Stalingrad 1942 (Campaign)

This book is a good general history of the Stalingrad campaign. Whilst more time could have been spent on the actual battle in the city itself the book still provides a good overview of the whole campaign that lead to the encirclement and destruction of the 6th Army.

Given it is only 64 pages I think it is a good buy for the money.

The Stalingrad campaign, stretching over six months and covering operations by multiple army-size formations, is a very difficult topic to fit into Osprey's tight campaign size format. Given that Osprey has covered the first few days of the 1944 D-Day landings in four volumes (!), it would have made more sense to cover this huge operation in two volumes, with one covering the German offensive and the other the Soviet counter-offensive. Be that as it may, for an author to cram so much into such a tight space he must exercise great discipline in what he selects to put in. It would also be nice if the material selected includes some fresh information or perspectives. Alas, Peter Antill's Stalingrad 1942 provides neither. The author pretty much admits up front that he is only interested in summarizing/synthesizing existing secondary sources, so if you have other books on the Eastern Front this one won't add much but a couple of nice color plates.

The volume begins with a 6-page introduction that traces the origins of the campaign, but ends up wasting too much space on Barbarossa which cuts into the space to cover events occurring just before the Stalingrad campaign, such as the Soviet attack at Izyum and the German Operation Fredericus. By the time the author gets to these vital precursors, he is on cruise mode. The section on opposing commanders listing 9 German and 6 Soviet leaders was adequate, but I found it annoying that the author suggests that war crimes charges against men like von Manstein and others were trumped-up. They weren't - just read the Nuremberg transcripts. The section on opposing plans is fair enough on the German side, but clearly does not incorporate David Glantz's best research-to-date on Soviet plans. The section on opposing forces discusses some new German equipment and re-organizations for the campaign, as well as the inclusion of more Axis allies, but overall this section doesn't say much that is insightful. The orders of battle provided are very confusing, because no dates are provided. The OB is clearly not set at 28 June 1942 when Operation Blau began, since it has units that were not in 6th Army at that time. One unit listed under 6th Army, 14th Panzer Division, actually served in 6th Army, 1st Panzer and 4th Panzer Armies during the course of the campaign - so the OB is confusing.

Stalingrad 1942 has five 2-D maps (Eastern Front, May 1942; Operation Blau, June-November 1942; Operation Uranus, 19 November - 12 December 1942; Operation Winter Storm; Operation Little Saturn, 16 December 1942 - 1 January 1943) and three
3-D BEV maps (German assault on Stalingrad 14-26 September 1942, 27 September - 7 October 1942 and 14-29 October 1942). The BEV maps, with gridlines 3 kilometers apart, are too zoomed-out to be useful and Stalingrad itself appears as just a grayish smear. One of the 2-D maps on page 35 shows von Manstein leading the 11th Army across the Kerch Strait in July 1942; actually von Manstein was in vacation in Romania after the fall of Sevastopol (clearly the author did not read his memoirs), the 11th Army was sent to the Volkhov Front and the Kerch Straits were crossed on 1 September in conjunction with the 17th Army and a single division left there from von Manstein's old command. The three battle scenes by Peter Dennis (Foothills of the Caucasus, 13 August 1942; Assault on the Red October Steel Plant, 23 October 1942; Soviet troops approach Gumrak airfield, 23 January 1943), are probably the best part of this volume.

Having wasted valuable space covering Barbarossa in the introduction, the author then proceeds to hop over the first two months of Operation Blau in a couple of pages, providing much less detail on the Battle for Voronezh, the Soviet retreat and the vital German river-crossing successes that led to a quick advance on Stalingrad. The author gets in stride by the middle of the volume, most of which is a rather tedious exposition of division-level attacks around Stalingrad from August 1942 until the end in February 1943. There is no drama, no sense of crisis in this lifeless retelling. The author starts covering a bit on the Caucasus campaign - including a battle scene - then pretty much drops it cold to focus on the city fighting in Stalingrad.

The ridiculously short bibliography for such a well-covered subject has only 19 references, including three websites and two articles from the regurgitative World War II magazine. Amazingly, solid works such as John Erickson's The Road to Stalingrad, Joel Hayward's Stopped at Stalingrad, von Bock's memoirs and Von Manstein's own Lost Victories are not listed, leading the reader to question the amount of effort that went into this volume. In several places, the author also makes mistakes about weaponry: on page 49 the photo caption says this is a "German PAK 36 3.7 cm anti-tank gun" but it is clearly a box trail IG 18 7.5 cm infantry gun.

The aftermath section is too high-level, trying to explain why the Germans lost the war in Russia, instead of merely trying to explain why they lost this particular campaign. Although German losses are mentioned, the catastrophic nature of this defeat is not fully explained -the Germans lost a lot more than merely an army, but a huge chunk of their offensive capability. Soviet losses are not mentioned at all, despite the availability of this information. Overall, if all you want is a Cliffs Notes type summary of Stalingrad, then this is your book.