Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Account Of The Stalingrad Battle
Review: This was the first book I read dedicated to the battle of Stalingrad and I can think of no better book I could have started with. Exhilarting, haunting, breath taking this book covers the human aspects of both sides of the fighting in Stalingrad in chilling detail but it also goes into detail of the troop movements and strategic aspects of the battle. Beever also starts by giving a brief yet useful insight into the 14 months from Barbarossa in June 1941 to Operation Blau in August 1942 to give a bigger picture of how the Wehrmacht found itself embroiled in the Southern city of Stalingrad, much further East than Moscow. The desperate struggle of wounded German soldiers trying to get the last remaining airfield in the Kessel before the Russian's closed in will probably haunt me for a long time to come. The sheer recklessness with which both sides, especially the Russians, treated the lives of their men sends a shiver down my spine and Beever portrays all this in a gripping narrative that you cannot put down. If you want to read just one book on Stalingrad and don't know which one to choose, I would suggest you choose this one.
Rating: 
Summary: The horror permeates the blur of detail
Review: What remains in my mind are the incidental points: German soldiers drowning in latrines, too weak from dysentary to rescue themselves or be rescued by starving comrades. Russians incinerated as they try to flee across the Volga. Mass cruelty mixed with a German clergyman painting a "Fortress Madonna" on the only available paper, the back of a military map. Soviet propagandists blaring "death tango" music across the front. The Russian truce seekers meeting with Germans after Christmas. Those on both sides who desert. Soviet POWs worked to death as human oxen. German letters home from the "kessel." Hitler's gambling with half a million lives and Goebbels' media manipulation. Stalin's NKVD and Hitler's Feldgendarmerie both shooting those terrified to fight. Everywhere, mud, ice, blood.These poignant and infuriating vignettes rise above the sheer mass of often primary-source material trawled by Beevor. Too often, this army formation goes here and this general goes there, especially in the middle of the narrative, and this weakens the "human" touch which I favor, although to be fair other readers may relish these strategic accounts. I certainly needed the maps to follow the action. When I was a child, a "Reader's Digest" condensation described Stalingraders eating library paste and boiling leather goods to survive. Surprisingly, the civilian plight gains very little attention; the focus here mixes wide-scale accounts of troop movements with accounts drawn from letters and documents. This is a difficult balancing act to carry off for simplifying a complicated story over a couple of years in four hundred pages, and I commend Beevor's skill while wishing nonetheless that the book was even longer, to allow more space between these two extremes, and more time to relate the dazzling or dreadful individual's story that illuminates the fog of war. A good companion to his "The Fall of Berlin," and those curious about the punishment batallions of the Soviets, the effect of the loss of the Sixth Army on the Nazi psyche, and the fate of those receiving Russian revenge for Nazi terror will find a logical continuation in his more recent work.
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