fro Amazon.
 
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#27
A quote from Ivans War
Ilya Natanovich was born in Vitebsk province…
Ilya’s aunts had been involved in the revolutionary underground for decades. They were old hands by the time of Lenin’s coup in 1917. One had worked in a secret revolutionary group in Baku, the oil port on the shore of the Caspian Sea. It was there that she encountered the young man who later gave himself the name of Stalin. Ilya’s own image of the future leader was shaped by a tale she liked to tell about his cruelty. One afternoon, she said, it must have been in April, some time before 1904, she and a group of comrades were out for a walk. Their path lay by a river which had swollen after the spring thaw. A calf, newborn, still doubtful on its legs, had somehow become stranded on an island in the middle. The friends could hear its bleating above the roar of the water, but no one dared to risk the torrent. No one, that is, except the Georgian Koba, who ripped off his shirt and swam across. He reached the calf, hauled himself out to stand beside it, waited for all the friends to watch, and then he broke its legs.
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To be honest, I lol'ed.
And that books is being considered as a good one?...
 
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#28
Maxiimuz said:
Stalingrad written by Antony beevor is very good! :)
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erm - it's a good starting point, is all - try reading Mike Jones - Stalingrad: How the Red Army Triumphed (it's even translated into Russian now) for a Russo-centric view and Jason Mark's 'Island of Fire' for a view that focuses on the German troops.

Although they have very different approaches (Jones' is a psychological approach, Mark's an incredibly detailed procedural approach), both give an insight into what drove men in such horrific circumstances. Beevor's book is solid and workmanlike in most places but not very far removed from 'Enemy at the Gates' in the respect that it sometimes sensationalises the wrong things, imo.

Bolt - read Stalingrad - how the red army triumphed - you will love it.
 
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