The Soviet-German War, 1941-1945: Myths and Realities

[JasonPratt]

COL (Ret) David M. Glantz, Editor, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, presents "The Soviet-German War, 1941-1945: Myths and Realities," as part of the Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series (archived at the US Army War College, uploaded to YT Mar 25, 2010).

I was meandering around doing some other things this morning and ran across this lecture from one of my favorite YT sites. Enjoyed the lecture and thought I would share.


The main backbone topic is about major East Front campaigns which so far as documentation go are utterly missing (or were utterly missing until just recently), despite being on par with Kursk and other famous campaigns, and can only be detected by data comparisons. (By which I mean the largest tank battle in history actually occurred early in Barbarossa, with Zhukov himself leading it, and practically nothing can be directly known about it.)

Accounting for those forgotten battles, argues Col. Glantz, exposes several well-known positions about the Eastern Front history (and several criticisms of main strategists on either side) as mistakes.

[JasonPratt]

One of Colonel Gantz' papers on the same topic, archived at Leavenworth.

http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/failures.htm

This is a summary of the full paper.

The Colonel made a 144-page version of his notes free to hand out (and archive and download). It includes the material from the transparencies in the video: they're spread out more, but you can find the tables for the forgotten operations of each period, just not next to the known operations for ease of comparison.

The pdf is too large to attach here, so here's the link to is Clemson archive download site: http://sti.clemson.edu/publications-mainmenu-38/commentaries-mainmenu-211/cat_view/33-strom-thurmond-institute/153-sti-publications-by-subject-area/158-history


As far as I can tell, he never did write a full book on it, so that pdf (a small book in itself) is the most that's available on the net. The video covers the material in the pdf fairly well.

[endfire79]

Thanks!  Always good to put a face & voice to an author of the books I've read. Checking out his essay as well

[JasonPratt]

He's rather a crusty lecturer isn't he?  :D I enjoyed it immensely, though I could only keep half an ear on it while working elsewhere.

[BanzaiCat]

Thanks, JP. Always interested in fresh insights into WWII, especially the Eastern Front.