World War 2 didn't occur as you probably think it did. Oh, the over all outline of the war is known, but popular accounts, until recently, rarely reflected the course of events that led to the known results.
This is particularly true of the events of the Eastern Front, so the so-called Russo-German War (which in fact involved numerous other nationalities on both sides). During the first 25 so years after the end of the war, it was normal to ascribe the Soviet victory to their masses of manpower and enormous number of tanks. This was followed by increased admiration for the Red Army, which was considered to have high quality armaments (especially armored vehicles), and a superior strategic vision. If it never mastered tactics, it still achieved victory through its own means, destroying the fighting capacity of the Wehrmacht. The Soviet Union thus deserved the bulk of the credit for the defeat of Nazi Germany.
I believed this latter view of the conflict, even if I had some nagging doubts. I own numerous rare unit histories and personal accounts from the war. I had trouble reconciling some details with the generally understood course of the war. The turning point, which finally allowed me to start making sense of things, came when Military History Journal, published an article by Eastern Front expert David Glantz. It was a preview of his 1999 book Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, about the fighting near Rhzev in late 1942.
I knew something awful had transpired near Rhzev at that time, because every history of the Grossdeutschland Division makes it clear that this fighting was the worst it faced during the war. Yet most campaign histories of the Eastern Front indicated that the fronts of German Army Groups Center and North were quiet at this time. Glantz had learned, from German unit histories and Soviet archived documents, that a massive Soviet offensive had been utterly defeated there at the same time the Red Army was finding success to the south at Stalingrad. However, the more northerly offensive was erased from Soviet official records because of its failure. Glantz soon realized that other Soviet failures had been similarly covered up, such as the late 1943 fighting around Vitebsk (the first attempt to destroy Army Group Center) and the May 1944 offensive in Bessarabia (subject of Glantz's Red Storm Over the Balkans). Even at the end of the war, the best the Red Army could do along the Oder was to frontally assault Berlin via the Seelow Heights, suffering appalling casualties in the process.
How can this be reconciled with the very real success that the Soviets had in driving the Axis forces back into German and Austria? John Mosier has explained it better than anyone before in his recent book Deathride. He has a repuation for turning history on its head, but this was my first exposure to his work. I came away enthralled by the most mentally-stimulating book I've read in several years.
Mosier demonstrates that fiction was the order of the day in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule. Stalin was told what he wanted to hear, whether about agricultural harvest yields, or the output of tank factories. Soviet official histories consistently overestimated the casualties inflicted on the Germans, while minimizing Red Army losses and inventing tank production numbers. The Red Army in fact ran out of armored vehicles on many occasions, which explains why they made such extensive use of allegedly-inferior British and American models. They often ran out of men, too, and could not have continued the war without conscripting women, men considered too young/old/unfit for service by other armies, and men from lands that were liberated or occupied during the advance to Germany. Only the most elite units were kept up to strength with fit Russian men of prime military age, the rest had to take whatever they could get or find.
What doomed the Germans, Mosier argues, is that they had to divert substantial resources to the Mediterranean theater, to Western Europe, and to the airspace over Germany. This removed manpower and armored divisions from the Eastern Front, but more importantly, it robbed the armies in the east of most of their air support. Meanwhile, American lend-lease supplied the Red Army with hundreds of thousands of trucks and similar vehicles. Previously, up to mid-1943, the Germans could make orderly retreats, exacting heavy losses from the Red Army. Thereafter, the Soviets could advance faster than the Germans could retreat, so that German defensive efforts became less and less effective, even as they continued to inflict far higher casualties than they suffered. German resources were stretched too thin, which saved the Red Army from the defeat it would have suffered if the Germans could have devoted their full effort to the Eastern Front.
It all makes sense to me. Mosier backs up his ideas with detailed end notes (including a minor reference to one of my own books). I'm familiar with many of his sources, and believe he interpreted them correctly. At the same time, I can understand how this unorthodox view of history will bother some historians. It makes some books on the same topic seem irrelevant. At the same time, the topic is too vast for comprehensive coverage in one book of 300 pages. So Deathride is essentially a guide for how to approach studying the Eastern Front, from now on.
I have since acquired Mosiers earlier The Myth of the Great War and The Blitzkrieg Myth. I've read the latter, and found it to have good ideas, but with execution less successful than in Deathride, which I think benefits from having stronger source material. I assume Mosier acquired much of this material in his research for Deathride's predecessor, Cross of Iron (a study of the Wehrmacht, which I haven't read, but intend to purchase).
This is a golden age in the study of World War 2. Numerous detailed, extremely informative books are easily and cheaply available to anyone who wants to learn about the era. Deathride is a fine addition to this body of literature.
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