Rereading history books can be more fun than you might suspect. You already know "what happened," and if you took notes the first time, you already know the historian's interpretation. What a second pass reveals, more than anything, is the writer's strength with language. When the data and how it's framed is known intimately, the presentation and craft leap out.
The other day I found myself stuck on some detail of the Battle of Stalingrad and went flipping through my copy of Antony Beevor's Stalingrad, The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943. It took only a short while to answer my question, but then I got sucked in, rereading a few chapters. What struck me was both how clearly I remembered his arguments, and how well they were framed within the text.
It may not sound like a big deal, unless you've spent some time with military history. Military historians seem to write at audiences already steeped in their language. Wonky readers can learn this language, but most of us can't visualize the field of battle. We get overwhelmed by foreign detail. The people to whom this makes sense probably spent years learning how to write like this, but no one ever taught us how to read like this.
Beevor's a wonderful exception to this condition. This is key, because the Battle of Stalingrad is considered the decisive turning point of the war in Europe. Learning how the Germans sowed the seeds of their own destruction here gives a micro view of its doomed effort at European conquest.
In 1941, the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive attack on the Soviet Union, a country with which they had a non-aggression pact and on which they relied for natural resources for their war machine. By 1942, they had the Soviet forces in Stalingrad pinned between the German Sixth Army and the Volga's riverbank. The remaining Soviet forces in the city had to be resupplied across the river and under fire. Hitler then launched Operation Blau, designed to eliminate this remaining contingent, capture the city's industrial might and its power as a symbol of "Stalin's City," cut off Soviet trade routes and have a key defensive point for controlling the oil fields of the Caucasus.
Here, everything started to unravel. Beevor acknowledges the defense of Stalingrad and its place in the Soviet/Russian memory as a great battle of the Great Patriotic War, but it's clear that he sees Germany, its high command and especially Hitler as responsible for the battle's outcome. At any point, the Germans could have disengaged from the city. The story of the battle is the story of how Germany lost it. Beevor cites several reasons:
• The Germans misread Russian patriotism. Instead of dividing the "people" from their antagonists, like "party functionaries," the Germans treated both with equal cruelty. Beevor notes this was caused by the politicization of the German army, which in Russia was as occupied with winning battles as it was executing Jews and other ethnic groups. Instead of solving one of their war problems, their ruthlessness created a new one.
• They underestimated the effects of the Russian climate and the Russian people's ability to withdraw behind the Urals and rebuild industry there. The fact that reliance on brutalizing weather and withdrawing deep into Russia was a response to previous invasions makes these two idiotic to overlook.
• In earlier battles, the Luftwaffe solved problems by eliminating enemy artillery, planes, and tanks from the air. But Hitler's insistence on punishing Stalingrad saw the Luftwaffe carpet bomb the city. The immediate effect was to make it a haven for snipers and guerrilla fighting, difficult for tanks to navigate, and the sort of battle of attrition that decreased German tactical advantages.
• Cronyism. Hitler's surprising successes early in the war cowed members of the General Staff who had doubted him and made doing so an unhealthy choice. Hitler compounded this by punishing dissenters—stripping them of command while rewarding those most willing to defer to him—while encouraging a cronyist state where logistics staff behind the lines told him what he wanted to hear. Commanders in the field were paralyzed when making decisions in his absence, and he supported them with the empty promises of other subordinates. A perfect example: Germany's Sixth Army's leader, Paulus, was unable to improvise on Hitler's orders, but he partly owed his untenable position to Goering's telling Hitler what he wanted to hear and lying about the Luftwaffe's ability to resupply Paulus.
• They believed their hype. Not only did Hitler and many of his commanders buy into the myth of aryan superiority, they also bought into polite fictions they told each other—ones like, "This army corps hasn't been reduced to 1/20th its numbers by enemy fire, frostbite, starvation, typhus, typhoid, or suicide/desertion." Thus, toward the end of the battle, you had men believing an overmatched army could overcome superior numbers due to innate Germanness, while they mapped out battles with armies that existed only on paper.
• Hitler was inflexible. As a totalitarian ruler, he needn't have worried about being consistent: he hadn't bothered to before. But as the war worsened for Germany, Hitler became more hidebound, more determined to view the battle only through his limited perspective. Beevor notes how the opposite process worked in Stalin. Despite being part of a political apparatus that demanded more ideological consistency—certainly a lot more written justification—Stalin was willing to commit apostasy. He brought back Tsarist military awards and planning structure, stopped killing commanders and instead listened to them and in changing his mind saw a change in his fortunes.
Beevor covers other factors, that compound or interrelate with the many above, but these form the core of his thesis. These, too, are details I remembered after years without looking at the book. Beevor presents a great but cherished rarity among military historians: anybody can read him, and anybody can understand him.
The fact that he was able to use information from old Soviet archives that no one had seen before certainly made his book new. The fact that everyone who's written about Stalingrad since Beevor's book was published leans heavily on his text speaks to how authoritative it should be considered. But these are academic distinctions. What's most remarkable is that he wrote a very valuable book about possibly the most important battle in the biggest conflict of the 20th century, and absolutely anybody can pick it up, enjoy it, and understand it with ease.
