Clark, Alan
Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45
New York: William Morrow and Company, 1965
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: xxii + 522
See also more books from:
Alan Clark
See also more books on the same topic(s):
Battle for Moscow, October - December 1941
Battle of Berlin, April - May 1945
Battle of Kursk
Battle of Stalingrad, August 1942 - February 1943
German summer offensive in Russia, May - November 1942
Operation Barbarossa, June - December 1941
Russo-German War, 1941-1945
Southern flank of the Russian Front, 1944-1945
Soviet advance to the Oder, January - April 1945
Soviet winter offensive, November 1942- March 1943
See also references to this book:
Reference in book review/survey July 2009
Feedback from visitors
Feedback from Michael Costello on Thursday, 7 January 2010
Rates this book: 
This still remains the best short account of the Nazi aggression against the USSR and the path to defeat.It is accessible to the general reader and provides an over-view of what that war was about. In contrast to the hard-sale promoted volumes by Antony Beevor (on Stalingrad, Berlin and the rest), Clark places the military confrontation of giants in the real political and economic context of the times. His is not another generals' tale of the kind written by Nazi commanders such as Manstein and Guderian, who, like many military top brass will blame anyone for defeats other than themselves. Clark justifies Hitler's forced decision to split his forces in 1942 and go for the southern Soviet oilfields rather than concentrate on the taking of Moscow. He understood (unlike his generals who have criticised him) that tanks and the rest need fuel, and that the failure of his Blitzkrieg had revealed the enormous economic miscalculations on which the whole Nazi strategy against the USSR was founded. In another telling example of this, Clark explains the ABC of the relationship of logistics to frontline strength when he points out that the Nazi shortage of winter clothing and provision in the winter of 1941-42 was dictated by the same miscalculation of what sort of war and its timescale might be needed if the USSR was the be defeated: if you place your manpower disproportionately in the frontline (the fist of Blitzkrieg) then the shortage of those in the factories who suply the front becomes evident when the fist's puch was eroded, starting already in the late summer of 1941, when the Red Army fought at Smolensk and then into the winer. Hence the massive use of slave labour by Germany (Jewish, Slav and the rest) to try and make up for the fundamental strategic miscalculation and also that of his generals' shortsighted attempt to carry on Blitzkrieg tactics in a situation which doomed this to failure. I think that David M. Glantz understood all this and, like Clark, provides a serious alternative reading in his volumes on the Nazi-Soviet conflict(and also on the Japanese war against China.
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