Roman Women Book

As a written work, it is often repetitive, and it could be much better organized.

As a work of history, it suffers from a few major issues.

First, due to what he claims are the paucity of Soviet sources available when he was researching (prior to the fall of the Soviet Union), he admits he draws almost exclusively on German sources--but he goes even farther than that and discounts what Soviet sources are available throughout the narrative. This creates a one sided, imbalanced look at the Eastern Front, particularly when...

Most of his German sources are postwar memoirs and interviews by people like Guderian (who seems to be a favorite). Given that generals (German and otherwise) writing in the postwar era had every incentive to make themselves look better and push all the blame for operational and strategic failures off on anyone else, uncritically trusting such memoirs is historical malpractice. This goes doubly for postwar German memoirs since such generals were also attempting to rehabilitate themselves and their troops in the eyes of the civilized world and wrote explicitly for American and British audiences with an eye towards ending the Western occupation of Germany and maintaining a strong anti-Soviet alliance with the Western powers. Guderian is, of course, perhaps the worst offender of the era, so trusting his word and his word alone as a source for a lot of the book is even more suspect.

Further, he discounts almost entirely other narratives of the war, handwaves logistics concerns that practically every other historian feels are important, and leaves out some crucial questions in the narrative--for instance, why, if Guderian and company were ready for their mad dash to Moscow in August of 1941, didn't they raise a bigger stink about sitting where they were? Could it be, perhaps, that the real reason, as identified by other historians of the War, that they desperately needed an operational pause for repair, rest, and refit?

My last complaint is that running through the entire book is a near-wistfulness about the possibility of German victory in the Second World War that makes me uncomfortable. I am not accusing Stolfi of being a Nazi-sympathizer, but I do think that he was (as were many of Cold War vintage) perhaps a little overcome by his anti-Communist feelings when it comes to comparing Hitler's Third Reich with Stalin's Soviet Union. Both were horrible, but there's no need to wish that the Germans had defeated the Soviets. None.

As to his actual argument, I will say that he makes a convincing case that, had German Army Group Center continued on towards Moscow in 1941, that they could have taken the city. His assertion that that would have ended the War does not ring true to me at all, however, given what we know now about Soviet plans during the War and even what was known at the time he wrote the book about the back and forth nature of the Russian Revolution (1917-1921).

It seems that--like his German subjects of study--he confuses operational success, even brilliance, for strategic success, which--again like the Germans--results in the failure of both the war and this book.