Not a whole lot of the battle in this book

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	• The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World ... Andrew Nagorski Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hitler's fatal decision is glossed over

Nagorski does a great job introducing the characters but fails to provide depth into the major conflict between Hilter and his General Heinz Guderian whom he held back from almost certain victory in Moscow. He did the same thing to Guderian at Dunkirk. Why? Who had Hitler's ear? What was he thinking? Perhaps a better written book will provide answers to those intriguing questions.

We didn't know it than

I am an avid reader of WWII events, I lived them, without knowing what really was hapening.A. Nagorski's great work is shedding a new light on those events.His book is very well documented;once one starts reading it is hard to put it down. I was 20 years old when those things hapened. Nagorski's work shows a completely different picture from what we were being told. Besides, until now I thought, the turning point of the war was the battle of Stalingrad, and later Kursk.This magnificent book compares only to Vasily Grossman's magnum opus:Life and Fate.

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Decent history, but fails to deliver

Nagorski has written a decent general overview of the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, detailing the rise of the respective regimes and their relations up until about 1942. The only problem is, the book is supposed to be specifically about the Battle of Moscow and how it was the most important battle of the war. He begins the book by claiming that this battle is often overlooked in favor of Stalingrad as the turning point of the war, and sets out to explain how Moscow was the biggest and most significant battle the world has ever seen. This may very well be true, but unfortunately, I just wasn't convinced by this book.

Aside from the introduction, he barely even mentions Moscow until halfway through the book. He spends way too much time detailing political and diplomatic events leading up to, and during the war, including whole chapters on the diplomatic experiences of American and British ambassadors, for example. He also concentrates too heavily on the general machinations of the Nazi and Soviet war machines which have been thoroughly covered elsewhere. In other words, he wastes page after page on details that describe aspects of the war in general, rather than details specific to this particular campaign. This is not to say that this information was incorrect or unenlightening, but I found it to be wholly superfluous to the topic at hand. That being said, several other reviewers have pointed out some glaring factual errors. I can neither confirm or deny these, but it should be noted.

Overall, I would say that while there is some worthwhile information about the eastern front here, the book is way too scattered and broad in scope, and because of this, ultimately fails to deliver on its intended promise. 3 stars.

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Not a whole lot of the battle in this book

Although well written and doing a good job on the political and human end of this great battle, the military aspect of this book was not very good. There was simply not enough about the battle itself in here and no new info on the military side at all. If anything the battle itself from Barbarossa itself through Smolensk, Kiev, Operation Typhoon, and the great battles and counterattack at Moscow itself, was laid out in only a sketchy and disappointing manner. Hopefully a new and modern complete history of the battle itself, in all aspects, military, human, and political will be written, but this one lacks sorely on the military end. Moscow 1941 by Cedric Braithwaite is actually a superior book to this one, despite lacking some details as well. As I've said, well written and somewhat interesting here, but alot more military detail is needed.

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Good Introduction to the Eastern Front

Mr. Nagorski's book is a good introduction to the German/Soviet conflict during WWII. I got this book because,although I have studied the USSR and had a good background on the Great Patriotic War, I didn't know very much about this specific battle. I'm not really Mr. Nagorski's proper audience . This book was written for readers who don't have much background on the conflict or on the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. Mr. Nagorski spends a good deal of time providing background information that's necessary to understanding the war, but which many readers will already have under their belts. This isn't in any way bad; a normal American or Western European of the late 20th/early 21st Century will find the Stalinist system bewildering. Why did Stalin murder and imprison thousands of loyal and competent officers immediately before the start of a war he knew was imminent? And although its easy to see why Stalin was paralyzed with the fear of "provoking" the Germans, I've always wondered why he didn't do someothing like order his planes to withdraw beyond the operational limits of the Luftwaffe-surely Hitler couldn't have considered that "provocative" and it might have saved his Air Force from its destruction in the first days of the war. Of course Mr. Nagorski can't explain that either-no one really can-but he presents the basic story in a very readable way and gives a good background on the paranoia and unreasoning terror that was part of daily life during the Stalinist era. He also gives a great deal of very useful background from foreigners looking into the Soviet Union at the time, quoting the American diplomatic staff's reports to Roosevelt and their diary entries as they observed one of the most horrific and baffling political systems in history. This is an excellent place for people interested in the Eastern Front to start their studies.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

The Battle for Moscow was the deadliest battle of World War II--and the deadliest battle of all time. Between September 30, 1941 and April 20, 1942, seven million German and Soviet troops took part in the battle, and 2.5 million of them were killed, taken prisoner, missing or severely wounded. As German troops approached Moscow, half of the city's population fled, while others looted stores, staged strikes and attacked those who were escaping. In the end, the German drive fell short, but Stalin's regime was so embarrassed by how close they came, by the mistakes the Soviet dictator made that allowed them to do so, and the behavior of many of its own citizens, that the battle was given short shrift in their history books.

Both Hitler and Stalin (briefly allied and now newly at war) intruded themselves into the strategies for their armies. Hitler was so overconfident--even though his generals warned him--that the German army went into battle in the Russian fall with no winter clothes. Stalin was so in denial that the majority of Russian soldiers had no weapons. They had to wait for a comrade to fall in order to acquire a gun. Soviet soldiers following the front lines were under orders to shoot anyone who retreated. Meanwhile, the German soldiers, well equipped with armaments, and well trained but with no winter clothes, were freezing to death by the thousands.

Nagorski's description of the parallels and differences between Hitler and Stalin is a fascinating opening to his book. His description of Stalin's courtship of FDR and Churchill is an important historical contribution.

His account of the near catastrophe of the German attack (Stalin had Lenin's body removed and sent away, so close was Moscow to capitulation) is dramatic.

Moscow was under attack and siege for six months. Nagorski describes the horror in great detail. Because he speaks Russian he was able to interview many who lived through this battle, including the young man who transported Lenin's body.

The Battle for Moscow was the first turning point of the war, the first time that the German Blitzkrieg had been stopped. If Hitler hadn't committed major mistakes, the history of World War II would have been radically different. Nagorski tells the full story of this epic battle for the first time. He draws upon previously classified documents from the archives of the NKVD, as the KGB was called, letters, diaries, memoirs, and numerous first-hand accounts of survivors, many of whom contradict the sanitized version of events presented by Soviet and even Western writers.

The result is a riveting tale of terror, mass murder and, ultimately, a narrow victory that marked the beginning of the end for Hitler's war machine.

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