Objective Mosco‘v
Operation Barbarossa. By Ronald Seth. (Blond, 25s.) ALTHOUGH the outcome of the war was decided on the Eastern Front, as a sector it remains the most underwritten of all. There are the apolo- getic memoirs of the German commanders; and apologetic interpretations of those memoirs by German historians; and the accounts, alternately fervent and romantic, or oppressively turgid, of their Russian opposite numbers. But every his- torian who approaches this subject with the intention of objectivity becomes ekmeshed, it seems, in the tangle of unpronounceable place names, myriad corps, divisions, battle-groups; the difficulty of finding superlatives in a cam- paign which was bloodier, vaster, longer, more barbarous, than anything in history.
If we take the Russian Front as a whole, we can see peaks of crisis which protrude from this Matto Grosso of detail. They are: the summer of 1941, when Hitler and professional opinion in the German Army were divided over the alter- natives of a direct advance on Moscow, or operations in the Ukraine and against Leningrad. Their hesitation resulted in a delay which allowed the Red Army to recover from the first shock of impact. The second crisis occurs in December of 1942, and concerns the attempted relief of the Sixth Army. The third, in July of 1943, when the Germans tried to mount another summer offensive. Of these, the first is probably the most important, and falls within the scope of this book (which ends with the winter of 1941).
Mr. Seth has done a workmanlike job with his narrative, but it amounts to little more than a digest (and one whose continuity is far from perfect) of a few widely read German sources, notably Guderian, Manstein, Assmann and Halder's diary. He has made no attempt to analyse the controversies, personal and doctrinal, which so vexed the German High Command in the summer of 1941. Of the primary authorities, some, like Goure's Siege of Leningrad, have been ignored, others, like Erickson's The Soviet High Command, have been quoted from extensively, but not acknowledged in the bibliography.
There are no illustrations, many misprints and a number of execrable maps, only partially translated from the German, reproduced in a clump at the end .of the book. By the time that the Germans reach the outskirts of Moscow the reader is in such a muddle that to read that . . but somehow the situation was saved' no longer prompts curiosity as to how, but rather gratitude that Mr. Seth does not really try to tell him.
ALAN CLARK
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