| QUOTE (MMM @ September 15, 2012 08:55 pm) | | Indeed I hadn't read anything written by Glantz, but given the oppinions of Suvorov, Solonin and PaulC (!), I supposed he was some kind of apologet of the Red Army. BTW, is there a link to Glantz's book(s)? |
He;s not really apologetic, he's a few words short of calling the Red Army a rabble ( o gloata de neispraviti ). His books follow the party line, not deviating 1" from it.
Which is funny since the data and his conclusions are most of the time going head to head. I will post you 2 user reviews from the Amazon since they capture exactly what I mean.
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Review 1.
Glantz is the leading authority of Soviet experience in World War II. In `Stumbling Colossus' he rebuts starkly revisionist thesis of Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun alias Viktor Suvorov that Soviet Union was poised to invade Nazi Germany in summer of 1941. Author goes to considerable length in exposing the weakness of Red Army; he vehemently argues about its woeful unpreparedness for war. Thanks, author just stopped short of calling it a rabble. I do not wish to elaborate on this. Because this is the same rigmarole stuff which we get to read in books covering war in the Eastern front.
While agreeing to broad contours of argument some aspects of Soviet deployment were profoundly disturbing. For instance, massing troops and material in narrow strips of land which wedged deep into German territory. Soviet troop concentrations in Bialystok and Lvov bulges looked frightening. Further Red Army built supply dumps, ammunition and fuel depots and airfields closer to the border. Ironically, author has dropped hints in this regard. Most of the airfields were located closer to the border. And airfields were crammed because in most cases two air regiments shared single airfield creating aircraft densities of up to 150 aircraft per airfield making it increasingly vulnerable to surprise enemy air attack. Some airfields were within striking distance of enemy artillery. Point is you require airfields closer to the border only if you are planning an offensive war, for the advancing ground troops have to be given fire support. In short, a nation planning to defend its territory the above deployment is nothing but courting suicide.
Instead what Soviets should have done was to retain Poland as a buffer state. Unfortunately after the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact Poland as a state was wiped out. Then main body of defending troops should have been deployed deep inside Soviet territory. After that lay mines, erect fortifications, barriers, obstacles from the state border toward main zones of defence Here idea is to wear down, exhaust the enemy before he comes into contact with main body of defending forces. A perfect manifestation of such a posture was Soviet deployment in the Kursk Bulge
Author deprecates Red Army's combat performance in Poland, Romania, Finland, Mongolia. It is difficult to concur with this view. At khalkin-Gol in Outer Mongolia Japanese Kwantung Army was smashed. Here Japanese centre was pinned down and Zhukov used rocket-firing ground-strike aircraft, armour to launch two powerful flanking blows. Main body of Japanese forces was caught in a pocket which contracted, shrank and ceased to exist. This was a classic battle of double envelopment, annihilation. Soviet propaganda played down the victory to foster an illusion of weakness. Author, it appears, has succumbed to this deceit.
On the positive side, author has given human face to war. Some of Red Army commanders were utterly merciless and cruel. Individuals were used as a cannon fodder. Head-on assaults were launched against well-entrenched German positions devoid of any strategic value when they could have been enveloped. Stalin preferred such assaults as he thought Soviet human resources were inexhaustible.
Another key factor was the mobilization process which went to work once German invasion commenced. Within no time Red Army was able to double, quadruple its strength. Losses were quickly replenished, divisions destroyed replaced; new divisions were raised from the scratch. Once fully mobilized Soviets had an immense pool of trained reserves amounting to 14 million men that helped absorb shock of German attack and wear down the aggressor. As author rightly puts it: Reserves, of course, did not stop German blitzkrieg but it helped ensure Soviet Union would survive in 1941,1942 and emerge victorious in 1945.
Nearly 70 years have passed since Hitler invaded Soviet Union. Even to this day there is no unanimity of opinion among learned men regarding circumstances which contributed to invasion. `Barbarossa' continues to be dogged by controversy. Book falls short of my expectations, for I thought Glantz to offer a point -by-point rebuttal of Suvorov's thesis. Judging from that sense the book was disappointing leaving readers to fall amid two diametrically opposing views.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1CVROI7R8LZJM/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0700617892&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=
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Review 2
Back in the 1960s, when I took high school Speech Class, my teacher taught me a useful trick. When asked to speak on something you don't want to talk about, pretend to talk about the subject you were assigned, then switch to else. It's not honest, but it works surprisingly often. STUMBLING COLOSSUS is a book-length example of this technique in action.
When Adolf Hitler invaded the former Soviet Union in June of 1941, his professed reason was that the USSR was planning to attack Germany. He only struck first, he claimed, as a measure of self-defense. The Kremlin denied this accusation, and for decades the denial was almost universally accepted.
