David StahelCritiques

Maybe read half - at work- just because an interesting topic. We learn a lot about the author's core thesis / point: that while the Russians made impressive attacks - with incredible bravery and risk- their whole vaunted winter offensive was a dud in the end. Yes, the Germans were pressed- even crazed- at the attacks- but hey held on and one has the impression of giving 10 to 1 losses to the Russians for every attack. Leading to the question of: Hitler's halt order (give up no more ground or else). Was this responsible for the Germans holding on? Some say yes- but the author says no. and that Hitler drew the wrong conclusions, thinking his Halt order did save the day.

David Stahel is back with another slab of hell on the Eastern Front, this time to make the argument that, as bad as it was, the collapse of Operation Typhoon was not quite the disaster that the Germans deserved to experience. That this was the case is a commentary on the limitations of Soviet military of the time and how the professional leaders of the Red Army had their own delusional maximum leader to cope with.

Apart from that it occurs to me, seeing as this is the fifth book in this epic, Stahel might have done a little recapitulation of the themes of his earlier books, which dwelt on personal and professional failings of the German officer corps. Seeing as this is more of a popular book, not everyone is familiar with the erosion of reputations that have occurred in the cases of men such as Guderian and Halder since the end of the Cold War, and the fading of the polite lie of a German army that did not share in the criminality of the Third Reich.

This work is massive in scope, involving vast geographic areas and millions of men. It does not discuss the retreat from Moscow at the individual soldier’s level, but at the corps and army level. We are treated to the workings of the very highest-ranking German generals on the Eastern Front. David Stahel, the author, is a professional historian, teaching both at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Defence Force Academy. This is the latest in a number of books he has written about the German Army on the Eastern Front during World ll. His purpose in writing this book is to show that the German retreat from Moscow was a victory “tactically, operationally, and even strategically”, and not a defeat as is often claimed by other historians.
Retreat From Moscow is also a very detailed telling of the German high command’s three-way battle with the Communists, Hitler, and the Russian winter. It is packed with historical facts of which most people are generally unaware. Which German general on the Eastern Front could mostly be likened to U.S. General Omar Bradley, the “soldier’s general”? Which side’s generals were most afraid to contradict their ruler? What motivated Hitler to give the Halt Order, thus preventing his armies from making orderly and life saving retreats in the face of vastly superior numbers? Why did the Communists throw wave after wave of mass attacks against well-entrenched National Socialist armies? These and many other questions are answered here.
The author’s treatment of the Wehrmacht Generals is uneven. At times it seems as if the author has taken a break from writing and then come back in a different frame of mind. This is particularly true in his treatment of Field Marshal Kluge, the commander of Army Group Center. Stahel shows a particular animus towards General Heinz Guderian, but does not tell the reader why. This may have been developed in one of the author’s earlier works. There is an impression that perhaps things were said in Mr. Stahel’s earlier books that should have been repeated for clarity’s sake in this volume. Stahel blames Guderian for the German army’s failure to be prepared for winter warfare. This hardly seems fair, though, because Guderian was a blitzkrieg general who had no expectation of having to fight winter warfare. The author also appears ambivalent in his attitude toward the opposing forces. He illustrates some of the German’s inexcusable treatment of Russian civilians, but insinuates that reports of Russian brutality toward German prisoners were mere rumors. He never calls the Soviets “Communists”, but usually refers to the Germans as “Nazis.” The writer does show human understanding for the suffering of the Wermacht troops in the field, but very little for the generals. One might expect a professional historian to show a bit more detachment than our author does, but there may be a good explanation for this. He is an academic, after all, writing in an environment not known for its tolerance of deviation from expected viewpoints.
On the whole, this is a very good book, especially for professional historians and serious students of history. For casual readers, it could be one or two hundred pages shorter. It is to be heartily recommended, but not in its e-book version. Professor Stahel makes generous use of maps and footnotes, which can be extremely difficult to utilize in an e-book edition.
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To a large degree, as has been noted in other reviews, this is not so much an operational analysis as a study in "friction," both on the battlefield as Stahel considers the lurching restart of Operation Typhoon and as the effort is made to trawl the depths of the German military mind as Stahel seeks to understand the almost maniacal pursuit of a victory that was not available to the Third Reich. And make no mistake, the start of the Soviet counter-offensive came at roughly the same time as the Japan unleashing its Pacific offensive against the Western colonial powers, thus creating a full-fledged American commitment to the conflict and the sort of war of material that Berlin could never win. This is as opposed to the war of maneuver that one could at least make the argument the Third Reich had an outside chance of success in pursuing.

