Barbarossa

Rating:
Summary: a vast subject brilliantly compressed
Review: Recognizing the overwhelming scale of this subject being too much to handle, Alan Clark manages to compress it into this one excellent narrative.

By emphasizing on the way Soviet and German leaders dealt with their problems, Alan Clark can afford to select the crucial scenes from this war. Most prominently emerges the year 1941, when Hitler painfully discovered he greatly overestimated his own military capacity. Clark's other selections roughly follow the same pattern: outcome differs from expectation.

The most terrible war in history of mankind has produced a real torrent of documentary materials. Alan Clark's 'Barbarossa' is one of the very few giving an all-spanning picture, without being boring or superficial. I guess even a 5 stars-rating is insufficient here.

Rating:
Summary: MAGNIFICENT
Review: This is one of the best book's ever written on world war two.
I learned a lot reading this book. Imagine a front 3000 miles long!
This book is full of information I had never read before.
It let's you get into the conversation's of Hitler, Canaris, Goering, Himmler, and the long suffering General Guderian. The author left me with the impression that the Soviet's could have defeated Hitler without allied help. My understanding of president Roosevelt's prosecution of the war took a major step down. The only problem i had with this book was the lack of good map's. But i still give it 5 star's.

Rating:
Summary: an interesting and worthwhile read
Review: Well written and interesting, though unfocused. Clark covers the early part of Barbarossa in great detail, in particular important battles like Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. However, there is little detail in between the major battles. For example, I've always wondered why Hitler sent several divisions down into the Caucasus in 1942, leaving a massively exposed northern flank, but Clark barely touches on that subject. He also spends a lot of pages describing abortive plots against Hitler and the various German leaders' efforts to negotiate peace without Hitler's knowledge late in the war. Since nothing came of any of the plots or the peace attempts, this isn't all that interesting and is well off the subject at hand. It's as if he compiled research that he did not know what else to do with, so he stuck it in the book. The absence of maps has been noted by other reviews and detracts from the book. Oddly, there is a list of maps at the beginning of the book, but no page numbers attached to them.

Despite these faults, it's a fine, if somewhat limited, read.