War in History: Eyes Book Review: Kharkov 1942. Anatomy of A Military Disaster Through Soviet

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Book Review: Kharkov 1942. Anatomy of a Military Disaster Through Soviet

Eyes
James Sterrett
War In History 2001 8: 365
DOI: 10.1177/096834450100800316
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Book Reviews 365
Documents relating to the discussion of policy, strategy and alterna-

tive plans are given less room. In part this reflects the shorter length
of the underlying documents, but some of these are much reduced.
Thus the prime minister’s General Middle East Directive of 16 August
1940, whose 18 paragraphs occupy three and a half pages in Church-
ill’s own history, is reduced here to ten lines. In addition, there are
only ten relatively brief extracts from the minutes of the meetings of
the Middle East C-in-Cs at which overall policy was discussed and
decided. By taking July 1939 as his starting point, Simpson has also
excluded Cunningham’s pre-war contribution, as DCNS, to Mediter-
ranean strategy.
The numerous exchanges between Cunningham and Pound are,
perhaps, the most interesting, revealing the myriad problems that con-
fronted the C-in-C, particularly after the arrival of German air and land
forces in early 1941. It is in these personal communications that Cun-
ningham’s often critical opinions of his fellow C-in-Cs are expressed.
However, the frosty relationship between Cunningham and Churchill
only occasionally surfaces. Only 11 of the documents are direct com-
munications between them, and it is a pity that room could not have
been found from Cunningham’s initial appreciation of 23 May 1940,
the prime minister’s critical minute about this, and the resulting tele-
gram that Churchill caused Pound to send. This initial exchange led
to much of the subsequent distrust, which is more clearly seen in the
prime ministers’ minutes in the PREM files at the Public Record
Office.
This volume is, nonetheless, long overdue. It wil help the reader to
strike a balance between the 1950s accounts of these events published
by Cunningham and Churchill, and to from an independent assess-
ment of Cunningham’s achievements during a period when Axis power
seemed irresistible.
Douglas Austin
Kharkov 1942. Anatomy of a Military Disaster Through Soviet Eyes. By

David M. Glantz. Hersham, Surrey: Ian Allan. 288 pp. £21.99 boards.
ISBN 0 7110 2562 2.
The Soviet offensive towards Kharkov in the spring of 1942, driven in

part by Stalin’s general desire for offensive action, ran afoul of ill for-
tune. The main Soviet blow came from the Barvenkovo bridgehead
south of Kharkov. However, the Germans had been independently
planning to encircle and destroy that salient, in order to lay ground-
work for their intended offensive towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus.
The Soviet offensive towards Kharkov was a surprise to the Germans,
but it fit all too well with the planned German offensive. The Soviet
offensive met disaster, with the attacking forces and salient encircled
and destroyed, significantly weakening the Soviet forces on the road
War in History 2001 8 (3)

366 Book Reviews
to Stalingrad. Kharkov 1942 presents an excellent resource for under-

standing this operation.
By a mild twist of fate, both the events of this book, and the events
that eventually caused half the book to be written, took place in the
spring of 1942. Although it was an unrelated decision, as the Soviets
planned and executed the Kharkov offensive, they also decided to dra-
matically expand their apparatus for the analysis and study of combat
experience. Nine years later, in 1951, that apparatus produced An
Account of Operations by Southwestern Front Forces on the Kharkov Axis in
May, 1942. That General Staff study forms the skeleton of this book,
fleshed out by extensive commentary by David Glantz.
The studies the Soviets prepared, especially those written in wartime,
set a high standard of candour and detail, all too often absent in Soviet
popular histories. The Kharkov study, like the others, is highly detailed,
with extensive commentary on planning and the course of operations
accompanied by a large number of maps. It thus forms an excellent
resource for those wishing to understand the battle from the Soviet
perspective. The publications of a straight translation would provide a
useful resource, and some of the General Staff studies are being pub-
lished thus, by Frank Cass.
However, the source of the study also creates problems. As Glantz
explains, when written in 1951, it could not place any blame for the
defeat with Stalin, which became increasingly problematic as Soviet
historiography wound along its twisting path. While originally classi-
fied, the study was declassified in 1964 as part of Krushchev’s de-
Stalinization program. That opened the path to counterclaims against
the conclusions of the study, which blamed, among others, Generals
K. S. Moskalenko and I. Kh. Bagramian. In 1969, Moskalenko was per-
mitted to publish a memoir which placed principal blame on Stalin.
A few years later, Bagramian was able to publish his memoirs, in which
he defended himself and blamed Stalin and the High Command for
the failure of the operation. Both Moskalenko and Bagramian revealed
previously unavailable information. Moreover, the 1942 Kharkov fail-
ure became the main Soviet-acknowledged failed Soviet operation of
the war, and Stalin became the official target for blame. As a conse-
quence, articles continued to appear in the Soviet press examining the
operation, providing more details and points of view. Thus, while the
details of actions in the study were generally unchanged, the con-
clusions were not.
The study has other problems as well. Scintillating prose it is not,
and indeed the casual reader will find it soporific. Much of the text is
written in militarese and assumes a familiarity with Soviet force struc-
tures and doctrine. Without such familiarity, a reader may have dif-
ficulty following the actions described. The text is written strictly from
the Soviet point of view and sometimes errs in its understanding of
German actions.
In regard to all these troubles, Glantz comes to the rescue. He takes