Besides that, returning to the operational side of things, Stahel also emphasizes that for all the narratives that suggest the fall of Moscow was in Germany's grasp, all that was really available was a chance to invest the city, meaning that Army Group Center was right where the Russian high command wanted before unleashing its hammer blow.

Finally, there is an accounting of the misery and atrocity of it all, as apart from the German campaign of annihilation against the Jews there was also the unofficial campaign of annihilation against the Soviet populace as the German military looted every resource possible to even survive the onset of the Russian winter. Stahel muses that in the twisted workings of the Nazi mind a dead hero was almost more useful than living soldiers; until the loses could no longer be replaced.

In this work Stahel remains intent on his mission of dismantling the operational/strategic obfuscation that still attends German military intentions in Soviet Russia in 1941, and illustrating the breathtaking unreality of what the German military professionals thought they could achieve with rapidly dwindling resources. Yes, "Typhoon" produced the great encirclement battles of Briansk & Viaz'ma, but it also remains true that in the process of breaking the Red Army the Wehrmacht was also breaking itself; and winter was coming.

Besides that, Stahel has rather more to say about the fate of the average German soldier than in his previous works in terms of relating the sheer misery of their situation. Granted that these men make awkward victims, on the grounds of the unrelenting violence and privation they inflicted on the Russian civilians in their path of destruction, but the story is still harrowing. Stahel ends on the haunting quote from German diarist Willy Peter Reese: "We served the imperative of history as specks of dust in the whirlwind and were privileged to participate in the end of our world."½

In his book on Operation Barbarossa Stahel made the blunt argument that Germany had essentially lost the war within two months of invading the Soviet Union, on the grounds that barring a blitzkrieg-style victory there was little or no chance for Germany to overcome the weight of resources that would be directed against them. The response was, essentially, what about the great encirclement battle of Kiev? Stahel examines that argument in this book and convincingly makes the point that his overarching thesis is still intact. Yes Hitler, with the help of desperate delusions on Stalin's part, gained a battlefield success but it was arguably something of a consolation prize bought at a very high price; which is also what the German military leadership believed. Never mind that their preferred early move on Moscow was not an option due the slow-motion collapse of the German military machine. At the end Stahel can only muse about what a lethal combination was represented by the interaction of the German military's cult of the offensive with the Nazi racial mythology.½

A superb book of military history, with more detail about the day-by-day movements of army units than all but the most diligent reader will need, but an entirely convincing overall message: Hitler's war in the east was lost by the end of August 1941, and the rest was just a long-drawn-out, incredibly destructive demonstration of that fact, with the Soviet advantage in manpower and resupply grinding down the German war machine. Useful maps, plenty of references, highly recommended.½

This study is an indication of how far we have come from the era of the "all hail the Wehrmacht" school of military history and the pretense of a German army that was relatively ethical (at least in regards to the Nazi regime). What Stahel does is factor in all the realities of moral connivance and professional incapacity that we now recognize in the conduct of the German military caste into a wide-ranging strategic and operational study of the first two months of the war with Russia. The bottom line is Stahel holds that with the battle of Smolensk the vision of Operation Barbarossa as a "shock and awe" war that would bring down the Soviet regime had reached its culmination point and that Germany was already out of good strategic options to win. Which is not to say that Joseph Stalin couldn't find new and interesting ways to lose the war. Apart from that what sticks with me is the vision of Franz Halder, chief of the German General Staff, as a man who seemed to operate in a dreamland, instead of the land of the possible; there were more centers of unreality in Hitler's Germany than the immediate presence of The Fuehrer.

