A million, as a number, is thrown around a great deal these days, but stop and think, for just a moment, about how big a number it actually is. It is 100,000 tens. It is 10,000 hundreds. It is a thousand thousands. A million is a number bigger than the population of all but a hundred cities worldwide. A colossal number... double it and you have the number of people who died in the
Siege of Stalingrad.
If the Nazis had lived to sustain their regime, they might have called it the Complete Disaster, an eight month engagement with Soviet troops with nothing to lose that left the Nazis in possession of nothing more strategic or valuable than a brick and mortar city bombed back to the stone age. Starved and exhausted, the German sixth army collapsed under a two-pronged Soviet counterattack which routed the Germans and began the precipitous decline of the Nazi regime in Europe.
This is
Mr. Beevor's account of that most pivotal siege, the generals who commanded it, the foot soldiers who suffered through it and the circumstances on both sides which demanded that the slaughter continue until victory could be claimed. It was madness, and yet the Soviet victory surely hastened the fall of the Nazis and allowed for western Europe to return to democracy and freedom. That alone makes a study of this great, nihilistic siege worthwhile and Mr. Beevor does not let us down. (4/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment