Stalingrad - Antony Beevor

Okay guys, this is where it gets serious. It is often said that military history is a cold artform and there was nowhere colder, both physically and mentally than the East Front in the years 1941 to 1943.

Make no mistake, this is a masterwork of the craft. Described evocatively as "bedtime reading only for those who do not dream." Stalingrad follows the fortunes of the Ninth Army and it's commander Paulus over 5 sections and 431 pages in harrowing detail from the initial thrusts of Operation Barbarossa through the well-known events in the city itself to the fates of those captured. It's a measure of Beevor's narrative skills and faultless research that by the end of the book you almost feel more pity for the Germans than for the Soviet army that clung on desperately, fought for every singe centimetre of ground and took casualties in the hundreds of thousands.
Yet this is not to say that in some quirk of history the Soviets are portrayed as the bogeyman to the proud and upstanding Whermacht fighting for an insane master; this book also follows the fortunes of the Red Army in equal precise detail from the dark times of the invasion to the fierce exultation in victory and the start of the roll towards Berlin. With a stoicism that would put Ancient Greeks and Romans to shame the 64th Army under General Chuikov clung on despite everything that the Germans threw at them - and they threw a lot.
But there was a third group of people cowering in the rubble, flinching at the shriek of bombs and rockets, dreading the squeaks and squeals of tank tracks - the civilians. People who should have been evacuated during the narrow window of opportunity were not, thanks to Stalin's belief that soldiers would fight harder for a live city than for a dead one; many thousands of them died as well - from the schoolgirls who were too close to an oil storage tank when it was bombed by the Luftwaffe to the ones buried alive by artillery fire to those who succumbed to Typhus, Typhoid, Jaundice, Lice and general starvation - but they endured.

From high strategy in heated conference rooms to desperate hand to hand brawls in bombed-out cellars to fleeing, frozen, desperate escapees on the unsheltered steppe the sheer scope of this book numbs the mind whilst at the same time stimulating with a breadth, precision and humanity that has rarely, if ever, been seen before and never bettered.

Read this book. Read it now.

10 out of 10