Peter Tsouras, who has special knowledge of the subject area from his work with a Washington agency, writes: "With the publication of Colonel General Krivosheev's Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century, the frightful tally and stupendous scale of Soviet arms has been revealed down to the last detail. Only the fall of Soviet power could break the Party's lock on this motherlode of history. I remember in July 1992 the deputy commander of the Russian Military History Institute holding aloft the flyer for a Greenhill book on the Eastern Front and exclaiming with brutal candor that the Russians had had to rely on Western sources for much of their own military history, so much of which had been suppressed by the Party. And nothing more seemed to frighten the Party more than the numbing truth of numbers. For the Western reader, the eyes grow wide with each table and the mind stays alert and on edge as the human dimension of those numbers sinks in. For example, the Soviets lost more platoon commanders than total dead for either the British Empire or the United States. As might be expected, the great mass of the information in the book addresses the Great Patriotic War. Every major operation is covered in great detail: which fronts participated, consisting of how many divisions and brigades, by type, their numerical strength, irrecoverable losses, sick and wounded, and average daily losses. Readable Jumbo Size Table (extremely slow: 306K) Other tables address medical statistics: Soviet military doctors treated 14,324,0781 wounded of whom 773,500 suffered head wounds, etc. There are sections on military production which address each type of weapon from revolvers to tanks, giving production, stock, and losses for each year of the war. For example, in 1944, the Red Army lost 52.7 percent or 13,800 of the medium tanks which included the number available at the beginning of the year and those received from production. There are even tables breaking down the surviving 1,368,849 (of 4,059,000) Soviet POWs by rank into the years captured and nationality. Incredibly, among them were 4,457 Jews In this book is also information which in the past has been even scarcer than for the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front. If you want to know how many troops the Soviets employed and lost in every operation such as the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Khalkin Gol, and the Spanish Civil War, you will find it here. The examples I mention are only skimming the surface of this historical goldmine, for nothing else can truly describe Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century. The book is a model of scholarship much adorned by a thorough and precise text. This book is a must for anyone interested in the Eastern Front and warfare in general. It is a classic." Books by Peter Tsouras include: Fighting in Hell: The German Ordeal on the Eastern Front Anvil of War: German Generalship in Defense on the Eastern Front The Great Patriotic War. An Illustrated History of Total War: The Soviet Union and Gcrmany 1941-1945 Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 80 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1997 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com