Then in 1989, "Viktor Suvorov" (the pen name of former GRU agent Vladimir Bogdonavich Rezun) attracted attention with his book Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, which claimed that Hitler was correct about Stalin planning to invade Germany. Suvorov wasn't the first to say this, but he attracted widespread attention to the issue. ICEBREAKER marshaled a large amount of evidence suggesting that Stalin was indeed planning on attacking Nazi Germany in July of 1941.
Now, judging what Stalin may have intended to do at any time is incredibly difficult. "Uncle Joe" never hesitated to lie, he broke agreements without hesitation, and he changed course on a dime. "The Boss" was also good at keeping his mouth shut about his intentions. Since the few people Stalin confided in tended to be as dishonest as he was, since Stalin's successors had their own 'lines' to promote, and since so much of the surviving documentation from that time is still secret, unraveling the truth about Stalin's intentions is bound to be a difficult historical detective job.
It gets worse when you realize that the Soviet Union was addicted to official lies. For instance, during the purges, it wasn't enough for him to shoot those he distrusted, and condemn millions to slave labor death camps. He also demanded that they first be convicted in "trials" where the verdict and sentence had been decided before the "judges" ever met. In his latest book, Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II (Blue Jacket Bks), Suvorov claims that the Soviet war games of January 1941 studied the Soviet 'response' to a German 'attack' on the USSR. The games supposedly had three phases 1) stopping the invaders; 2) driving them back to the border; 3) going on the offensive to invade Germany. But only 3) was actually played, Suvorov says. Thus did the Soviet Union plan aggression while labeling it defense.
Thus, to evaluate Stalin's intention towards Hitler, you'd have to examine available documents very, very critically, cross-reference a huge number of sources, and above all look at what Stalin's military DID up till June 22, 1941, constantly asking yourself "Is this more consistent with a plan to remain at peace with Germany, or a plan for surprise attack?"
Enter David Glantz and STUMBLING COLOSSUS. For reasons I can't fathom, Glantz thinks that if Stalin was indeed planning to attack Hitler, this justifies and excuses Germany's genocidal invasion of Russia. Frankly, I can't see it. Hitler was a "social Darwinist" racist who always aimed to attack his neighbors, and either enslave or murder "inferiors", a category that included most of the human race. The only thing he was justified in doing during WWII was committing suicide. But Glantz sees the idea that Stalin might have planned aggression against Hitler as "frightening", and he's determined to denounce the heresy.
Unfortunately for Glantz, he can't actually come up with much material showing Stalin's desire for peace. Glantz continually insists that the Soviets were worried that Hitler was going to attack the USSR, that the Soviets believed they were in a "war imminent" state, that the Red Army was looking at a "variety of defensive topics" and that Stalin refused to strike first (p.6-7). Yet Glantz also insists that Stalin was certain that Hitler was NOT going to attack the USSR in 1941 (chapter 9, passim), and he blithely asserts that the Soviet govt. believed "it could avoid hostilities until at least the summer of 1942" (p. 191). Aside from the blatant contradiction, Glantz is left with another problem: if war was going to start 'imminently', but Hitler was not going to attack, then Stalin MUST have been planning on attacking Hitler. The fact that so much of the Red Army was forward deployed close to the border (pp.102-107); that reinforcements were moving up secretly and separately from heavy equipment, and without support services mobilizing yet (ibid); that airfields and planes were concentrated near the border without defenses or even much camouflage, while the Red Air Force lacked " 'a precise plan for the employment of the air forces' " when Hitler attacked (p. 195,199); and the demand from Moscow for defensive plans that would stop any German attack at the border (pp.270-288), coupled with order that FORBADE the troops from manning border defenses, setting up anti-tank obstacles, or laying minefields (pp. 246-252); that Stalin continually rejected People's Commissar for Defense Timoshenko and Red Army Chief of General Staff Zhukov's warnings of possible German aggression while secretly mobilizing (pp. 234 -241); that, at a time when war was was supposedly imminent, the signals units that would coordinate the millions of Soviet troops were at a peace-time configuration (p. 113); that there were no plans for evacuating equipment and retreating in an orderly manner if the Germans attack (p. 135); above all, that Timosheko and Zhukov that wrote a report for Stalin saying that the USSR should pre-emptively attack the Wehrmacht forces at the Soviet border, because the Germans were in a position which enabled possible "forestalling (preempting)" of Soviet plans (plans that aren't specified, btw) (pp. 241-245) -- to me, all these certainly look much more like a Red Army getting ready for a surprise attack on its own timetable than they look like a Red Army frantically preparing for a German onslaught. Glantz contends these were actually defensive measures, but doesn't try to explain how they were supposed to work, and frequently criticizes them himself. An examination of Soviet defensive doctrine would seem in order, but Glantz doesn't provide any. Perhaps that's because Red Army doctrine was, according to Glantz himself, traditionally offensive.
How then is Glantz to defend Stalin's pacifistic intentions? He responds by saying that IT DOESN'T MATTER IF STALIN WAS PLANNING TO ATTACK HITLER, since Hitler attacked first (p. 245). But this will only work if he first succeeds in making the reader forget that the entire controversy was not 'Did Stalin ACTUALLY attack Hitler first?' (not even Josef Goebbels claimed THAT), but 'Did Stalin PLAN to attack Hitler first?'. So Glantz uses my old speech teacher's trick. He shifts the topic to 'Was the Red Army ready for war on June 22nd, 1941?', when Hitler attacked Stalin. The many disastrous defeats that the Red Army suffered during Operation Barbarossa show that it was NOT ready. Glantz tries to link Red Army combat performance in 1941 to Stalin's future plans by asserting that the Red Tsar was well informed about his army's capabilities, possessed of good military judgment, and not about to order an offensive against Germany, because such an offensive "would have bordered on the lunatic," and Stalin "was not a lunatic." Yet the information GLANTZ himself presents on Stalin's state of information, soundness of judgment, and even his sanity all tend in the opposite direction. Glantz contends that Stalin wrecked the Red Army with continual paranoiac purges; filled the upper ranks with cronies and yes-men; ignored obvious signs of attack by Hitler; approved badly flawed mobilization and deployment plans that cost Russian millions of soldiers killed and captured; and that he couldn't be bothered to train his troops. Throughout the early months of the war, Stalin refused to let units retreat in time to escape traps, and ordered counter-attacks that had almost no hope of success, but which ground up the Red Army at a frightful rate. How this tale of incompetence shows that Stalin was 'too smart to attack Hitler' is beyond me.
On June 22nd many troops were marching forward on foot, while their equipment moved by train, their ranks were not at war strength, they were short on staff officers, their units were scattered, and support forces were still unmobilized. Troops at the front weren't dug in, and were further from the unmanned border defenses than the German attackers. The Red Air Force was under orders not to interfere with German aircraft crossing the border, and thus hit on the ground. Caught so completely off balance, no army could be expected to fight well. But given time to finish mobilization and deployment, it's arguable that most of these problems would have vanished, or at least been much ameliorated. In Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945, Evan Mawdsley gives figures for aircraft losses that show that the Red Air Force loss rate went down by a factor of NINE when comparing the first two weeks of Barbarossa with the next fourteen. The Red Army's rate of retreat fell by a similar factor after the opening battles, from over 23 miles per day to less than than three, despite total German air command and Soviet troops being fed into battles piecemeal and unsupported. By December, the Wehrmacht was stalled before Moscow, and the Luftwaffe had lost nearly twice as many planes as during the battle of Britain. It is not obvious to me that a July Red offensive that caught Germany by surprise was doomed to fail, much less so obviously impossible only a lunatic would have ordered one.
There's also a spirit of what I can only judge to be dishonesty throughout this work. For instance, Glantz incessantly claims that Stalin's purges of the officer corps resulted in a lack of experience and time in position when the war started, and that these problems were instrumental in the early failures. By Glantz's figures, supplemented by those of Suvorov in his latest book (Chief Culprit: Stalin's Grand Design to Start World War II (Blue Jacket Bks); highly recommended) and Evan Mawdsley (Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945), the number purged and kept out of the Red Army was about 43,000 officers, many veterans of the Russian Civil War (around 55,000 were purged, but 12,000 restored to service; not all of those purged were active duty officer, by the way, and thousands were commissars, rather than commanders, facts Glantz doesn't see fit to mention). By June, 1941, the officer corps was around 440,000. If no one had been purged at all, it could not have affected more than 10% of officer assignments. Arguing that the lack of these 43,000 people was a huge factor in the defeats of 1941 is hard to credit, especially when many of the Civil War veterans still on active duty turned in lackluster performances. Moreover, of the 43,000 permanently purged, 18,000 got the boot in 1940 and 1941, when the Red Army was occupying territories and fighting a war with Finland, a performance Glantz judges very unfavorably. How many of those 18,000 were justifiably let go because they failed to perform? The author doesn't address the issue. As far as he's concerned, the fact that someone was purged proves his comptence.
In the end, STUMBLING COLOSSUS has a few minor virtues. It does provide a partial picture of the problems the Red Army experienced in 1937-41, though it never really comes to grips with the difficulties of expanding an army over three times in size in less than two years. It is an interesting statistical source, though full of strange omissions. The bibliography provides pointers for further reading. But mostly, it shows how the "will to believe" can blind lead an author to produce a book with a conclusion that is utterly contradicted by its own evidence.
NOT recommended, unless you're studying the psychology of self-deception.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1VCZUCJCIBXPR/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0700608796&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=
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) not only does that by showing the disposition of Soviet troops at the borders, but explains with data and numbers some stuff: what troops, how many / how ready / how complete, who were the commanders, how did they fight etc.
