Glantz and House for Birlinn Despite its perennial popularity I know hardly anything about the Eastern Front (I suspect I’ve been bored for too long by the overly seriously von Borries player). I read Paul Carrell and discovered the usual nonsense in which the German Army and Hitler fight each others and the untermensch of the steppe play a walk-on part. This book is therefore very valuable because it covers the whole war from a truly strategic point of view. Equipped with excellent maps one can get an idea of how the campaign developed and the armies changed. My immediate reaction was that Hitler was sold a pup by the French and Lenin. He imagined the Russians would repeat 1917 or surrender (like the French) after a short but vicious battle. There is no other way to explain the attack on a power with such resources. In Glantz and House’s world, Kursk is not of great concern to the Russians. They knew they would win and were already planning their next offensive. I found one point of great interest. The authors propose that as the war developed the two armies ‘swapped’ identities and styles leaving the Germans at the end of the war under-equipped and lacking a real response to Blitzkreig. The sheer numbers are staggering as is the 1944 and 1945 advances. Old Duffer's Book Corner Book Reviews The First Armies Verdun 1916 Russia's Civil War Luetzen 1632 Philip V of Spain The End of Chivalry Le Roi De Guerre Warships of the Napoleonic Era Cannae The Death of Anglo-Saxon England Ancient Siege Warfare War and Society in Revolutionary Europe 1770-1870 Forgotten Victory The Remaking of the English Navy Cassino: The Hollow Victory Raising Churchill's Army The Imperial War Museum Book of the War in Italy The Irish And British Wars 1637-1654 Cavaliers: The Royalist Army At War 1642-1646 Alamein Normandy 1944 Hill 112 Breaking The Panzers Béveziers (1690) Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914-18 Caesar’s Legion Operation Bluecoat Operation Epsom Marching to the Sound of Gunfire The Franco-Prussian War Robert the Bruce’s Irish Wars When Titans Clashed The Wars of Edward III Monte Cassino Under Fire The Somme Roads to Falaise Mud, Blood And Poppycock All The Kaiser’s Men Iron Hulls Iron Hearts A Noble Crusade The Pendulum of Battle: Operation Goodwood The English Resistance The Battle of Koniggrätz Pallas Armata Back to Perfidious Albion #104 Table of Contents Back to Perfidious Albion List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Charles and Teresa Vasey. 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