Book Reviews 367
all the various Soviet accounts, adds a number of German accounts,

and weaves them all together to create a far more complete and bal-
anced study. The translation of the General Staff study is printed with
a tinted background, and Glantz alternates blocks of the study with
blocks of its own text. The length of the blocks varies, according to
the degree of necessary explanation, from paragraphs to pages. In this
manner, Glantz is able to bring the reader up to speed on a variety of
topics and provide alternate points of view.
The longest inclusion covers the overall strategic situation, Soviet
planning, German planning, and Soviet force structures. During the
course of the account, Glantz provides both German viewpoints and
additional Soviet material in the form of both expository text and selec-
tions from eyewitness accounts of the fighting. In the process, Glantz
has made few changes to the original study. The original Soviet maps
have been cleaned up, corrected in a few places with the use of
German materials, and a small number have been added, bringing the
total to 37. Furthermore, Glantz added the names of participants in
the numerous places where the original study did not name them, and
added a nineteenth appendix which details the fates of the prominent
Soviet survivors of the operation, both additions serving to make the
participants less anonymous.
All of Glantz’s various additions to the basic study sum to an immense
improvement of the value of the underlying General Staff study. While
the publication of the translated study alone is of use as a source on the
operation, Glantz has woven in the other available materials to create a
more rounded, accessible, and ultimately much more valuable account.
Our understanding of the war would be richer if other translations of
similar studies followed the lead set in Kharkov 1942.
James Sterrett
Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Edited by Timothy Brook. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1999. viii + 300 pp. $39.50 boards,
$15.95 paper. ISBN 0 472 11134 5 boards, 0472 08662 6 paper.
More than 60 years after it happened, one of the worst atrocities of

the modern era is beginning to be discussed in the English-speaking
world. The telling of the story of the Rape of Nanking has had strange
twists. For decades after the war crimes trials which condemned the
Japanese military leaders at Nanking (Nanjing), there was silence, an
inability in China and outside to deal with the horror during which
an unknown number of Chinese, possibly a quarter of a million, were
killed. Some of the earliest attention actually came from within Japan,
where a bitter controversy erupted on the question of Japanese war
guilt in the media, in memoirs and in academic circles, with right-wing
apologists on one end of the spectrum and academic researchers on
the other. In China the attempts to deny wartime atrocities stimulated

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War in History

Book Review: Kharkov 1942. Anatomy of a Military Disaster Through Soviet

The online version of this article can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://wih.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Downloaded from wih.sagepub.com by nino oktorino on October 13, 2010

Documents relating to the discussion of policy, strategy and alterna-

Kharkov 1942. Anatomy of a Military Disaster Through Soviet Eyes. By

The Soviet offensive towards Kharkov in the spring of 1942, driven in

War in History 2001 8 (3)

Downloaded from wih.sagepub.com by nino oktorino on October 13, 2010

to Stalingrad. Kharkov 1942 presents an excellent resource for under-

War in History 2001 8 (3)

Downloaded from wih.sagepub.com by nino oktorino on October 13, 2010

all the various Soviet accounts, adds a number of German accounts,

Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Edited by Timothy Brook. Ann

More than 60 years after it happened, one of the worst atrocities of

War in History 2001 8 (3)

Downloaded from wih.sagepub.com by nino oktorino on October 13, 2010

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