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apple16
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Исаев Алексей
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26.12.2003 16:11:49
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WWII; 1941;
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Того же автора - review Бивора
Abstract (Article Summary)
Glantz reviews "The Fall of Berlin 1945" by Antony Beevor.
Full Text (1262 words)
Copyright U.S. Army War College Autumn 2003
The Fall of Berlin 1945. By Antony Beevor. New York: Viking Penguin Press, 2002. 490 pages. $29.95. Reviewed by Colonel David M. Glantz, USA Ret., author of When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler, The Battle of Kursk, The Battle of Leningrad: 1941-J944, and many other titles, and editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
A sequel to his best-seller The Battle of Stalingrad, Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin is a superb narrative account of the Red Army's climactic assault on Berlin, Hitler's "lair" and the formidable citadel of the Nazi Third Reich. In fact, both books are inexorably linked regarding theme, content, methodology, and style. As Beevor states in his Preface to Berlin, "On 1 February 1943, an angry Soviet colonel collared a group of emaciated German prisoners in the rubble of Stalingrad. 'That's how Berlin is going to look!' he yelled, pointing to the ruined buildings all around. When I read these words some six years ago, I sensed immediately what my next book had to be." Given Beevor's superb talents as a writer, The Fall of Berlin will prove no less successful than his Battle of Stalingrad.
Structurally, Beevor models his treatment of the Battle of Berlin after Christopher Duffy's popular 1993 book, Red Storm Over the Reich, in which Duffy describes the final five months of the war, beginning with the Red Army's massive assault along the Vistula River in eastern Poland in early January 1945. Like Duffy, Beevor provides context for his description of the struggle for Hitler's capital city in eight chapters that track the progress of the war from early January to early April 1945 and Soviet and German planning for the war's endgame that both sides knew was fast approaching.
However, unlike Duffy, who simply surveys the course of military operations in summary fashion, Beevor relies heavily on memoir literature and interviews with participants in these dramatic operations to fashion an intensely personal and often touching mosaic of this turbulent time. More important still, by skillfully exploiting memoir literature and previous published accounts, Beevor captures the psychological state and intensely personal motivations of commanders and soldiers alike as they approach the climax of this most terrible and costly war. In this sense too, the link between Stalingrad and Berlin becomes starkly apparent.
In his final 20 chapters, Beevor explains in detail how the Wehrmacht and Red Army prepared for and conducted the titanic struggle for Berlin. Relying on a wealth of personal recollections and a variety of classic military studies and recent articles and books, Beevor's narrative shapes a clear, riveting portrait of the struggle's progress without omitting the necessary context of Anglo-American military operations that helped shape the Red Army plans. As in the earlier chapters, Beevor's emphasis remains focused on the human dimension of this terminal struggle, including a candid yet evenhanded treatment of the barbarism and other atrocities born quite naturally from the twin emotions of hatred and revenge that often embellished the routine horrors of war during this period.
Stylistically, this book has no peer. Beevor remains unsurpassed as a writer of clear and appealing prose. In short, The Fall of Berlin represents narrative history at its best in the long tradition of Will Durant, Alistair Horne, Cornelius Ryan, John Keegan, and countless other authors whose attractive writing styles have given life to often dry military history. In this sense, the book is rightly destined to achieve best-seller status and no doubt will receive well-earned praise and well-deserved recognition. At the same time, appropriate to his stated intent, Beevor's work excels as social rather than operational history in the sense that personal perspectives dominate over accurate and detailed descriptions of who did what to whom, when, why, and how. However, in an age when the study and understanding of history is fast faltering, to its credit, Beevor's work performs the valuable service of once again igniting the general public's interest in what is no longer taught.
In regard to content, in addition to sacrificing operational detail in the service of readability, the factual basis of Beevor's history is quite limited and sometimes dated. As was the case with his Stalingrad book, which ignored a critical portion of the famous battle's strategic context, in this instance the Red Army's Operation Mars (whether Mars was a genuine strategic offensive or, as many Russians claim, a massive diversion of unprecedented scale), as well as some of its operational detail, Beevor's description of the Battle for Berlin is similarly incomplete. For example, he fails to exploit all of the formerly classified but now available Soviet General Staff materials concerning this period of the war. These include the massive 700-page study of the Berlin operation published by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1950 and many volumes in the detailed documentary collections edited by V. A. Zolotarev and published by Olma Press during the past five years. In particular, this includes multiple volumes in this series dealing with Stavka and Red Army General Staff orders and reports on the Battle of Berlin and a single 600-page volume containing a voluminous number of documents directly related to every aspect of the Berlin operation.
Instead of exploiting this fresh source material, Beevor tends to rely heavily on older German and Soviet works, such as the memoirs of Guderian, Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky, and others, many of which are self-serving, to construct the factual basis for his account. In the case of Guderian's memoirs, for example, Beevor accepts uncritically Guderian's dated assessments regarding the Red Army's supposed numerical superiority over the Wehrmacht both in early January and early April 1945. Likewise, in the case of Zhukov's memoirs, Beevor accepts Zhukov's now questionable rationale for why the Red Army halted its march on Berlin in February 1945. Finally, in the case of Konev's and Rokossovsky's memoirs, Beevor cites the older, heavily censored versions, published before 1990, rather than the unexpurgated accounts which were published in the past five years and provide more candid judgments of the Red Army's plans and actions in 1945.
In the same sense, Beevor accepts uncritically many of the time-honored but now questionable explanations for controversial issues associated with the war's final phase. For example, he accepts at face value Russian explanations as to why Stalin decided to halt operations toward Berlin in early February 1945 and instead spend months clearing his flanks before advancing on Berlin in April 1945. In this regard, fresher sources now indicate that, in this case, Stalin's decision may have been related to Allied assurances at Yalta that Berlin was Stalin's for the taking whenever he wished, and that, based on these assurances, Stalin's focus from February through early April 1945 was on gaining a stranglehold on Austria and the Danubian basin, which the terms of the Yalta Agreement did not address. Tellingly, the Red Army began its assault on Berlin on 16 April 1945, only three days after its forces entered Vienna.
Despite these relatively minor blemishes, The Fall of Berlin stands as a superb example of narrative social history at its best. Beevor achieves his aims admirably, and in doing so will ignite renewed interest in this chapter of the 20th century's most horrifying war. This book is a must read for all military professionals and those interested in general and military history alike.
[Author Affiliation]
Reviewed by Colonel David M. Glantz, USA Ret., author of When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler, The Battle of Kursk, The Battle of Leningrad: 1941-1944, and many other titles, and editor of The Journal of Slavic Military Studies.