World War II is the gift that keeps on giving for historians and history aficionados. It is an epic tale with clear villains and, if not good guys, then not so villainous guys. It is a conflict that expands at least two decades with debates about its start: the official, Eurocentric 1939 mark with the German invasion of Poland, and the broader 1931 starting point with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It ended in stages, May of 1945 in Europe and August of the same year in Japan. It is replete with stories of villainy, betrayal, heroism and great sacrifice on the part of groups and individuals.
World War II also fuels the imagination with a series of what if’s:
What if Hitler had been stopped at one of the many stages in which he flouted The Treaty of Versailles
What if the British and the French had taken the initiative during the Phoney War period and attacked Germany with purpose and determination while most of Hitler’s troops were turned on Poland.
What if Hitler had actually attempted to invade Britain before turning his attention to the Soviet Union.
What if Stalin had followed the advice of General Georgy Zhukov and others to attack Germany while its troops were engaged in suspicious maneuvers along the ill-gotten border the two countries shared.
What if Germany had asked Japan to invade the Soviet Union from the East.
What if Hitler had still been an evil lunatic, but slightly less of an evil lunatic and ordered that the peoples of the conquered Soviet republics who welcomed the Nazis as liberators be treated with respect at least during the duration of the war.
What if Hitler had displayed half a brain by not declaring war on the United States after the rising Western power declared war on Japan.
What if Hitler had accepted that the southern front had achieved by the Summer of 1942 the objective of inserting itself in the Volga to block the flow of Soviet oil traffic without having to take a city called Stalingrad.
That last what if comes via Geoffrey Jukes’ Stalingrad to Kursk: Triumph of the Red Army (2011).
One of the many gifts which WWII would appear to provide is making it easy for any trained historian to write a compelling book about the whole of it or about a specific chapter in the saga. This is a gift that Mr. Jukes short, but tedious book returns to sender.
The Eastern Front of WWII is one of the most mesmerizing episodes in human history. It marked the confrontation of two totalitarian systems which shared a complete disregard for the value of individual human life. Those of us lucky enough to have been born during the postwar period in a liberal democracy can only approach the four-year bloodbath initiated by Operation Barbarossa with mouths agape. The devastation of Eastern Europe during the war staggers the contemporary Western mind used to social media battles and internet descriptions of critique as destruction. According to Jukes, “Studies published in 1995 put the totals [of Soviet deaths] within a range of 21.2 to 26.6 million.” Germany lost around eight million soldiers and civilians as a consequence of Hitler’s attempt to acquire lebensraum at the expense of the Soviet Union. This, of course, does not take into account the death and destruction unleashed on the countries caught between the German and Soviet behemoths.
However, the numbers alone cannot tell the stories of sacrifice, heroism, cowardliness and betrayal that can provide contemporary readers with an actual understanding of what took place in the Eastern Front. The problem with Stalingrad to Kursk is that Jukes tries his best to do exactly that, and in the end he only proves that numbers cannot substitute for storytelling and analysis.
Jukes claims in the introduction that his book will “consider the circumstances that led to the invasion, and the early stages of it, with particular attention paid to matters suppressed or glossed over in Soviet-era accounts.” The book does some of that. For example, it points to Stalin’s miscalculations in the early stages of the war, not only about whether Germany would attack, but once it did, about its intentions. Stalin at first believed that “Germany’s main purpose in invading would be economic, to satisfy her driving need for resources for fighting a prolonged war, specifically Ukrainian coal, iron ore and grain, and the oil of Transcaucasus.” After realizing by the end of 1941 that Germany was aiming for a quick military and political defeat of the Soviet Union, targeting large urban centers like Minsk, Leningrad and Moscow, Stalin held to this new found conviction for too long. After the Germans had shifted their attention to economic targets in 1942, Stalin and the General Staff retained “reserves in the Moscow area for longer than necessary, at the expense of the front in the south.”
The book also provides the occasional flabbergasting anecdote. It gives an account of Agent Max, a Soviet controlled double-agent, who with apparent authorization from Stalin, gave the Germans advanced notice of Operation Mars to keep them engaged in the Kalinin and Western Fonts, unable to relief the large concentration of Germans at Stalingrad who were encircled by Operation Uranus. Jukes claims that Zhukov conceived Operation Mars as a diversionary assault. However, he believes the Soviet General was unaware of the tactics used by his country’s intelligence services to ensure that the Germans gave their all to repelling his assault and left their countrymen at Stalingrad to their now legendary fate. Thus, the Soviet leadership willingly sacrificed the lives of soldiers in one front to ensure the success of soldiers in another front.
Such vignettes of double-dealing and perfidy are few and far between in Stalingrad to Kursk. What abounds in the book is tables and stats: the number of tanks, airplanes, guns, and combat troops on both sides are given over and over again for the Eastern Front as a whole and for its various battles and operations as well. Rarely are these numbers put into broader, more compelling context.
The Soviet advantage in tanks, airplane, guns and mortars at the start of Barbarossa does serve as a launching pad for Jukes’ analysis of the almost catastrophic performance by the Red Army in the first few months and the improbable resilience of the Communist system in the face of many early setbacks:
Despite their large numerical inferiority in weapons, the invaders achieved in just four months a series of victories a whole order of magnitude greater than those of their First World War predecessors that had sufficed to bring about the Tsarist regime’s collapse in 1917.
However, numbers in this book mostly obfuscate and deaden the story of otherwise gripping battles like Stalingrad and Kursk.
The defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad gets mentioned as an afterthought in the chapter titled “Victory at Stalingrad.” It is buried under an avalanche of statistics on food production in the Soviet Union at the time and the impact of US help through the Lend Lease Act to the Soviet’s overall war efforts. We get almost nothing about the experiences of soldiers and civilians trapped for half a year in the hellscape of the ruined city on the Volga.
A similar critique can be made about the chapter titled “The Battle for Kursk.” The details of what happened in this less famous battle and the significance of the victory for the Red Army get buried under an avalanche of statistics highlighting Soviet losses in weapons and manpower. We learn that
223,000 troops of the left wing of the Western Front took part in Operation ‘Kutuzov’; in 38 days of fighting 192,441 (43.9 percent) of them were killed, captured or wounded. The whole of the Front, some 842, 200 troops, then participated in Operation ‘Suvorov’; over its 57 days 338,188 of them (40.4 percent) suffered the same fates. Even Stalin found these casualty levels unacceptable for the results achieved, and dismissed the Front’s commander, general Sokolovsky.
We are told almost nothing about the experiences of soldiers and commanders during the battle. At the end of the chapter, readers are left with little sense as to why the Soviets felt this was such an important victory for their cause, except that “a Soviet soldier’s chances of avoiding death or capture were almost six times as good after Kursk as before it.”
Numbers cannot tell a story. They can at best back it up, add to an understanding of what once took place. Only a compelling narrative that gives an account of the big picture along with detailed, individual experiences can bring the past to life. In Stalingrad to Kursk, Geoffrey Jukes refuses to provide a compelling story and a compelling reason to recommend his book. You can pick any book about WWII with blindfolds on and be almost guaranteed to find a more interesting and elucidating account on any stage of the war than the one provided by this book.