Stalingrad

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For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. However, although Soviet attacks at this point were appallingly wasteful and incompetent, there could be no doubt about the determination to defend Stalingrad at any cost.

Antony Beevor has written an excellent history which should be required reading for those who think that D-Day was what broke the back of the Nazi war machine. This I greatly regret: I have a friend, Josek, who was in that siege as one of many idealistic Polish volunteers who made the incredible trip there, survived despite getting TB, and was given a loaf of bread to set him on his way back to Poland - if you ask me it's more than a one loaf walk, but anyway. You read about General Paulus’s nervous tic, or about how Operation Uranus, the plan that encircled the Sixth army, came into being.Antony Beevor is the renowned author of Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees' Award. This dismissal, Beevor asserts, marked the tragic end of the general staff as an independent planning body. Trotz seiner Sympathien für die Russen wird der Respekt und die Empathie für die Leidenden deutlich. In short, Stalingrad is a great book, the sort of account a battle so important and breathtakingly vicious deserves.

Many of the planes carrying them crashed and scattered their final words to the winds and elements, or into the hands of Russians who used them for propaganda.It was the United States who provided substantial material support to Russia, significantly enhancing their ability to defeat Germany. An extraordinary story of tactical genius, civilian bravery, obsession, carnage and the nature of war itself, 'Stalingrad' will act as a testament to the vital role of the soviet war effort.

With Hitler's launch of Operation Barbarossa and planned annihilation of Bolshevism - or rather, it's new form: Stalinism, his armies would turned up on the banks of the Volga and end up marking the turning point in the second World War. In an attempt to impress Toni, a neighbour he is trying to romance, he quotes facts he has learnt from Beevor's book. But the eventual victory of the Red Army, and the failure of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, was the first defeat of Hitler’s territorial ambitions in Europe, and the start of his decline. You read about the HiWis (look them up if you don’t know about them) and the select group who fought until the end for the Sixth army.At near 500 pages it's deep and dense enough giving you just about the most comprehensive account of the Battle of Stalingrad, yet never becomes boring or too academic making for an immensely addictive and intense read if you like your WW2 history books. Beevor is a former officer with the 11th Hussars who served in England and Germany for five years before resigning his commission. This book starts with operation Barbarossa and goes on towards the fateful siege of the city Stalingrad. For instance, the Sixth Army had to respond to Soviet tactics with "storm-wedges" introduced in 1918: "assault groups of ten men armed with a machine-gun, light mortar and flame-throwers for clearing bunkers, cellars, sewers.

It deserves to be understood by every literate westerner, because what happened on the Eastern Front had a decisive impact on the post-war world. Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year “Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad is much more than a military history. It is no small achievement to have reached such a wide audience with the pity of this particular war. On the north front, Russians sent in Lend-Lease American tanks, which with their thin protection, proved easier to knock out.Some soldiers were optimistic about Hitler’s declarations about how he would relieve the army at Stalingrad but pray to be taken away via Pitomnik airfield. Hitler's frustrations over the lack of success in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad, meanwhile, reached its zenith when he dismissed General Haider, the chief of the Army General Staff.