The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin`s War with Germany, Volume One

I don't often write such negative reviews, even when a book is on the opposite side of the political spectrum than me. But I couldn't believe how bad this volume was, first published in 1975 and re-issued by another publisher in 1984. I wondered about 100 pages in whether the author, John Erickson, had been given an assigment deep in the Cold War, by a US intelligence agency or MI-6 in Britain, to compile a list of all high ranking Soviet military officers and their units, and their fate from June, 1941 to the fall of 1942, focused on the German attempt to capture Moscow first, and then take Stalingrad. I thought of this aspect recalling that segment in the movie "Thirteen Days" when Ken O'Donnell combs the CIA dossiers on Russian officials to try to verify the importance of the "back channel" intelligence officer meeting with RFK to go around the Politburo: turns out they found out he served with Khrushchev in the Southern theatre in Ukraine from WWII records and Mr. K shows up reapeatedly in this book. I do not exaggerate however: you could comb the entire 472 pages of text with a sieve, looking for commentary and context paragraphs, and judgement ones too, and end up with an essay of about 50-75 pages, maybe less. The rest is a list of officers, units, Fronts, towns, cities and pincer maneuvers from both sides, but no serious writing about what the battles were like and very little from the officers and soldiers themselves. A book of lists of names, places and units all waiting to be keypunched into the early IBM models. Astonishingly, despite the long paragraphs about front build ups, grand strategies, and the units to be involved over the huge landscape that was Russia, WWII from June 1941 until early 1943 at Stalingrad, and the Southern Front, there is not a single map when the text cries out for a hundred maps, one every five pages. Well, at least, one every 25-50 pages. I was constantly going to my two atlases to follow the verbiage and see where the towns, rivers and natural features (which get short shrift, but are occassionaly mentioned). Now I'm not calling for a "people's history" of this massive slaughter, but heavens, I ended up skimming quickly through the text to get to the substantive commentary and evaluations of the strategy and tactics. It's better on the grand strategies, but is just awful on the battlefield tactics, type of defensives, weapons on both sides ( although I did learn that Russia had a heavy tank besides the new T-34 - by not a word of the fearful German machine gun the M-42 nor the field guns from either side (we do get the calibres of the Russian ones, not much else like their effectiveness). Readers who want good military writing which fills in all Erickson's missing parts, please visit the literary but engaging volume entitled "Stalingrad" by Vasily Grossman, who was a Russian Red Star military reporter - some say the Russian "Ernie Pyle" who was close to the shifting fronts on the long and massive retreat which only stopped on the outskirts of Stalingrad in the fall of 1942. And more than a few times Erickson's strained volume offered up vivid memories of episodes of battles and forced march breakouts that made Grossman's "Stalingrad" such a great read. Unfortunately, I also bought Erickson's second volume on the war, "The Road to Berlin" which starts much better but devolves into the old pattern - but does offer a few maps. Why do I submit myself to these trials? Because I write fairly extensively about the war on Ukraine at Substack. And at the same time reading Antony Beevor's "Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, which is the inverse in every sense but especially style, of Erickson's work.

John Erickson's "The Road to Stalingrad" is a meticulously written, detail rich work of military history. This dense volume illuminates the tragedies and triumphs of Stalin's war machine from the outbreak of Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 until the victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad in early 1943. This is not a volume for the casual reader wishing to learn more about the Soviet experience in World War Two, but it and its sister volume proved essential when writing my Master's Thesis on the Nazi and Soviet command structures during the war. If you want a deep analysis of Stalin and his commanders at war, then check out this and the second volume, Erickson's "The Road to Berlin."

