Russia at war 1941-1945

What kind of book is this? It is least of all a formal history of the war. The very scale of the Soviet-German war of 1941-5, directly involving tens of millions and, indirectly, hundreds of millions of people, was so vast that any attempt to write a "complete" history of it is out of the question in one volume written by one man. A number of military

histories of this war have been written by both Russians and Germans; but even the

longest of them, the vast six-volume Russian History of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union running to over two million words, and trying to cover not only the military operations, but "everything", is singularly unsatisfactory in many ways. It contains an immense amount of valuable information which was not available under Stalin; but it is overburdened with names of persons, regiments and divisions and an endless variety of military and economic details. It is full of ever-recurring "heroic" clichés; and yet fails completely, in my view, to tell the story of that immense nation-wide drama in purely human terms. It has the failing common to much, though not all, Soviet writing on the war of making practically all Russians look exactly alike. Since this book is about the wair in Russia, it contains, of course, numerous chapters on the main military operations.

But, in dealing with these, I have, as far as possible, avoided entering into any minute technical details of the fighting, which only interest military specialists, and have tried to portray the dramatic sweep of military events, often concentrating on those details—such as the immense German air superiority in 1941-2, or the Russian superiority in artillery at Stalingrad, or the hundreds of thousands of American lorries in the Red Army after the middle of 1943— which had a direct bearing on the soldiers' morale on both sides.

Further, I have tried to treat all the main military events in Russia in their national and, often, international context: for both the morale in the country and inter-allied relations were very noticeably affected by the progress of the war itself. There is, for instance, nothing fortuitous in the intensified activity of Soviet foreign policy after Stalingrad, or in the fact that the Teheran Conference should have taken place not before, but after the Russian victory of Kursk— which was the real military turning-point of the war: more so than Stalingrad which, in the words of the German historian, Walter Goerlitz, was more in the nature of a "politico-psychological turning-point".

This book, therefore, is much less a military story of the war than its human story and, to a lesser extent, its political story. I think I may say that one of my chief qualifications for writing this story of the war years in Russia is that I was there. Except for the first few months of 1942, I was in Russia right through the war—and for three years after it—and what interested me most of all were the behaviour and the reactions of the Russian people in the face of both calamity and victory. In the fearful days of 1941-2 and in the next two-and-a-half years of hard and costly victories, I never lost the feeling that this was a genuine People's War; first, a war waged by a people fighting for their life against terrible odds, and later a war fought by a fundamentally unaggressive people, now roused to

anger and determined to demonstrate their own military superiority. The thought that this was their war was, in the main, as strong among the civilians as among the soldiers; although living conditions were very hard almost everywhere throughout the war, and

truly fearful during some periods—people went on working as they had never worked

before, sometimes to the point of collapse and death. No doubt there were moments of panic and demoralisation both in the Army and among civilians—and I deal with these, too, in the course of my narrative: nevertheless, the spirit of genuine patriotic devotion and self-sacrifice shown by the Russian people during those four years has few parallels in human history, and the story of the siege of Leningrad is altogether unique.

It may seem strange today to think that this immense People's War was successfully