David Stahel's latest work, 'The Battle for Moscow', is somewhat removed from his previous volumes on this topic. This is his fourth book and it becomes evident that what was clearly visible on a majority of pages in his first three texts is missing from much of this latest effort. That is, there is a significant lack of tactical and operational descriptions of battles. At least one amazon reviewer has already commented on how disappointed they were to discover this. Yet, in this supposed 'weakness' lies the strength of Stahel's argument(s). The Wehrmacht on June 22, 1941 was a vaunted fighting force that managed to defeat and conquer most of Europe. The ensuing invasion of the Soviet Union showcased, on the surface, the Wehrmacht's military prowess operationally and on a tactical level as numerous encirclements and victories were achieved. Stahel outlines them all quite well (mainly in regards to Army Groups Center and South) in his previous volumes. That is, the Red Army lost hundreds of thousands in the encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, and finally at Viazma/Briansk. Yet, the narrative that concentrates on the victorious outcomes of those encirclements misses the forest for the trees.

Thus, 'The Battle for Moscow' is a somewhat different creature than Stahel's previous works because it highlights again and again the slow progress of the German Army in the latter half of Operation Typhoon throughout November and early December of 1941. There are no major battles, encirclements, or defeats of the Red Army because German forces were incapable of launching significant operations to achieve such feats, and when a major city was taken, Rostov by Army Group South, it eventually had to be evacuated due to Red Army pressure and German inability to hold it. Stahel thus forces the reader to assume the physical and psychological state of the German Army through the numerous diaries, letters, memoirs, and battle reports that he quotes from. The exhaustion of German troops was palpable on very page as they became bogged down in the mud of early November while hoping for a sudden freeze to create conditions for an eventual lunge toward Moscow. And when that freeze did come it brought with it new obstacles that while facilitating one last push toward the Soviet capital also meant a whole new level of exhaustion, misery, disease and madness for countless soldiers.

Additionally, on more than one occasion Stahel draws the reader's attention to the genocidal nature of the war that Hitler unleashed against the Soviet Union and the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the numerous stages of the Holocaust and the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. One simply cannot discuss Operation Barbarossa or Typhoon without highlighting the numerous difficulties the Germans faced in the rear from Soviet partisans and how they treated the civilian population as the cold set in and they needed both clothing and dwellings to keep warm, which often meant stealing from the local population and displacing it to fend for themselves while appropriating their living quarters.

Finally, much of Stahel's concentration rests on the German commanders and their actions throughout November. Unlike many self-serving post-war memoirs, archival documentation from this period shows that generals like Bock, Guderian, Kluge, etc., had a choice in how they handled their troops and assignments. None were forced to go on the offensive, the majority of those decisions they took for themselves based on a variety of factors until their forces were simply beyond the means of, in some cases, even picking up their weapons. No German general was dismissed at this point (dismissals would come after the Soviet counter-offensive commenced) and yet being on the frontline, knowing the situation their soldiers were facing, they continued to ignore the exhaustion of their troops, the limits of their mobility (lack of trucks, tanks, planes, etc.) and forced their depleted formations onto the offensive again and again. What was the end goal? Moscow was never supposed to be captured, but encirclement was no longer an option as the targets were far too distant for what the Wehrmacht could hope to accomplish in November or December. Thus, Stahel emphasizes the disconnect that existed between the goals of German commanders and the reality of what their forces could accomplish, with the final result being a situation that soon found exhausted and depleted German troops retreating in the face of a well-developed and planned Soviet counter-offensive.