The edition I just finished is the original 1975 Harper & Row, apparently not revised since. The book is very good in its detail of the Soviet primary sources available at that date to the author, and his mastery of Slavonic languages was a great aid to him in conversations and other research in the USSR. It is also good in providing a semblance of Red Army order-of-battle and leadership, i.e. up to a point. Much of the detail is perhaps a bit more than the reader may want - down to divisional, brigade, regiment, etc. level actions and movements - but a major flaw is the complete lack of ANY maps whatsoever (at least in this edition I read from), so the reader is doing a mental juggling act in visualizing the movements of corps, armies, fronts, and so forth. The author frequently cites the diminution of Red Army units through casualties and attrition but only rarely points out the same for German units. One is left with an overall (and very false) impression that the Soviets are fighting from a terrible disadventage while the Nazis have relatively fresh and full-strength formations. In truth, the German units were just as ragged and undermanned/underequipped for most of the war and did NOT have much in the way of fresh formations and huge production to draw from, ever. Even at the very start of the 1941 invasion the Germans were up against a massive Soviet superiority in everything but quality of leadership - Erickson must surely have known this but he does not mention it at all. Erickson continually cites the severe shortages for Red Army units and fronts of ammunition, troops, tanks, lorries, etc., and these shortages are cited by Red Army officers as a major reason for the many catastrophes they suffered at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Actually the USSR was producing HUGE quantities of war materiel of all types and their manpower pool was almost inexhaustible; the problem was their misuse and misallocation/misdeployment of these needs, i.e. incompetence. One may note the exact same sets of excuses used by the Czar's army during World War One. Even then they had huge production etc. but incompetently handled it all. Erickson could have understood that but he didn't write about that parallel. A good study of the WW1 excuses was done by Norman Stone in his THE EASTERN FRONT 1914-1917. I highly recommend Paul Carell's HITLER MOVES EAST and its sequel SCORCHED EARTH as the best available study from the German side. His HME reads like an exciting epic. Also very good is Clark's BARBAROSSA - a major thesis in his work is demonstrating how weak the Germans actually were in the 1941 invasion and onwards, far weaker than the Soviets. Seaton I haven't read (yet). And then there are all the various memoirs, e.g. by Guderian, Manstein, et al.

John Erickson's 2-part history of the Soviet-German war in 1941-1945 is the definitive English-language publication on the topic. Because the Second World War was basically won and lost on the Eastern Front, and because conquest of the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe was Hitler's primary motivation for going to war in the first place, this book is a must-read for anyone truly interested in military history or the history of the 20th Century in general. There is a lack of maps in the book, so I would suggest to the reader that they invest in a WWII atlas of some sort if they really want to follow what is happening. And the book is mostly told form the Soviet perspective, but that is not such a bad thing as there are far more English-language books about the Third Reich anyway. But there is nothing else written in English that comes close to Erickson's history in terms of overall balance and exhaustive, well-documented research.

If you're studying Stalingrad or building up a credible military library, you really need this book, which stands alongside Antony Beevor's best-selling "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege" and Joel Hayward's definitive "Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitlers Defeat in the East 1942 - 1943". Make sure you have all three.Erickson's book explains Soviet grand strategy, operational art, and tactics, and does so during a narrative that is gripping and informative. Yes, it is true that you need maps to help you locate the place names but check out the good maps in Hayward's book while you are reading Erickson's. Erickson cut a trail with his meticulous use of Soviet russian-language archival documents. This gives the book real strenth and reliabilty.Soviet sacrifices were as great as Soviet suffering. I would like to shake the hand of every Soviet commander Erickson mentions. Thank God for them is all I can say. THEY won World War II.The books I mention in this book review are so far ahead of the rest that I would give them all six stars. You must get them. Erickson's companion volume, by the way, is about the period from Stalingrad to Berlin. It is also magnificent.By the way, I once met Professor Erickson and I can affirm that he is a thoroughly nice gentleman. He signed his book for me and happily answered my dumb questions. Isn't it nice that at least some of our paramount scholars aren't ivory-tower types?

One of the most fascinating aspects about this book is that Erickson's study was so thorough, that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this book still remains a definitive work on the Red Army during the Second World War. I agree with a another review that one must have some knowledge of the conflict before attempting to read this book as the author assumes that the reader has some knowledge of the conflict.. It serves not only as a study of the Red Army but also has interesting insights into the political, economic and socail situation of the Sviet Union during the Second World War.