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." ( )